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Walter Bargen appointed Missouri Poet Laureate
On Tuesday, January 8, Governor Matt Blunt named Walter Bargen, one of our favorite local poets, as official poet laureate of Missouri.
Walter’s work has appeared in the pages of The Missouri Review no less than four times–in 1983, 1989, 1991 and 1997.
On Making the Public Personal in Poetry
A few weeks ago at the University of Missouri, I had the opportunity to go and listen to Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet, playwright and Nobel Laureate. In fact, I got to see him speak twice: first at a question and answer session attended by a small group of writers in the Corner Playhouse, and later at a public lecture entitled “The Politics of Art.” Although the lecture was superlative, it was his responses in the Q&A session that I think will live with me the longest. There he answered questions about what there was to be learned from the differences in ritual and fundamentalism; how to treat of subjects tragic and huge; how art can try to do what forgiveness cannot; and how to treat of public tragedies in a way that makes them personal. Soyinka’s answer to this last question, as I heard it, had to do with finding the quintessential humanity of a situation, and it is this consideration that I can’t stop thinking about.
Even as a poet who believes that the full spectrum of human experience is art’s province, no matter what the actual artist has demonstrably, “authentically” experienced, I’m often troubled by the attempts to represent public suffering and catastrophe, current or historical. Or, more properly, I’m troubled by the fact that such attempts most often fall short of doing justice to human suffering, and instead reduce those concerns to mere reportage or, worse, political sloganeering. So I’m always cheered by finding or being given poems that reveal a quintessentially human aspect. As luck would have it, I had recently been rereading the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, who as a teenager fought with the Polish underground against the Nazis and was later, as it says on the dust jacket of his book, Mr. Cogito, “a spiritual leader of the anticommunist movement.” His work has been a standard-bearer for me when it comes to the questions of representing historical and contemporary suffering of human beings. After hearing Soyinka’s answer, I immediately thought of Herbert’s poem “Five Men,” which I quote here from Selected Poems, translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott:
Five Men
1
They take them out in the morning
to the stone courtyard
and put them against the wall
five men
two of them very young
the others middle-aged
nothing more
can be said about them
2
when the platoon
level their guns
everything suddenly appears
in the garish light
of obviousness
the yellow wall
the cold blue
the black wire on the wall
instead of a horizon
that is the moment
when the five senses rebel
they would gladly escape
like rats from a sinking ship
before the bullet reaches its destination
the eye will perceive the light of the projectile
the ear record a steely rustle
the nostrils will be filled with biting smoke
a petal of blood will brush the palate
the touch will shrink and then slacken
now they lie on the ground
covered up to their eyes with the shadow
the platoon walks away
their buttons straps
and steel helmets
are more alive
than those lying beside the wall
3
I did not learn this today
I knew it before yesterday
so why have I been writing
unimportant poems on flowers
what did the five talk of
the night before the execution
of prophetic dreams
of an escapade in a brothel
of automobile parts
of a sea voyage
of how when he had spades
he ought not have opened
of how vodka is the best
after wine you get a headache
of girls
of fruit
of life
thus one can use in poetry
names of Greek shepherds
one can attempt to catch the colour of the morning sky
write of love
and also
once again
in dead earnest
offer to the betrayed world
a rose
The poem is remarkable for many reasons, not the least of which is its insistence on what cannot be said—even as it takes us through the description of being executed, it has already suggested that we can only imagine it as an empathetic moment in the poem which is quickly replaced by the stark realization of the executioners’ uniforms. Yet, to me, the great lesson here, and one answer to the problem of how to convey the public events as a personal concern, is that our empathy, such as it is, can lead us in our imagination to hear a conversation between the doomed prisoners that rebuffs, if only for a little while, that doom, a conversation that is filled with the awareness of life. It is this awareness that leads us to make poems, and these poems that address “the betrayed world.” In the process of making such poems and offering them, we ultimately find what Wole Soyinka referred to as the common humanity which is endangered by such public events of suffering and tragedy. Imagination gives us that which we cannot otherwise know, and it is the empathy that arises in response to the forms imagination takes—whether an inspired response to a random question or a precisely realized work of art—that make the world and its population personal to us.
Why Poetry Doesn’t Sell
I know why books of poetry don’t sell. I witnessed part of the problem last month when I attended a conference put on by Missouri’s Center for the Book. Several of the local poets who were invited to read had also signed up to have tables at the book fair to sell their collections. Yet, none of them had set up displays or even sat down at their table for five minutes to talk to conference attendees. Most of the poets swooped in, gave their reading, and then slipped out a side door. Those who did stick around and were a little more social kept their books in their satchels.
The concept of poets as divas seems oxymoronic and exotic and yet they exist. Do poets really lack an audience or do they refuse to do the work necessary to create one? Instead of work, they show practiced indifference. Perhaps they believe it is too crass to sell their books. They wrote it, maybe they believe it’s someone else’s problem to sell it. Or do they suffer from a defeatist attitude? No one reads poetry, why bother?
I used to host a book club at a local bookstore and had little difficulty finding readers. Fiction and nonfiction writers would contact me and ask to if they could add my book club to their “do-it-yourself” reading tours. They seemed willing to sell books out of their trunk if they had to. The publishing industry has always struggled and now with the recession it’s going to struggle even more. Promoting books has increasingly become the responsibility of the writers. Someone forgot to tell the poets.