Biography
Roger Steigmeier is a resident of Northern Colorado, has an MA in English Education from NYU and has taught in several colleges. He has one full volume of published verse (Light Traveling Dark Traveling Light, First East Coast Theater and Publishing Company, 1984) and has numerous publishing credits, including poems published in Dog River Review, POET, Pegasus, Many Waters and Mobius. (He served as an associate editor of the latter publication.) He has been a member of Poets and Writers, Inc. since 1984. Mr. Steigmeier is listed in Who's Who In America.
Mr. Steigmeier is currently seeking a publisher for two book-length works of cultural analysis. The first is titled Ideology and Transcendence: A Study of Western Systems of Thought from a Transpersonal Perspective. The second is The Amfortas Legacy: The Fate of the Hero in American Literature. Both studies extend on the seminal work of Joseph Campbell and Ken Wilber, in particular the idea that human evolution is incomplete without a general shift in consciousness to what are called transegoic levels. Continuing failure to realize this shift has led to a central crisis that plays out into all fields of human experience and endeavor.
The first book examines this crisis in terms of various political, religious and economic ideologies, all of which are understood to be compensatory systems that attempt to make up for the failure to evolve psycho-spiritually. The study shows how these systems have all failed to resolve the crisis and have actually worsened it. The second book looks at how the crisis and its failed attempts at a solution have been depicted through certain stories and leading characters of 19th and 20th century American literature.
Mr. Steigmeier's latest verse collection is a work in progress titledThe Book of Gaia, a celebration of the Great Goddess, of whom Marija Gimbutas wrote in her several books on the old matrifocal culture that once flourished in southeastern Europe.The Goddess is a symbol of an egalitarian, peaceful culture that extolled art and philosophy and regarded women as equals in all facets of life. Steigmeier's poems are an anticipation and a hope that such a culture could be reborn.
