American poet (1945- )
Writing is a kind of centering, a kind of meditation. I find it to be profoundly rewarding. Actually, I'm an addict. If I go too long, and so far that hasn't been longer than a week, I start to feel unsettled, nervous. I begin to feel that I'm not engaged, a disconnection is threatening my world, that I'm being passed by and I'm both failing myself and the world by not writing about it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri", New Letters on the Air
Though I do keep lists of words that catch my attention for a variety of reasons, they rarely make it into poems, not infrequently because I lose the lists.
WALTER BARGEN
"An Interview with Walter Bargen", BkMk Press
I love to invent words but even when I think I’ve invented one or a new variation on a word, I often find that someone else has already made use of it.
WALTER BARGEN
"An Interview with Walter Bargen", BkMk Press
Waking in a strange bed, I'd forgotten magpies until this morning.
Beyond the window, one flies over the weathered picket fence, black-white
staccato wing beat: moonlit cloud against night sky,
snow-streaked shadowed mountain, manic-depressive,
winged declaration of disunion.
WALTER BARGEN
"Ornithological Perspectives"
Leaves are falling casualties.
WALTER BARGEN
"Days Like This Are Necessary"
It might sound a little glib, but maybe I don't know what a finished poem is. I lean toward the school that a poem is never finished, it's just abandoned.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri", New Letters on the Air
When I started writing, I found that I composed poems as a rhythm of images. I think the style was a little too hermetically sealed from the reader. From there I gravitated toward narrative. I found that narrative allowed me to be more expansive, more inclusive, and was much easier to write a poem that told a story. But narrative didn’t always allow me to use my imagination as freely as I was prone to do sometimes, so I found myself writing prose poems with an intensity I hadn’t experienced before.
WALTER BARGEN
interview, Cavalier Literary Couture
I think it’s easy to see with the existence of these forms, the intermixing of prose and poetry, that they are really two sides of the same coin and that one doesn’t do well without something of the other. Prose falls flat on its face without incorporating the dance of poetry and poetry has no voice without the narrative touch of prose.
WALTER BARGEN
interview, Cavalier Literary Couture
Adopting the prose poem, allowed me to think and write more openly and broadly, and to extend and sustain a subject or object of attention more that I could in a verse poem.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri", New Letters on the Air
I made it to the moon and nothing changed.
WALTER BARGEN
"Mare Tranquillitatis"
There’s a couple of reasons why I write poetry more than anything else. I have written a few, what could be called short stories, something longer than flash fiction, but after about 6 pages I found that I’m desperate to figure out how to get out of what I’ve created. Using that many words overwhelms me and I feel like I’m drowning.
WALTER BARGEN
interview, Cavalier Literary Couture
I always seem to be in search of the missing, for something that was not quite achieved, some key to understanding that I need. Why was I there? Why did I leave? Who was I supposed to meet and didn’t? Was it to be found in the store next to the one I walked into, the place that held what I was really looking for and didn’t even know I was looking?
WALTER BARGEN
"An Interview with Walter Bargen", BkMk Press
Sky's gray sheet spreads icy rain.
Through the night we heard the branches cracking.
Now they bend with the bowed ache of apostrophes.
Backs to the window, sitting on the couch, we listen
as the radio announces the list of schools closed.
WALTER BARGEN
"Ice Bound"
What photons aren't banged,
blocked, absorbed, diverted by our distracted attention, pass on and on.
WALTER BARGEN
"Redwood"
Growing up in a military family perhaps cultivates a certain kind of imagination that makes it easier to engage in the subject of war.
WALTER BARGEN
"An Interview with Walter Bargen", BkMk Press
I clearly remember that I finished my first poem, though it was not very good, when I was 16 years old. I wrote it on a desk pad. It was called "Requiem" and had phrases like "the seasick swaying trees."
WALTER BARGEN
interview, Augustinus-Gymnasium Weiden
The unpolished granite at the limits of homesteads,
far fields, dry gulches, smoky hills, a foundation of grassy outlines,
clumps of jonquils, and rotting wheels spokes. Rectangular, upright,
chest-high squared limestone slabs, these high plains
scarred by a single tree and magpie, slowly flying over dry seas.
WALTER BARGEN
"Ornithological Perspectives"
My path is deeply littered with favorite poems.
WALTER BARGEN
interview, Cavalier Literary Couture
One of the main activities of the Poet Laureate is to embody poetry. It is really helpful to see someone who presents poetry and makes them want to take poetry home with them.
WALTER BARGEN
"Thinking Out Loud: Missouri Poet Walter Bargen", KBIA
In this country, land of the 24-hour news channels, it’s easy to "suffer" from news exhaustion, but for me there’s something in me that cries out when I hear about the suffering of others in these ultimately meaningless conflicts. How can I declare them meaningless when people are dying?
WALTER BARGEN
"An Interview with Walter Bargen", BkMk Press