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Days Like This Are Necessary: New and Selected Poems

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In his introduction to this collection, Kevin Prufer explores the reasons why Walter Bargen is still little known even among serious readers of American poetry. Our best hope is that BkMk Press will get busy and make the book available (as it is not at the time I am writing this review, not even from Amazon). This is Bargen's thirteenth collection of poetry, and at least 6 of those belong in the consciousness of anyone who cares about contemporary poetry--all of them are worth reading.

For the reader who has none of Bargen's books, this is the perfect first choice. It is a "new and selected" volume, and so includes 48 pages of new poems and substantial selections from ten of his earlier volumes. I would bet that anyone who reads through this volume would decide to seek out the earlier volumes to be sure to be able to read all of Bargen's published poems.

That Walter Bargen is the first official Poet Laureate of Missouri is mentioned on the cover and is worthy of note--would that the title would guarantee wide sales for his books. Fortunately, his tenure in the position has led to many public readings, guaranteeing him a widening audience and, I hope, a faithful group that will continue to read him.

Bargen is a poet of the natural world; his carefully crafted poems are rich in images and incidents of animal behavior, of experiences in the woods and fields, of encounters between humans and the non-human environment they inhabit and often despoil or simply destroy, wastefully. At the same time, Bargen is a complexly political poet, portraying the interactions of humans in their social and economic encounters with each other, all those basic elements of human behavior that add up to the designation of homo sapiens as a "political animal." The new poems in this volume are probably the darkest and most satiric (in the sense of damning) poems that Bargen has written, though those qualities appear in many of his volumes. In some poems, we first suppose we are in a nightmare world and that the dream will end, only to find that what has seemed a dark dream is actually a description of someone's lived experience--and so the "real world" and the nightmare are conflated.

The opening section of "Days Like This Are Necessary" is called "At Play in the Ruins," and that title collects multiple and internally contradictory meanings as we read through the upsetting, even horrifying, memories of warfare and efforts to escape the barbarism of humans who sometimes, even without meaning to, cause devastation and death; when they do mean to destroy, and use their intellect to create engines to multiply that destruction, Bargen finds them so often, with the darkest of ironies, destroyed by their own mechanisms. This particular collection of new poems is not for the fainthearted, but it continues to ring with the lyrical power of Bargen's poetic voice, protesting what may seem to be irresistible and inevitable destruction in the name of stubborn survival.

I also offer special praise for the illustrations and cover design. Michael D. Sleadd has provided designs for a number of Bargen's earlier volumes, perhaps most spectacularly the cover of Remedies for Vertigo, but all are superb designs. It is not far-fetched to suggest that Michael Sleadd is to Walter Bargen as Leonard Baskin was to Ted Hughes--artists working in tandem and mutual support. BkMk press should be commended for including Sleadd's great cover design and section-heading designs within, all contributing to the power of this fine book.

Walter Bargen's poems will harrow and inspire; this collection provides a superb introduction to the full range of his work. Buy it.

You only get better with experience. "Days Like This Are Necessary" is a collection of poetry from Walter Bargen, the first Poet Laureate of Missouri. Drawing on a long catalog of poetry, he presents a fine blend of new work and work from his past leading to an excellent book of poetry. "Days Like This Are Necessary" is an excellent collection that should not be missed. "Handmade Table": It's midnight; the lights/are off. Hands glow/in their own concentration//like someone else's gloves,/thin and old, the wrong size,/and out of style.//They shake in the only/world they know./On a scratched oak table//two hands are folded;/the right cupping the left,/the left tight as a fist.

I met Walter Bargen in a parking lot, of all places, a lot cordoned off at a St. Louis area high school for a writing and publishing festival. We talked for a good 30 minutes about poetry in general and his poetry in particular, volumes like "Theban Traffic," "West of West" and "The Feast." As we talked, more people walked up and joined the conversation. I looked over the books he had for sale, and bought two I didn't have. He autographed both, and for one - "The Feast" - he drew a picture of a fork, spoon and plate. I finally (and reluctantly) walked away, leaving behind some lively talk.

Now Bargen, Missouri's first poet laureate whose term just expired, has published "Days Like This Are Necessary: New & Selected Poems." The volume includes many I've previously read in "Theban Traffic" and "The Feast," but many more I have not. Reading them all together is to gain a deep appreciation for the poet's overall body of work.

Bargen writes about relationships - between husbands and wives, within families, and even more broadly, between cultures. I was surprised to see how much of his recent work was shaped by events in the Mideast, especially the war in Iraq and the civil war in Lebanon, and how he merges wars in the Mideast with day-to-day American life:

Beirut

Machine guns inhabit the rooftops
like hungry crows.
bullets peck the library
city hall the cobble streets
Allah's forehead.

To the east
mountains belch dust
as artillery fires into the city
planting the bloom of brown orchids
on the beach apartments
on the Hilton
in courtyards filled
with the shattered rosary of bricks.

People are opening their bodies
for the world to read
the print still wet and so red
it pours out a stoplight
on Broadway and Ninth
in downtown Columbia, Missouri.

I've stood at Broadway and Ninth in downtown Columbia, but I never imagined blood pouring from the stoplight. Bargen does more than that here, of course - he invites us to imagine small-city America as a kind of Beirut.

He also tells stories, stories of death and loss that become stories of life, as he does in "Inventories of Ruin:"

Even the crooked is straight at any one
instant, when there's no forward
or going back, no sideways to consider,
just as the asphalt beyond making capricious
turns. How it goes on or ends without us,
as it did Friday when night sped past
the overturned Ford that clowned
somersaults over the median, tossing
those drunk on immortality to the pavement
and ditch...

Bargen turns the story of a car accident into a life story, the wreckage of the car coming to symbolize the wreckage of a life.

And then there's the story of Jake and Stella, told in "Theban Traffic" and included here. Bargen uses the prose poem form to explain who they are and unfold a story of two people who love each other but always seem to find themselves disconnected. From "New Waves on Old Water:"

"Stella travels two thousand miles to sweep up the dust of another
relative. Whole mountain ranges pass below her quicker than
dreams. She perches on the edge of a continent.

"Because they cannot see each other, they cannot exchange diseases
though the distant unease is worse. Though they cannot share a
bottle of wine their separate glasses overflow with a blush of light.there is a smeared stain in the air like a burning city. Over the phone, he hears her say that's the sun setting over the Pacific..."

There is distance here, and even alienation, but there is also the strong sense of longing and affection. All of the Jake and Stella poems reflect this, almost clutching the contradiction of love and simultaneous separation, even when they're together.

These are quiet poems, meant to be read in quiet. A collection is necessary, and goes far beyond any need to explain why Bargen was selected to champion poetry in his home state.

One of my favorite alltime books has been Fields of Thenar, published around 1980 when I lived near Walter Bargen, then a carpenter supporting a young family in an earthy warren built by his own hands. Those poems are in here, along with others from other periods. They seem to do just what i think poems should do; celebrate the sensuality and pleasure in every day life in a spare, unflinching voice.