Missourians

Missouri's First Poet Laureate

Updated at May 08, 2008 12:56

By Scott Spilky

 

As the state’s first poet laureate, Ashland native Walter Bargen has crisscrossed the state speaking, reading his work, and championing the power of words to move the imagination.  

“Poems are more relevant than they have ever been,” he says.  

Walter, the award-winning author of eleven books, has been writing for nearly thirty years. His work has appeared in more than one hundred publications, including The Missouri Review. He grew up in Belton near Kansas City and attended the University of Missouri at Columbia where he has worked for decades, first as a technical writer and currently as a consultant on testing with primary and secondary schools.  

Last fall, he was one of more than one hundred Missourians nominated to become poet laureate; he was selected as a finalist in December and interviewed with the governor. When Walter got the news he had been appointed to fill the two-year term as Missouri’s first poet laureate, he was “surprised, delighted, taken aback, wondering what’s in store for me.”  

What’s in store is a minimum of six appearances a year at public libraries and schools across the state to promote the arts in Missouri. Walter was inundated with media requests after the announcement.  

“People are curious,” he says. “It’s the first of something.”  

While not a requirement of the position, Walter penned a poem about the state, “Moon Walk Missouri,” which he read at the ceremony marking his appointment in the state capitol rotunda. “It’s about the need to tell stories and how that is an essential part of our identity,” Walter says of the poem.  

That need will be a central theme of Walter’s message as he talks to people about poetry’s continuing ability to move us in our fast-paced, digital age—something he witnessed with the outpouring of poetry after 9/11.  

“People find solace in something that is well crafted and thoughtful,” he says.  

Walter penned the following:

Flying on Instruments
 
In the flashlight’s beam, he follows the frantic
flutter of a dusty brown bird up and down
the shed’s cobwebbed window, leaving dusk
streaked with dust and stars.  This bird, perhaps
a flycatcher, tries desperately to fly deeper into
night’s glittering glass as he approaches and fails
at rescue before grabbing it with one hand
rather than scooping with two.  He is surprised
by its weight, or lack of weight, and feels
uncertain how tight to hold a handful of air.
He steps from the door into the dark
and he almost doesn’t notice his empty hands.

 
 
To Keep Going
 
From far up the valley,
from deep in the willow thickets
along the creek, a birdcall
comes I don’t recognize.

Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote
that he would  go away.
And the birds will still be
there singing.  He was right,

he went away, and some of us
still hear him singing, in
the branches beside our houses
and far up cold creeks.

But there are those birds
that have left too.  The last
dusky seaside sparrow died
in a cage behind beach dunes

in Florida, unable to call in a mate.
The shrike, the butcher-bird, Jackie
hangman, the strangler, all our names
for feathers on the same bird,

a songbird that goes against the grain
and with hooked beak breaks necks
of mice and other birds and sometimes
hangs their limp bodies on strands

of barbed wire where they dangle
like half-eaten laundry–their song
is disappearing too–along with
the meadowlark that has perched on

a fencepost in my garden and tilted its
head back, stretching its neck and exposing
a black feathered necklace as it points
its bill skyward, clearly announcing

spring, a yellow-breasted soloist
fronting an orchestra of greening
grass, it too is going away, and for
no good reason that we can understand,

and so there are fewer notes
to remind us of his going,
to keep us listening, to keep
us going.

 

Deuces Wild

They argue from one god to another─
slippery steppingstones across a creek
deep in forest.  Ice cubes in a drink.
Miracles outdistance conclusions.
Birth necessary but not sufficient.
Death the absolute.
The more certain, the louder they become.
The more uncertain, the louder they become.
Bouts of paradise race around the table.
Heaven hovers over half-filled glasses.
Hell simmers in the other half.
Cat curled under the chair,
someone steps on its tail
and everyone is awake again.
It’s the last hand of poker
this Saturday night.  Everyone’s losing.
Nothing left to bet, the center of the table
piled high with wings.



Breakfast with Asteroids

Two million years into the Late Pliocene,
consciousness leaps and crawls before any of us,
beyond clear beginnings of our struggle, when an asteroid
doused its fiery body in the Bellinghausen Sea,
names only we need to locate ourselves, our suffering,
amid ice sheets more blank than Hobbes ever imagined. 
The splash went three miles in the air, sent a tidal
wave twelve stories high into the Pacific Rim,
and perhaps rained unnamed creatures on the Transantarctic
Mountains, explaining the “Sirius enigma.”  Another
sixty-five million years back, an asteroid crashed
into Yucatan leaving a crater wider then the sprawl
of Los Angeles, dust blotting out the sun, extincting
three-quarters of all species—too early for us to worry.

This morning I’ve a headache.  I’ve collided with at least
the meteor responsible for the mile-wide crater in Arizona¾
six hundred feet deep when it stopped, but I’m plunging deeper. 
For weeks now, I’ve been dreaming that the trees are still
burning with light.  I remember looking out the window,
astonished that after so many killing frosts, that so many oaks
are still green and rustling with wind.  Is it the lifting of a dish,
then a glass, then a fork, out of soapy water, wiping them
with washrag and rinsing, then setting them on the rack to drain,
these stark daily details, what the living do, that sends me
plummeting through another barren season.  The trees are leafless,
the blooded sun rising, the sky an iron skillet, the sink soon empty.

Visit www.walterbargen.com for more information.

June 2008

Email this Article