Baron Wormser, , A Memorial Tribute

Baron Wormser

This is from the obit online from Seven Days

October 16, 2025

Baron Wormser, poet, essayist, novelist and teacher, died of brain cancer at his home in Montpelier, Vt., with his family on October 7, 2025. He would like to be remembered for his writing, which includes 10 books of poetry, including a posthumous volume that will be out in January, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems; as well as two coauthored books about teaching the art of poetry; and a memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring, about his 23 years of living off the grid with his family. He also leaves behind four novels, a book of short stories, and many essays on his Substack, “The Exciting Nightmare,” and in the online journal Vox Populi, among others. He was recognized for his writing with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Guggenheim Foundation and was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine from 2001 to 2005. He received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005. A high school librarian for much of his life, Baron also taught writing at the Stonecoast, Fairfield University, and Western Connecticut MFA programs and at the Frost Place, and was a respected and inspiring teacher, mentor and editor for many writers.

For me, it's an understatement to say he was a respected and inspiring mentor. I never formally studied with him, and we met in person only once after a reading he gave at Assumption College. But we wrote to each other, stayed in touch, and he commented on my work, and I wrote back sharing my praise regarding his latest book or essay or poem. We were introduced through Leo Connellan. 

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

Good Trembling I read in 1985 and liked it, but then I found The White Words from 1983. I liked it even more and I was hooked. I'd go to bookstores and libraries in search of the literary magazines that were publishing his new poems. 

Though Baron wasn't a native of the New England I grew up in, he understood the region in ways that deepened my appreciation of it, that helped me see it with more clarity and tolerance and conviction. His poems helped me feel better about my own lack of vision and the fog of bewilderment that I as a young man often found myself stewing in.

Over the decades, his work gave me, and I suspect all his readers, much to savor, ponder and enjoy. His career was a long and fruitful one. 

To read his poetry and prose is to find elegance, humor, integrity and an artful acuity of vision. He was never 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.

Years ago now, I originally presented this blog post as an informal but heartfelt encomium to a writer whose work continues to challenge, inspire and delight. Baron wrote to me saying he liked and appreciated the blog, and was grateful. I wrote to say it was the least I could do, and that he deserved a wider readership.

I now present it as a memorial. As always with great artists, the work lives on. The artist, however, especially for those who knew him, is missed. 

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. 

Now, he's a part of history. 

We all live with him in the History Hotel. It's where love and betrayal, hope and despair go hand in hand. As part of the work that makes our lives, Baron shows us those entangled and entwined, those giving 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 available in an edition from the University of Chicago Press. 

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

As one 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 than they really are. 

I think The Road Washes Out is one of the best, 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, who wrote so well about Vermont, and Ernest Hebert who wrote about New Hampshire. I should also mention Thomas Williams, and Russell Banks. 

And other New England poets, as well, not just Mr. Frost or Mr. Longfellow. Louise Bogan, for example, who's unfortunately often overlooked. This is due to her formalism perhaps, but also how she resides in the inimitable shadows of Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Charles Olson, to name just a few from the mid 20th Century.

For me, what appeals and what distinguishes the work of all these authors, as well as Baron, 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. I always feel with Baron's work that everything is at stake in each line. This is a tension that's difficult for a poet to convery without coming across as pretentious or full of bluster.

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, chopped wood, 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, made Baron a keen sympathetic observer of his neighbors and community. He was a perceptive reader of poetry and literature, and an honest and unselfconscious analyst of his own responses to the natural world. The result is that in his work there abides a candid warmth, whether it's in the personal essays on community and isolation, or those on nature, politics and civilization, or in the frank lucidity of his poems. 

What I found remarkable about his collection Atoms, Soul Music And Other Poems is just how funny some of the poems are. And the wide range of topics he was willing to address.

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

Baron authored at least twenty books, which included novels, a memoir, a book of short stories, two coauthored books about teaching poetry, and many books of poetry. 

He had his substack, and his regular entries to the Vox Populi journal. He kept publishing poems, as well, and asking questions and writing about the politics he found heinous and disturbing. He kept challenging himself and his readers until the end.

Below, the cover for his novel, Tom O'Vietnam.

Essays of his appeared in Best American Essays 2014, and 2018. He 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. 

The cover for his short story collection, below, The Poetry Life.

He was the founder of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. Who can say how many aspiring writers have benefited from spending some time there? Quite a few, no doubt. 

The cover, below, for his novel, Teach Us That Peace.

Lastly, 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

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

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