About Baron

Baron Wormser was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1948. He grew up in Baltimore and went to high school at Baltimore City College and to college at the Johns Hopkins University. He did graduate studies at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Maine.

In 1970 he moved to Maine with his wife Janet. For twenty-five years he worked as a librarian for SAD 59 in Madison, Maine. Also he taught poetry writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. From 1975 to 1998 he lived with his family in Mercer, Maine, in an off-the-grid house on forty-eight acres. His memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet's Memoir of Living Off the Grid, (see "Publications") concerns that experience.

In 2000 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Maine by Governor Angus King. He served in that capacity for six years and visited many libraries and schools throughout Maine. Also he read his poem "Building a House in the Maine Woods, 1971" (see under "Poems") at Governor Baldacci's inauguration in 2003.

He currently resides in Cabot, Vermont, with his wife. Since 2002 he has taught in the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine. (See "Talks" for his commencement address in 2005). In 2009 he joined the Fairfield University MFA program. He works widely in schools with both students and teachers.

Wormser has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2000 he was writer in residence at the University of South Dakota. He directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire.

Featured Poem

An Island Romance (Maine)
Note

Imagine everything being in place.
I don’t mean only the pins in the drawers
Though I mean that too but I mean
Your feelings—not squashed or pruned—
But right in place and everything around
You in place, too. That’s what
An island is, that kind of chance.

I know you can say that everything is
In place already, that trees can’t dance
And birds shed feathers not leaves
And that’s the rightness of place that counts—
And it is—but love gets mixed in here,
The love between men and women,
Husband and wife, that we say
We understand the way we understand
Anything that we do over and over
Till it becomes a kind of weather
But I’m talking about a man and woman
Living together more than forty years
On an island and no one else there.
I’m talking about a real man—
Black hair, medium height, a trace
Of a limp on his left side—and a real
Woman—blonde hair, high voice, small hands—
Who sometime in the late 40s—how about
’47?—came to Sheep Island which no
Longer had any sheep and which had gone
Back to spruce and built a house of cement
He rowed over bag by bag from the big island
And of those spruce he cut and fit into cement
Until it looked like a house in a fairy tale—
Each window casing made by hand,
Each pane set in the sash just so,
Each window placed for the fullest light.

He fished enough and she knitted sweaters
And they lived and people wondered but
They weren’t bothering anyone. They had as
Much claim to live on a place that no one
Wanted to live on as anyone. When you saw
The two of them together in Cundy’s store
As often as not they were holding hands.
They were neat looking—combed and clean—
But you felt a little uneasy because
You felt how deep love could go,
That it could pull you off into a world
Where you stopped caring about what
Others thought, that the merest touch
Of another hand could make your blood simmer
And softly growl with feeling that had to go off
By itself it was that strong.

                                       They never invited
Another soul out there ever. They got older
And they used the boat with the engine
Instead of rowing over but they still held
Hands and lived in that house we
Could picture because we had seen it
In children’s story books. That’s why
The blather about years and bags
Of cement is just blather—the sorry lint
Of facts, the believe in make-believe.
These two people had the sea for ears
And the sky for eyes and when they
Came together as man and woman
The pity of fathoms, the cold ocean notes
That sang outside their windows seemed to waver.

I know about age and death, as did they,
But think of the mornings when they sat
By the cook stove they’d hauled out there,
When he came back from the out of doors and she
Put down her handiwork and they sat there
With each other, drinking their tea and
Their mouths making little in-drawing sounds
And their putting their cups down
And how the fullness of being alive
Was the rich heat of their imagining.

Author’s note: The poem “An Island Romance” was sparked by the story of Nan and Art Kellam who lived for decades as the sole residents on an island off the Maine coast. My poem is an imagining of that shared life but a recent book, We Were an Island by Peter Blanchard tells the actual story of their life. It’s a haunting and beautifully done book with excellent photos.

Read more poems . . .