Great Regulars: Walter Bargen--a poet at home

with writing in almost any style, from rural reveries to enigmatic surrealism--is the first poet laureate of Missouri.

His books include The Feast, in which some of the speakers, trapped in isolation, take on the persona of the biblical Jonah in the belly of the fish. In other works, such as the poem "Office of Forgetting," he is content to evoke nature, or the Midwestern seasons.

from John Mark Eberhart: The Kansas City Star: Missouri names its first poet laureate

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