Baron Wormser, poet, essayist, novelist, short story writer

I must go back to the 80s when I first discovered the poetry of Baron Wormser. https://baronwormser.com/

I first read Good Trembling from 1985 and liked it, but then I found The White Words from 1983. I was hooked.

Over the decades, I've found that his work has given me, and I suspect all his readers, much to savor, ponder and enjoy. His career has been a long and fruitful one. To read his poetry and prose is to find elegance, humor, integrity and an artful acuity of vision. He's not afraid to experiment, or to be a formalist, or to write about mundane perhaps common warps and tropes, so to speak.

Here is one example:

In Baseball

Neither forces nor bodies equivocate:
Each action holds a tell-tale trait,
Each moment convokes an actual fate.

Reality, being precious, becomes a game
In which, nature-like, no two things are the same-
Whatever is remarkable is nicknamed.

The untitled fan applauds the grace of epithet
And thinks of warring Greeks, whose threats,
Stratagems, confusions, deeds though met

On a smaller scale are yet quiveringly real.
Player against player on a simple field,
It's the keenness of conflict that appeals

To the citizen so sick of the abstract "they."
Here, there is no such thing as a beggared day.
Achievement can be neither created nor feigned

And the whole mix of instinct, confidence, wit,
And strength emerges as a catch or a hit,
Something indicative, legible, quick

And yet as much a mystery as luck.
Lured by the tangible we strive to pluck
The meaning that cannot be awe-struck.

The exemplary fact remains-a ball,
The thing that rises and abjectly falls,
The unpredictable, adroit rhyme of it all.

I present this blog post as an informal but heartfelt encomium to a writer whose work continues to challenge, inspire and delight.

In Baron's eleventh poetry collection, The History Hotel, published by CavanKerry, https://www.cavankerrypress.org/ the historical circumstances that touch, anneal, shatter, and buttress a life are paramount. 

We all live in the History Hotel where love and betrayal, hope and despair go hand in hand. As part of the work that makes our lives, Baron shows those entangled hands in each of these poems. 

An earlier book by Baron, a memoir published a couple of decades ago, titled The Road Washes Out In Spring, is now available in a new edition from the University of Chicago Press. 

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/R/bo198061919.html

As a native New Englander who grew up in a mill town and walked to school through the woods along a river, and at home read short stories with my Mom from Yankee magazine, I've also consumed, as an adult, my fair share of narratives about rural life in Maine, and Vermont, and sometimes the other New England states, though they get short shrift as they're viewed incorrectly, in my opinion, as less hardscrabble. 

I think The Road Washes Out is one of the best, the most complete and satisfying narratives of this variety, with a clarity in the prose that stirs memories of the New England I knew as a kid. I find the style reminiscent of works such as Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion,  Dorthy Canfield Fisher's Seasoned Timber, and Donald Hall's String Too Short To Be Saved. 

Of course, other fine prose writers come to mind, too, such as Howard Frank Mosher, and Ernest Hebert. 

And the New England poets, as well, not just Mr. Frost, but Louise Bogan who's unfortunately often overlooked due to her formalism perhaps and the inimitable shadows of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Charles Olson, to name just a few from the 20th Century.

For me, what appeals and what distinguishes the work of all these authors is a sense of lived experience that comes through between the lines, an honesty, a vision, rather than just a literary stance or an appealing style in the telling.

For nearly twenty-five years, Baron and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water. They grew much of their own food, carried water by hand, and read by the light of kerosene lamps. 

“When we look for one thread of motive,” he writes, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” 

His refusal to be satisfied with the obvious explanation, the single thread of motive, makes him a keen and sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community, a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is a series of candid personal essays on community and isolation, nature, civilization, and poetry. 

This new edition of the Road Washes Out in Spring features a new preface by Baron. 

Baron is the author of twenty books including novels, a memoir, a book of short stories, two coauthored books about teaching poetry, and many books of poetry. 

Essays of his appeared in Best American Essays 2014 and 2018. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. 

From 2000 to 2005, he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine and received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta. 

He is the founder of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching.

Here below is a link to a video from the 830 Club and a discussion between Richard Cambridge, Baron, and Thomas Rain Crowe about what it means to write about and live off the grid. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBZQeHkwwd0

Lastly, here is a link to Baron reading in March, 2023 at a bookstore in Norwich, Vermont. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3gnpmXqQ20

Enjoy!