Walter Bargen interview (MO Literary Festival)

Walter Bargen, Missouri’s first-ever official state Poet Laureate, is one of the numerous writers participating in the Missouri Literary Festival Oct. 2-4 at Hammons Field and the Creamery Arts Center. KSMU’s Randy Stewart spoke with Bargen by phone a few weeks ago.

Walter Bargen is often asked how he came to be named Missouri’s first official Poet Laureate. One of his answers is, “you spend four decades writing! …And hopefully you improve over time, and you develop a style that people are interested in reading and that has some appeal. And you end up being Poet Laureate.” The actual mechanics of the selection process were rather more mundane: former Governor Matt Blunt’s office accepted nominations for this two-year appointment--135 nominations for this first-ever Poet Laureate appointment. That huge list was winnowed down to four finalists, each of whom went through an interview process. Bargen says the job involves a lot of travel across the state, making appearances at libraries, schools, universities, book clubs, teachers’ conferences, writing festivals, etc.

At the Missouri Literary Festival, Walter Bargen will give a reading Saturday Oct.3rd at 11:00am, following the 10:00am reading by former United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins.

Bargen’s poetic style is perhaps best summed up by a word he himself coined: “povella,” a cross between a “poem” and a prose “novella.” He used it specifically to describe what he’d written in The Feast (published in 2004 by Bookmark Press/UMKC, and which won the William Rockhill Nelson Award for best book of poems by a Missouri or Kansas author). With “povella,” Bargen was trying to capture The Feast’s style in one succinct descriptive term. “There are eight sequences in there, and they’re almost on the edge of being de-constructed short stories. The essential part of every story is there, except that all the tissue that ties it together is not there. It then requires the reader to be much more active in the reading of it.” Unfortunately, “povella” didn’t catch on--critics in particular preferred to describe The Feast with the more cumbersome (and prosaic) term “prose-poem sequence.” “The press… decided that would be much more recognizable to people than ‘povella,’ since I think I’m the only person who’s using that word!”

This begs the larger question: what is the line, if indeed there is one, between “poetry” and “prose?” Walter Bargen feels there isn’t a definite “line” between the genres. Often, he says, when people read a novel, “the two or three pages that they recall most vividly are often described as ‘the most poetic’” pages in the book. “A prose writer might say that ‘every [poetic] lyric is hiding a narrative;” conversely, a poet could easily say “every prose piece is hiding a lyric!” Bargen quotes well-known prose poet Russell Edson as saying, “prose and poetry are two sides of the same coin.” Bargen notes that a prose poem will use (almost) every technique that you will find in a poem (except for rhyming at the ends of lines!), while “a prose poem is essentially a poem--it’s just written as a block of text.” As for the differences between a “prose poem” and “prose” (i.e. the sort of narrative writing one finds in a book, short story, article, etc.), Bargen says, “a prose poem is always much shorter [than a piece of “regular” prose]--it may be only one paragraph. But in that one paragraph you may have an entire story… you’ll find that there is alliteration in there, there’s a strong rhythm--all the techniques that you would find in a poem are in a prose poem. Well, prose contains all of that too. They’re just not that clearly separated from each other.” A prose poem boils a narrative story down to its essentials--and sometimes, says Bargen, “it may even get leaner than that… but it will, hopefully, stimulate somebody’s imagination, to rediscover what those ‘essentials’ are.”