CHEW ON THIS AND IT’S NOT A STICK OF TRIDENT:
A REVIEW OF WALTER BARGEN’S THE FEAST

            If one is craving food for thought, The Feast is the book on which to indulge, and the poems within exhibit the type of self-indulgence that poetry should: exploring the link between personal imagination and the means through which it translates into the linguistic: how thought becomes word.  These prose-poems sequences display the energy of axons firing signals from receptor to receptor, and the quick-paced language that results could only manifest when there is no insistence on line.  The form decodes these impulses into articulate strings of words that resonate in the pit of one’s stomach.  Readers find themselves in a state of déja vu when immersed in these poems because, although the content is the product of one man’s imaginative experience, the language springs from an innate common medium: the language of thought itself (mentalese).

            Bargen seems to pull this off by bombarding the reader with a seeming overload of sensory input.  But this is precisely how human beings take in information and how the mind/imagination turns it over with itself.  Thoughts shift more rapidly than a cosmic clock.  “Exhausted Spectrum” is a good example of this.  (Even the poem’s title indicates its intent.)  The poem moves in and out of its character’s (Jonah’s) consciousness.  Jonah ponders his existence, his humanity, his mortality while the poem’s speaker expounds the character’s wounds. The poem travels between the internal and the external: “Down the street there are friends missing . . .” and then back to Jonah’s more pressing concerns “The wounds shimmer, the preened feathers of plucked angels.”  Not only can readers identify with Jonah’s human experience, but seem to be of him as well because the language mimics thought.  Think of Einstein when he first imagined himself riding  beams of light.  This is not to say that the poems are difficult to follow„Ÿone simply enjoys the word and image play and allows him/herself to be transported to wherever the poems go.  When in the presence of nerve impulses firing at lightning-like speed, what else can one do but become immersed in the genius that language is in translating thought.

            However, because language is largely an arbitrary system, the translation process produces a loss of purity.  It is indeed when humans articulate their perceptions that all went awry; it is, perhaps when we fell from grace because we had a tool with which to question.  It isn’t so much that we were innocent from the get go and that language corrupted us: it is that we were able to express whatever dark curves our thoughts sometimes strayed to.  Anything that one can imagine is possible, but it is words that make imagination imminent.  Bargen expresses this throughout the book but perhaps best in the poem “The Blue and Black Book.”   The poem begins:

In a small unnamed Baltic town, close enough to the sea that one can smell the salt crystallizing in the tidal winds sighing inland each day during the summer months, there was to be found„Ÿtaking a deep breath that expands the chest into a false sense of belonging to something eternal„Ÿa true hint of a beginning.

            That opening sentence demonstrates the type of seeming digressionary overload of the sensory mentioned earlier, but it also served in communicating what I see as the books main agenda: the thought/language continuum and its effect on the human psyche.  The poem, in the second stanza, continues:

On the crowded walls of his small room hung souls frowning with the look of those drowning in deep thoughts.  He sat troubled.  If in the beginning was the Word„Ÿa clearly spoken, though assuredly and not easily understood one„Ÿthen innocence never existed, since every true word is married to its false compliment.  So, if the in the beginning was the Word, then also, in the beginning was not the Word.  As soon as something was heard, it was not heard.

If one has ever paid attention to what one is thinking, in any significant way, one will recognize that this is the way thoughts fleet.  And perhaps this nature of thought„Ÿthe speed, as well as the conflict between poles is what causes the inherent conflicts within human beings.  But it is also what makes us beautiful.  When language is true as it is in these poems, we are redeemed.

Jen Reid
REDACTIONS 4/5
p 66-67