Available Now
Impenitent Notes, Baron Wormser’s ninth book of poetry, is available now. From the CavanKerry Press press release: “Wormser writes of darker themes—a mother dying of cancer, the bilking of Americans by the gurus of Wall Street, torture in Latin America, the faceless life of prostitutes, the anger and despair of the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq—but even in the most solemn of moments, he never fails to identify the absurdity, the fundamental quirk that accentuates our universal human imperfections.”
Read the full press release.
Read a review.
See more books by Baron Wormser.
New in Talks/Articles
Vendler versus Dove
A discussion about authority and the task of poetry anthologies
Fairfield University MFA Commencement Speech
Thoughts on Race and Poetry in America
A response to Major Jackson’s essay “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black”
The Arc of Teaching a Poem
a teaching statement composed by Baron Wormser and Dawn Potter (also posted on Dawn’s website)
Donald Sheehan: A Memorial
A brief speech given on Frost Day in memory of Donald Sheehan
Introduction to John Haines: Descent
The introduction to a collection of Haines’s essays, reviews, chronicles, memoirs, and poems, spanning four decades, from CavanKerry Press (available through UPNE and Amazon.com)
The Wire and The Wasteland
If you have seen the show and read the poem, read the essay as it appeared in The Manhattan Review.
Jack RIP
A remembrance of Jack Wiler
See Talks/Articles for more. . .
Frost Place Poetry Outreach
Learn how you can bring Robert Frost to your classroom.
Books
The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid
UPNE, 2006
“All in all, this is the best book about rural
New England life since Jane Brox’s Here and Nowhere Else. Its scope is narrow but its reach is vast.”
—Robert Finch, The Boston Globe
Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems
Sarabande Books, 2008
The Poetry Life: Ten Stories
CavanKerry Press, 2008
See Publications for a complete list of books.
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Featured Poem
Calendar (1956)
Rabinowitz tries to crawl
Inside the numbers.
He multiplies, for instance,
The days of the year times
A fortunate life span
And arrives at an impressive
Figure—Twenty-five thousand
And five hundred.
Still, it is a poor unprepossessing
Number beside the tree
From which millions of leaves fell.
Rabinowitz sits with a calendar
Which he fills in
With names such as Shulamith
Or Schmuel or Hersh or Reva.
Each day of the calendar
Gets a name and he says
The name when he looks
At the calendar in the morning,
A sound he makes
For the sake of sound,
A wafer of prayer,
A blue speck of feeling.
During the last week of December
He fills in every day
Of the next year with names.
He dreams of thin black hair,
Frizzy brown hair, half-smiles,
Grimaces, sobs, small fingers,
Fat fingers, thumbs,
Old people and children,
Loud voices, murmurs.
This is the calendar
That awaits a new religion,
Braver than the previous ones.
Today is Tsaureh-The-Baker’s-Wife Day.
The Jews have their years.
The Gentiles have theirs.
Eternity cares nothing.
Existence plods on like
A trek to nowhere
But Rabinowitz has spoken for each day.
He dreams of reddish curly hair,
Dimples, long necks,
Dear serious soulful eyes
That bury oblivion.
from Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (2008)
Read more poems . . .
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