"I was born on a Saturday morning, September 15, 1940, the son of Daniel Wayne Ragain, a carpenter, and Beatrice Lucille Totten Ragain, a homemaker, in Olney, a small farming community in southeastern Illinois. I was bitten by polio, 1948, grounded and home tutored till high school. The solitude led to living in my head, reading and making up worlds through which to roam freely. One summer, in my mid teens, I read Hitler's Mein Kampf and Gandhi's Autobiography, one after another. The life of the mind opened right there: a realm of deathless words; a sense of kinship far beyond our small family in its struggles for bread and coal; a notion that a man might shape his life through his choices, that we become our choices; that we get what we do, not what is promised; that trust and spirit are insolubly linked.
     "More books, a gift of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. There was the Door to which I found no Key; There was the Veil through which I might not see. It was my first bite of the Sufi apple, that Golden Delicious. Then, in college, I stumbled onto Paul Rep's wonderment Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, then Kenneth Rexroth's One Hundred Translations from The Chinese (and another collection from the Japanese), poets who seemed to have written poems anticipating my reading them, that odd sense of direct transmission. I rode John Blofeld's shoulders across Taoist China, back into the mists. Lao Tzu found me through the pages of the Tao Te Ching…Simplicity comes from letting go of what you want. Before long I had wandered into the foothills of Cold Mountain in Chekiang province, a two day hike from the East China sea. Cold Mountain is in Han-Shan's poems. Cold Mountain is the poems. Cold Mountain is Han-Shan. All of this is in the mind. I am still in the foothills. If my heart were like Han-shan's, I'd be on that mountain right now. The highest art is to quicken, deepen the days we are given. I must not forget to heed Han-Shan's last words, shouted to the emperor's messengers, before he disappeared into a crevice of Cold Mountain. Thieves. Thieves. You better get to work"
     Maj Ragain lives in Kent, Ohio, and teaches writing and poetry at Kent State University. His most recent books are A Hungry Ghost Surrenders His Tackelbox (Pavement Saw Press 2006) and Twist the Axe: A Horseplayer's Story: Poems and Journal (Bottom Dog Press 2002).