Walter Bargen has published twelve books of poetry and two chapbooks. His poems have recently appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry East, Seattle Review and New Letters. He has won William Rockhill Nelson Award, the Chester H. Jones Foundation Prize, the Quarter After Eight prize, and a National Endowment for the Art Fellowship. In 2008, he was appointed the first poet laureate of Missouri. He lives in Ashland, Missouri with his wife, Bobette, twenty cats, and one dog.

Other poems by Walter Bargen in Verse Daily:

Books by Walter Bargen:

Other poems on the web by Walter Bargen:
Two poems

Walter Bargen's Website.

About Days Like This Are Necessary:

"His work is technically sophisticated, rhythmically subtle, and emotionally complex, but—and here’s the trick—it’s also the kind of poetry that one might offer to someone who says he doesn’t like poetry all that much...one of Walter Bargen’s great gifts is his ability to speak directly to any intelligent reader, without compromising in any way, and to make himself understood, in all his complexity."
—Kevin Prufer

"Bargen is at times the attentive biologist, observing the smallest of details in the natural world, a slant of light, a cat preparing to slay a snake. Like an anthropologist or geographer, however, Walter sees a nature that is virtually always occupied by people and history: a zoo in Kabul savaged by war, a backhoe in a drained lake, a human reaching out to save the supposedly victimized snake. Like a psychologist, Walter explores the peculiarities of memory and like a historian or philosopher, he reaches back to the Greek gods and German and Chinese philosophers."
—Patricia Okker