Ron Boggs

Ron Boggs has lived many lives.

His first life was Green Boy, an absorbing color that permeates everything he writes. The woods and hills he grew up within blossom through all of his writings.

Birthed at 20 into another life from the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare and John Donne, Green Boy became Student. This life matured with a host of beats and other descendants of Walt Whitman: Gary Snyder, W.S. Merwin, Marvin Bell, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson.

Another being matured him into Playwright: "April Discovery" or who better represented American poetry, T.S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams (things, also, are ideas), and "Ring of Fire."

Another existence demanded its expression through the study of history. Let's call him Mythographer, an often silent though insistent accumulator of books, facts, theories, and experiments during the tumultuous 60s and 70s. How power and tyranny fought liberty in American, as well as,human history haunted his years of reading, research, and ruminating. The prevalence of and admiration for evil from ancient into modern times, and in American history, was a common thread in the human story of over 40,000 of our history as conscious beings. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on "The Culture of Liberty."

He lived as Apprentice for decades, composing his reading, writing, and living through poets and others who spoke the life that was living him that he could never seem to reconcile with the life that he was living and by which he was making a living. Some of these poets were Robert Bly, William Carlos Williams, Clayton Eshleman, Carl Jung, Charles Olson, Wallace Stevens, and the anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg.

Imaginal Imbiber emerged from nowhere to adventure him for almost two decades into the internal workings of every nook and cranny and ends and beginnings of the earth and world. He spent imaginative feasts living Spanish speaking poets such as Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo. Fernando Pessoa's many selves woke many ways of poetry, aiding birth to many singular muses, feminine and animal voices, and heart altering pulsations. European poets such as William Butler Yeats, Vasko Popa, Czeslaw Milosz, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Paul Valery roamed with British poets such as William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He ran around with Rumi and Kabir. Going east, he imbibed Chinese, Japanese, and Zen poets such as Han Shan, Li Po, TuFu, and Wang Wei along with Eihei Dogen, Ryoken, Ikkyu, Issa, and Basho.

When he imaginatively returned to America after a long, long absence, he discovered a country in exile from itself. Thus was born Primal Poet whose own experience of imaginative exile transformed the madness of its fire by "seeing through the fire, awakening one's true desire." Primal love gave birth to living a primal life.

He did not recognize the America to which he returned after so many imaginal, mythical, psychological, and spiritual traumas, journeys, and blessings. America the land of space and unbounded time heaved with the bloat of excess and abscess of sands of escape, encapsulated in prisons of own making. An American culture enclosed by mutual orthodoxy and rebellion that went nowhere but into the past or imaginary escape into technological dystopias. How heal the rift of exile Americans were living?

Living these many lives, and more, made him into a writer of intellectual and spiritual adventures. The ten books on his Amazon Author Page tell the tale of his "interesting" lives.