Introducing Baron Wormser

Brattleboro Literary Festival, October 4, 2009

 

1. Memoirist

A decade ago, when I first moved to the East Coast and started to meet people in the literary world here, I kept hearing this refrain: “Oh, you’ve got to meet Baron.” I heard this in the context of poetry, of course — he’s the prize-winning author of eight volumes of poems and for six years he served (if that’s the right term) as poet laureate of Maine. And Baron is greatly admired as a teacher of writing and, on a more meta level, a teacher of teachers of writing.

      But when people told me about Baron living out in the country, living off the grid, there was a particular note of wonderment, verging on awe. Some seemed to imagine Baron and his family embodying the literary ideal known as pastoral, in which carefree shepherds have lots of free time for daydreaming, making music on simple, flute-like instruments, and wandering lonely as clouds. Others (many of them Catholic) imagined Baron’s life as one of virtuous privation — a purified, hairshirt life in which, stripped of comfort and human contact, Baron was eking out some kind of literary sainthood out there in the wilderness. And then of course there were those city people who thought that anyone who would live off the grid must be a crank, some kind of nut.

      Well, I finally met Baron and his wife, Janet, and quickly saw that they were not shepherds, or hermits, or nuts. If Baron is any kind of freak at all, he’s a reality freak. When you hear his poems (as you’ll have the chance to do later today in this very theater), you’ll hear a passion for clear-eyed engagement with the world, for the insight that comes of prolonged, patient observation, for the satisfaction of hard work, and above all for the knowledge of how things really are and how they got that way.

      Henry David Thoreau explained in Walden, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” In Baron’s wonderful memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring, he updates this very urge: “What brought me to the woods,” Baron writes, “was the prospect of living with nothing between me and the earth — none of the electronic gibber-jabber.” What he found in his twenty-three years in the Maine woods wasn’t a pastoral daydream or ascetic privation but rather the abundance that comes of living life without shortcuts. Baron himself has defined memoir as vthe journey of the self” as it tries to locate its true stature and, like Augustine in his Confessions, to recognize the value of life. “At its best,” Baron has written, “memoir glows with this feeling, even amid darkness.”

      The Road Washes Out in Spring, glowing with a sense of life’s value, is memoir at its best. Please welcome Baron Wormser.

 

2. Poet

Ten years ago I became peripherally associated with the Frost Place, a hotbed of poetry — if a place named “Frost” in the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire can rightly be called a “hotbed.” I soon came to understand that I really wouldn’t get it at all until I met Baron Wormser — “it” meaning not just the Frost Place, where Baron is director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, but also poetry in New England, and in fact poetry in general. That’s how esteemed he is in a literary community that knows him as a poet, a teacher, a critic, and a man.

      The twenty-three years Baron and his wife, Janet, spent in the Maine woods, raising their family and immersing themselves in books and contemplation, would be the stuff of legend, but we now have something better than legend: we have Baron’s own marvelous account, The Road Washes Out in Spring, with its all-important subtitle A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid. Baron wasn’t just chopping firewood and slapping blackflies in them thar hills — he was cultivating a sensibility that is absolutely unique in contemporary poetry. Or perhaps I should say: off the grid of contemporary poetry.

      So how to describe Baron’s poems? I could say “wide-ranging,” but perhaps that’s to be expected in a body of work that has produced eight volumes since 1983. I could say “straightforward,” but that would belie Baron’s slyly casual erudition; as he declares in a poem about a small New England town,

We knew who Gandhi, Georgia O’Keefe, Albert

Camus, Ben Webster and Walker Percy were.

We had amassed a civilization in our heads.

I could call Baron’s poems “wise” and they certainly are that, but they have no pretensions to wisdom, rather like his no-bullshit grandfather who, in a recent poem,

. . . never was

A look-in-the-mirror type but always grabbed

His hat and said he was ready.

I would say that Baron is a political poet, but there’s no need to bolt for the exits; I mean politics in the broadest and deepest sense, an awareness of the contexts, the implications, embedded in everything, with the implied moral imperative that meaning is everywhere, so: be aware of everything. And as you read Baron’s poems you get this giddy sense of everything being a metaphor for . . . everything.

      Which is to say: the world of these poems is a single infinitely interconnected web, a world made magical not with tricks but with a fearless attentiveness to reality. In one poem Baron celebrates a wonderful mid-’60s DJ who was, Baron writes, “The Master Metaphor Mixer . . . Trick and No-trick, he was ultra-bardic.”

      You’re about to hear a voice like that, a voice that you’ll never be able to unhear. Please welcome the ultra-bardic former poet laureate of Maine, Baron Wormser.

 

© Michael Fleming

Brattleboro, Vermont

October 2009

 

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