American poet (1945- )
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"
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
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
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"
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
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
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
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
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
Leaves are falling casualties.
WALTER BARGEN
"Days Like This Are Necessary"
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
I made it to the moon and nothing changed.
WALTER BARGEN
"Mare Tranquillitatis"
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
Sometimes when a prose poem is floundering, I rewrite it as verse, and it's better in that form. The reverse process of verse into prose poem, also works to clarify what's working in the writing and what's not. It's not a blunt line that demarcates the difference between verse and the prose poem.
WALTER BARGEN
"An interview with Walter Bargen, first poet laureate of Missouri", New Letters on the Air
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
You are so far south I keep
looking down at my thumb.
Written on the wrinkled skin
just below the joint
the neon blue veins fan out
flashing the name Utopia.
WALTER BARGEN
"Bye Bye Olduvai"
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"
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
When you're spontaneous, there's always the opportunity that you'll surprise yourself and discover something new.
WALTER BARGEN
Riverfront Times, September 29, 2009