Featured artist: Baron Wormser
Maine's Poet Laureate Baron Wormser lives in Hallowell. We in the Penobscot Bay region are fortunate that Baron visits frequently giving readings as well as workshops for Maine Writers and Publishers at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.
"Even at its most expansive Whitmanesque moments, poetry remains an art of essences and essences are unnerving. Poetry is respectably referential - it talks about the Boston Red Socks and Route 128 - but it also exists unto itself and cares only for its own perfection - the consort of sounds, rhythm, words, form, pauses."
- from Teaching the Art of Poetry, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. , 2000
Weather
...I hunted for words - an adjective that trembled
Or glinted, a noun that had the black authority
Of deep, incontrovertible feeling - but nothing,
Only carefully serviceable phrases - "hot enough
To fry and egg," "southwind," "light snow at dusk,"
"Mud almost up to the top of my boots."
We stopped reciting to one another, instead reading
To ourselves, silently, seated in our kitchen
On a March afternoon, one of those nondescript
Sunshine and clouds, late winter days.
when we looked up and locked eyes, we both
Nodded spontaneously. We didn't cry or clap.
We knew that we'd been trusted with something
truer than common. Ray didn't want words.
the feeling of being present each day was -
When you got right down to it - lordly.
- from When, Sarabande Books, 1997
Song: I Thought I Must Notice
...In the garden, footprints:
The comical leaps of toads.
I heard the faithful phoebe sing
And I thought I must notice
That it was spring.
- from Good Trembling, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985
Walk
...Fond of vague, local expeditions, we
Decide to go for a walk.
The elms are lifeless. The clouds are magenta.
We talk
About the prospects for disarmament,
My back pains, how in Maine each spring is "late".
None of this
Precipitates any debate
On the part of woodpeckers or frost-spilled walls
Or the hillside's seasonal waterfalls.
After a while our voices have had enough of themselves,
We listen
And in our aimless footsteps detect something else,
Something lulling and May-sweet.
- from Good Trembling, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1985
Carthage and Airplanes
Carthage likes to ride in airplanes.
Up in the sky he can forget
About the schedules of earth.
It is almost like thinking,
Gazing out the window at the clouds.
He likes to ponder.
"We're pretty high up," he says
To his aides.
"I wonder if we could go much higher."
Everyone looks thoughtful.
Back on earth ten-year-olds heft Uzis,
People drop dead on sidewalks,
Friendship sours like old milk.
How much better it is in the sky!
Too bad you have to be going somewhere.
Too bad the endless limo will appear
And some suit or turban or daishiki
Will greet you and start
Telling you about what's going
To happen soon or happened yesterday.
"Why don't you fly around more?"
Carthage would like to say to them.
If you live in the sky, nothing happens.
You don't even see the rain.
It is almost like thinking.
- from Carthage, a chapbook of fourteen poems about an American president who in the words of Stephen Dunn is "a frightening mix of power and banality."
Available directly from Baron Wormser or on the Internet at www.janestreetpress.com or at independent bookstores throughout Maine.
And in the fall of 2006 look for Baron's memoir entitled The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Life off the Grid from University Press of New England.
Baron Wormser lives in Hallowell.He is author of Mulroney and Others, a guide for teaching poetry, Teaching the Art of Poetry: the Moves, When, Good Trembling, and most recently, Carthage. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals including The Paris Review, The New Republic, and Harper's. Wormser has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He also won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry in 1996. Wormser teaches at the Robert Frost Place and the Stonecoast MFA program.