At the Dead Center of Day
"...this chapbook has the finish of a careful, longtime practitioner. At the Dead Center of Day is a carefully built arrangement of poems , a journey through some of the genuine abominations of the twentieth century-the agonies we withdraw from unless pressed to the task by someone like Bargen, who reminds us that we dare not forget. Most of these poems are not just staged shockers, but responsible, vivid holdings of the imagery of horror. They contain genuine feeling and each is a subtle, cautionary deliverance.”
“Bargen
concludes his chapbook with an extraordinary work, “The Elves of
Katyn Forest,” which
in essence delivers his final statement on the power of endurance
in the face of contemporary horrors.
The poem begins, “It started during the night after the
burning of many cities. It
started when the soldiers in uniforms the color of miles / of
muddy road began the forced march of the defeated. / The mud of
the vanquished and the mud of the victors / indistinguishable.”
With frightening precision Bargen has “the long muddled
lines drudged into a dark forest /to a strange mumbled cadence-the
belch of boots being sucked in/and out of mired miles-fifty
thousand struggling vowels/and rifle reports the only consonants
spoken over the dead/guarding the ditches.”
The entire country stops breathing. The trees become
bloated. He concludes
his poem:
A
half century later, out of Katyn Forest miles of mud-caked
Uniforms
march.
At dust-choked crossroads villagers look for
Passing
cars.
The sucking sound, the faint moans, only wind twisting
Through
the gargoyled and steepled churches. Couples
stroll along
Rivers,
watching their children run ahead. Cottonwoods
sail
Their
leaves on the reddening current. The
evening grows faint;
The
sun’s pulse weal on the water. The
children shiver, listening
to
stories of elves who return to retake the country they lost.
“Walter Bargen says more about the hate and cruelty of our time in a
few lines than does all the exhibitionist stomping and bellowing of a
dozen slam group.
-Paul Zimmer of The Georgia Review-
Anyone
desiring something more than the virtuoso dance of
- John Miller of the Delmar 7-
At the Dead Center of Day is a carefully built arrangement of
poems, a
concludes... with an extraordinary work, "The Elves of
Katyn Forest," which
-Paul
Zimmer of
The Vertical River
There's a boldness I love, which perks up the eyes and ears
in these days full of indistinguishable detritus from large
and small press alike.
Bargen leaves a strong impression. This is from the opening of "No Matter How Hard We Try":
The wind is really nothing:
a few overheated or under cooled spaces
hyperventilating, pushed this way
or that by a few points of pressure.
Maybe it throws around a little rain
or hail at the edges, and the swizzle
stick of lightning mixes winds itself
up into a coil sucking up chickens
and yachts.
There's that uncommonly strong imagery that appeals, the layering . But it's moved and blended, stirred, by skillful enjambment and language choice...
Water Breathing Air
Water Breathing Air is the fifth collection of poetry by Bargen, whose poem "The Good Red Rose" won the 1995 St. Louis Poetry Center open competition. The poems in his latest offering often begin with a joyful moment that is that is quickly juxtaposed with a jolt of reality, such as an accident , an argument or one of his recurring images, a flood. The canvas of his writing is scarred with the effects of modern industry and the betrayal of nature by man, and images of nature's resistance run like a current through this collection.
"Sorting Snapshots" is a more contemporary poem in which the narrator is overwhelmed by memories that remain unexplained. Memories, like water swell and overflow, and they can dilute the very meaning of what they represent.
The poem reaches an epiphany by revealing the narrators underlying desire to preserve memories. Camped on the floor, surrounded by photographs, the narrator is determined to put them in an album. But the narrator is invaded by the very memories and can't go through with the cutting and trimming:
"What's cut away
is the peripheral and its edges, thin
strips of the unnecessary, the clutter that obscures the borders and blinds
the focus."
The narrator feels guilty discarding unworthy moments and falters. Finishing the job would mean sacrificing the insignificant, and looking back, the narrator realizes it was at those moments that the mind was free and unburdened. In the future, as Bargen artfully depicts, we'll be no more remembered than the background faces in a photograph.
"And then there's
the overexposed, the double exposed,
and the underexposed; it's all the avoidable
accidents and the way we edit our lives;
what we must forget, the litter of vision that
swells and turns all our faces to backgrounds."
Bargen's poems speak in the language of water but his reflections don't dampen the human spirit. Rather, his images -floating on the waves of hope and possibility-can inspire and rejuvenate.
The Feast
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
Remedies for Vertigo
Remedies for Vertigo
Walter Bargen
Cherry Grove Collections
ISBN Number: 1-933456-40-X
Reviewer: James Owens
Books go in search of their right readers, and Walter Bargen's poems are looking for readers who understand the need of giving them the time and space to deploy their often oblique verbal machinery. Bargen's poems usually seem plainspoken on first reading, straightforward narratives of working life, reflections on history or encounters with animals, mostly birds, that verge towards an uneasy recognition of the danger inherent simply in being alive. The poems, however, open up to deeper associations and subtleties on second and third readings.
The first poem in the book, "Playing Chicken," from a sequence titled "Experiments in Flight," serves as a sort of half-ironic ars poetica , though ostensibly an anecdote about a farm boy sent to catch a chicken for dinner and forced to approach the wary bird slantwise, as Emily Dickinson says one should stalk the truth of a poem.
He must act
as if he were headed in another direction,
and only coincidentally walking past
toward the shed for a shovel or to the storm cellar
for potatoes, all the time edging ever-so-slightly
sideways while staring straight ahead, but really
watching from the corner of his eye, then springing
and bending in one scooping motion into his arms,
a squawking, flapping chicken....
By the time a reader gets to the sixth and last poem in this opening sequence, it is clear that Bargen is thinking about more than the roundabout ways of slipping up on a poem. In "Flying on Instruments," a man tries to rescue a trapped bird that misunderstands his kind intent and attempts to escape through a "shed's cobwebbed window, leaving dusk/ streaked with dust and stars." In a clear echo of the earlier poem, the man approaches the bird and "fails/ at rescue before grabbing it with one hand/ rather than scooping with two." The man carries the caught bird to the shed's door for release into the night and 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.
Bargen is not a poet who resorts to the easy moral, but this "door into the dark" and the man surprised by his “empty hands" surely suggests something about the ambivalence of weighing action and the significance of action against the world's tendencies towards destruction and chaos, especially as a reader moving through Remedies for Vertigo encounters other "fail[ures]/ to rescue." People in these poems try to save baby birds from cats, small snakes and nesting phoebes from cats, bumblebees from a glass jar, a cat from cold weather and a fallen tree. The best these attempts can do is to succeed temporarily. An "eight-inch-long, pencil-thin/ ring-neck snake," rescued just before it is "playfully eviscerated" by a cat, "slithers into a brush pile and into another ambush" ("Minor Gods").
In the human world, people often seem in need of rescue that never comes. "Civilized Sacrifice" moves from the attraction of climbing mountains—"I have climbed the backs of gods"—to a portrait of an Inca girl found naturally mummified in the Andes, five hundred years after she tumbled down a rocky slope to wait
in private, as we all do to speak with our gods, hoping
to appease, to know, to secure the illusive cosmic
machinery, and in that last numb moment her left
hand gripped her dress for the intervening centuries.
"Photographing the Wind" brings the potential rescuer's powerlessness in the face of human tragedy into the contemporary world in a particularly harrowing way. The poem starts calmly, far from disaster, "sitting on the porch" and enjoying "a wholly comfortable wind,/ tailored and too expensive for the end/ of a ragged century," but the century's dynamics of danger and damage intrude on this peaceful scene in the form of a photograph of an African child dying in a famine, while a vulture waits nearby for a meal. Photographs, to borrow from Susan Sontag, are problematic, implicating the viewer as consumer of the image, while rendering intervention impossible, and this photograph refuses to avert its gaze, the poem's precision becoming a sort of penance for the speaker's comfortable distance from pain.
The naked child has drawn her knees up
to her chest, her forehead pressed against
years of parched ground, her forearms
stretched forward and away from either side
of her thinning body, her back to the steadfast bird,
guardian of this warring, drought-stricken plain.
And there is nothing to be done. The speaker knows "the bird can't be blamed./ This is simply what it knows best," and all we are capable of is to
want to believe in a wind
such as this one crossing the porch,
that refuses to carry a cry or spread
the scent of finality, and instead braids
strands of warmth through the cool
of evening, between the spaces of outspread
fingers, our hands failed kites,
our lives falling through this luxurious air.
It is a pleasure to watch the way Bargen's repeated returns to his thematic interests (others include flight versus falling, flight as longing for the sacred) develop the overall structure of Remedies for Vertigo , so that it is a book , not merely a group of poems that happened to find their way between the same end-papers.
Walter Bargen has quietly produced ten collections of highly achieved poetry during the past couple of decades, and Remedies for Vertigo may be his best. Readers who live with it long enough to grow a feel for the echoes between poems and for the music of Bargen's voice—which underpins the book's larger architecture—will be more than satisfied.
For those of you who are fortunate, or unfortunate, enough to have a copy of Remedies for Vertigo, you might find this review interesting. No, I do not know this person and I did not pay to have this written. This review appears in www.Thepedestalmagazine.com , issue No. 38.
Theban Traffic
