In his essay “Arendt in New York,” in our Winter 2017 issue, selected for inclusion in Best American Essays, Baron Wormser wrote “She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came.” Baron, a dear friend, also nurtured a “vision of decency,” though I doubt he was waiting for it to arise. I hope readers will return to that essay, and to his large and varied body of work. The depth and breadth of his mind can be experienced — and enjoyed! — in his essays “In Praise of Quentin Anderson,” “More,” and “More Money Than God” all published in Solstice. We have gathered, below, brief tributes to Baron from other writers.
I met Baron at The Frost Place some forty years ago. Baron—a Baltimore Jew filled with a Maine Yankee’s Congregational spirit and a Taoist’s “fanciful sanity” in regards to the world. He knew that poetry’s economy is founded on the world as it is rather than the world as we might like it to be; and he knew that the craft of squaring one word with another, phrase by phrase and line by line, is both intimately and pragmatically connected to the daily craft of living. Splitting firewood, drawing well water, filling and lighting kerosene lamps and reading by them, gardening—both for the food that is eaten and the beauty that is needed—were all activities that, for Baron, could restore the world around us and could make the “real world as real as possible,” as Gary Snyder once defined our human task of living.
Going off to the woods was never an act of renunciation; for Baron and his wife, Janet, and his two children Owen and Maisie, their life off the electric grid and its daily, necessary activities opened up the possibility of remembering and restoring the very things that have sustained human beings throughout time. As Baron put it, “our task is to honor, heed, and love the plenitude of energy upon which life rests. Though we distract ourselves endlessly, we are far from endless.” Living daily by being here in each moment “rather than cavorting in our heads,” (as Baron says) opens us both to the phenomenological facts of existence and, perhaps more importantly, helps us to consider, in Baron’s words, the “occasions of thankfulness that always {are} present.”
To my mind, Baron was one of the best poets in America—he was equally adept writing in form or in free verse; he could move diction-wise from “poetry is the logic beyond reason” to that’s “what keeps you reading all these twitchy nights”; his poems have the memorable and palpable pleasure of phrasings like a “Niagara of impudent moments,” the “ratchety clack of redoubtable trolleys,” or describing Harvard Square as the “vast declarative sea of ambling youths.” And his poems move between the personal and the historical with astonishing ease, always allowing for conflicting points of view with a kind of Keatsian Negative Capablility. What makes his work so important (in all the various forms Baron worked in) was his willingness to ask constantly what it means to be a human being against the backdrop of our contingency and fallibility. In a Word to the Reader in his second book, Good Trembling, Baron wrote: “what poetry offers is the courage to acknowledge a sympathy for the human predicament.” And in an early poem called “The Oxymoron as Taoist Vision,” Baron wrote: “I do not want to act as though/ I know what everyone else knows./ Because we use the same words/Does not mean we have the same eyes.” Baron Wormser saw with his own eyes; he was an original. And what I admire about Baron’s work is what I admired about him: he was hard-headed, utterly unsentimental, but also passionate and never, ever indifferent. He knew that to be original, which he always was, we must be, as the archaic meaning of the word implies, in touch with our origins.
— Robert Cording
I scarcely know where to begin in a tribute to Baron Wormser, so multifaceted were his talents, so crucial his services to the written word, so generous his relations with all manner of people. We were friends for over forty years. As editor of New England Review, I first encountered him in the late 70s, and was honored to publish his poetry right up to my retirement from the journal in 1989. I knew Baron too by way of his association with The Frost Place in New Hampshire, which I chaired for most of his tenure as director of its poetry and teaching conference, another role in which he provided inspired and important service.
Were I forced to apply a single adjective to this extraordinary person– I mean beyond the readily applicable ones like gifted and brilliant– it would likely be principled. Baron’s integrity was simply unimpeachable. Not that he was stubborn; not that he didn’t graciously entertain disagreement (including my own in a few rare instances); it’s simply that no imaginable self-advancement could sway him from commitment to what I must lamely call Things That Matter – his obligations as husband, father, friend, citizen, and poetic champion. He was the textbook antithesis to a hustler, a man who, for all his modesty, even self-effacement, was devoted to humane values, ones desperately needed in our fraught and corrupt era.
We won’t see Baron Wormser’s like again. Ave atque vale.
— Sydney Lea
Baron was a lonely person who made other people feel less lonely. He taught me how to write. He taught me how to teach. And then he bequeathed me his poetry and teaching program at the Frost Place. Baron gave me my vocation, and he showed me that loneliness lies under all. We reach out from our own solitudes into another’s: a mind, a book, a flower. Those moments of glimmer. They were his gift, and his work.
— Dawn Potter
It isn’t possible to encapsulate what it personally meant to me to know and work with Baron Wormser. I graduated in the inaugural class at Stonecoast (2004) and worked with Baron for three semesters including my critical thesis semester. After I graduated, we kept in touch. I visited him in Maine and Vermont, and he stayed with me when I lived in Connecticut. We took walks together, dined together, and I met his son and spent time with Janet. He wrote blurbs for my first poetry book, and I acknowledged him and sent him a copy of every one of my books after that, including my first novel published in February. He emailed me to say he enjoyed it. Janet Wormser provided artwork for the back cover of my first short story collection, Growing a New Tail. I now live in SW Colorado but I had planned to visit them in spring of 2026. I last heard from him in September, after I sent him a copy of my recent novel.
None of this can begin to express who Baron was and what he meant to me. From his pronunciation of poem (po-em) to his quiet reverence for literature to his phenomenal recall of the work of literally thousands of writers to his modesty about his own work, a Buddhist acceptance of what one cannot control, the necessity of using words as a quiet revolution, and his legendary compassion, there is simply no one else like Baron Wormser. He once told me that living off the grid and raising their children that way gave all of them a preference for solitude and an unhurried life that few of us choose. He recently visited his former off-the-grid house in Maine and wrote about that visit on his Substack in September. This was the last essay of his I read. He was heartened to see that the owners approached it with the same reverence for the environment. A part of him (and Janet, too) missed that life. It was the antithesis of the hustle. Even though he worked as a librarian during those times, they also chopped wood, pumped water, used an outhouse, and grew a lot of their own food. His memoir made me long for a simpler life. That is not to say that he was oblivious to issues in the country and the world. Baron was remarkably well-read. I looked forward to his essays on Vox Populi and subscribed to his Substack. He had a poet’s eye and a linguistic facility with words. He also knew how to use white space, something I learned from him. Not only did he write stunning poetry, he also wrote and published fiction and nonfiction. His essays were award-winning. His versatility continues to inspire me.
Like many of his friends and loved ones, I will be grieving this loss a long, long time. Baron’s ability to linger with words and invite others to do the same changed the course of my life. I loved the man, the poet, and the mentor.
Thank you, Baron Wormser. I wish we had more time.
— Lisa C. Taylor
All of us who know Baron were devastated to hear that he was diagnosed with inoperable brain cancer and died at home three weeks later. What the hell. In a sense, there are no words, but many of us, like him, are writers, and trying to express our sorrow and grief, and honor him and his work, is what we do. He was prolific, witty and profund, in life and in all genres of writing. He was (and is) beloved. That’s the right word to express how I feel. He was a friend.
I taught with him for years in two low-residency MFA programs in Maine and Connecticut. Later, at New Rivers Press, where I was Editor, we published his groundbreaking novel Tom O’Vietnam (described by Bruce Weigl as “in a class by itself and resonant of great works about Viet Nam…”) and included his poetry in Visiting Bob: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Bob Dylan (which I coedited with Thom Tammaro). For him, he said, the two writers whose work always came to mind were Shakespeare and Bob Dylan, and his last novel, Songs From a Voice: Being the Recollections, Stanzas, and Observations of Abe Runyon, Song Writer and Performer (Woodhall Press), is a take on Dylan’s early years, though told in a voice uniquely Baron’s own.
I met him for the first time in southern Maine, when I was invited by the novelist Lee Hope, the founder and then-director of Stonecoast, to teach in the program. Years later, I left Stonecast, as did Baron, and we both found ourselves teaching in the Fairfield University program, founded and then-directed by the novelist Michael C. White. As in many such programs, faculty and students gathered twice a year for a week or so in scenic locations—Freeport and Brunswick in Maine, Enders Island off the coast of Mystic in Connecticut—for seminars, workshops, panels, and readings as well as various social events.
Baron was (and is) a legend among both students and faculty, admired by all for his lyrical and powerful writing, his wide ranging literary and cultural knowledge, and, perhaps most of all, for his kindness, generosity, empathy, and wisdom as both a mentor to students and a good friend and sometimes counselor to colleagues. Slight of body, even elfin, Baron was good company, full of life, intellectual vigor, and a mischievous sense of humor, whether he was musing on his latest enthusiasm (see his recent, and now archived, Substack, The Exciting Nightmare), sampling Heaven’s Door (Bob Dylan’s whiskey) as we sat on the lawn facing the sea off the coast of Mystic, or praising the work of the students he mentored.
He contained multitudes. “When we look for one thread of motive,” he wrote in The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, “we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” He and his family lived in a house in Maine with no electricity or running water for almost 25 years. Oddly enough, that book, perhaps his best known, is one I haven’t read; I just ordered it and anticipate its arrival. Like other friends and writers who have left us—Jack Driscoll, who also taught at Stonecoast, and Walker Percy, a mentor to me in the 1970s when I lived in Louisiana, come immediately to mind—Baron’s death leaves an absence and a sadness in my life that I can’t appease. Give me back my friends.
All love to you, Baron.
— Alan Davis
How can I measure what we have lost? Trying to capture the essence of a prolific writer like Baron Wormser isn’t just daunting – it feels doomed to inadequacy. Examine a random part of any section from The Road Washes Out in Spring, Baron’s kaleidoscopic memoir of living with his family off the grid in the Maine woods, and attempt to predict where Baron’s multifocal mind will lead us. What about this one, for instance?
I remember the evening of the first day in which we moved into our house in the woods. It started to get dark and I thought – it is getting dark. That seems simple-minded, but what I felt was vividly complex. Night’s coming was so profound, so transfixing, so soft yet indelible that I was startled and lulled in the same awed moment. I remember very clearly feeling how, second by tiny second, it was getting darker, how the dark was creeping in, how it was inexorable and delicate, how night “fell” – a great, slow curtain – how darkness “grew” – something organic yet rooted in the ineffable.
Here, this simple, quotidian observation – night falling – morphs into a mind-bending mixture of intense emotion and more abstract, intellectual complexity. That was pure Baron but, of course, only one aspect of him. He was a master of intense observation, whatever he was looking at: trees, leaves, stones, roads, sunlight, darkness, the moon, stars, kerosene lamps, snakes, water, flowers, frogs, birds, culverts, soil, snow, firewood, stoves, gardens, vegetables, people, and poetry – to name only a few. Those were some of the concrete subjects he touched on in that memoir, and they functioned as the wellspring for his conceptual and metaphorical divergences. Like Robert Frost, Baron believed that “writing poetry and living in the country were the same enterprise. Both were about situating oneself . . . Being versed had to do with being situated, with dwelling.” Baron and is family may have lived simply in Maine, but there was never anything simple about his thoughts or his multifarious poems or his pragmatic politics, as his recent, probing essays in Vox Populi demonstrate. In my experience, not many writers could think so well as he could.
I had the good fortune to co-teach workshops in Fairfield University’s MFA Program in Writing with Baron, and I was always struck by his Socratic method of teaching through asking questions and stimulating cooperative dialogue. He didn’t demand agreement or tell students what to think, but he chose and carefully dissected models of poetry which, for anyone who was paying attention, taught you what was most important to know. The closest he came to direct pedagogy that I ever saw was when he would deliver a particularly cogent line of reasoning in a seminar and end it with, “Okay?” His many students, over decades, were lucky and appreciative.
I will miss our long phone conversations. I will miss hanging out in bars in Mystic, Connecticut, talking about Whitman and Dickinson with him. I will miss his generous readings of any work-in-progress I sent to him. I will miss his sly humor and his trenchant conclusions about the continuing decline of our country. And most of all, I will miss the poems and essays and novels and memoirs he won’t be here to write anymore. As Baron said in one of a thousand perceptive lines, “It was unsettling to become so aware of what had been lost.” Unfortunately, I am terribly aware of what losing Baron means, and way more than unsettled.
— Bill Patrick
I was introduced to Baron’s work when I came upon Mulroney and Others, one of my mother’s favorite collections. She loves Maine poets, nature poets, unpretentious poets. Reading Baron’s work always felt like a reprieve. We would quote Mulroney back and forth to each other. I returned to his collections often throughout young adulthood. Years later, when looking to study poetry during Covid, I searched “where does Baron Wormser teach” enrolling at Fairfield University and the mentorship program that they offer. For a year I worked with him, writing at all hours of the day and night. Baron taught me how to treat writing poetry like a job-and that it can be a transformational yet sort of everyday gig, as valid as any other work. An emphasis throughout our time working together was the seasons, that everything is always changing, and that poetry works as a metronome to catch the changes, the rhythms of life. I was writing with him when our family dog had to be put down, and I had to take her to the vet by myself to say goodbye, wearing a plexiglass shield over my mask. I wrote poems right after this, odes to her, the only pieces which he mercifully did not offer corrections for. She died in the spring, as the last of the blossoms fell from our tree out front. Isn’t it strange, how death sweeps through like a season? Isn’t it strange, how one day it is summer, and the next day it is now autumn, and Baron Wormser is no longer here? He will be so missed.
— Annabelle Lewis
A few words about a comet
The Comet Lemmon recently passed through earth’s atmosphere, making its closest approach to Earth in 1,000 years. As it passed through the night sky a technicolor swirl of auroras exploded across the night sky, potentially visible in rural areas around the northern hemisphere, including 15 US states. The auroras were the result of the comet passing through a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field, a rare convergence of astronomical events.
Baron Wormser and I never met face to face, but through our correspondence and my publishing his work in Vox Populi, we developed a relationship that went beyond author and editor and became, at least for my part, a true friendship. I loved his essays for their clear emphatic prose, his unshakable belief in the power of literature, his strong sense of ethics and the weaving of his personal experience with the themes of the books he loved. He believed that great books speak to our current troubled time, and the other arts, film in particular, contain the qualities of great literature: a moral sense that begins in personal integrity and rises to the level of instruction on history and society. He credited his mother with inspiring his love of literature and spoke of Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson and Twain with affectionate respect.
Although history will have the final word on who among us is read by future generations, I’ll put my money on Baron. His writing represents the best of the American spirit, a convergence of a great mind focused on the literature of a people who fail repeatedly to live up to their values. Whether he was talking about Emerson striving to create a new sense of the worth of the individual, David Lynch exploring the limits of reality, Whitman’s opening himself to a vision of democracy, or Christian Nationalists carrying on an unholy war against decency, Baron never looked away, but followed the inquiry wherever it led.
His poems, like his essays, never bowed to fashion. Dirty Realism, Confessionalism, Formalism, and Language Poetry didn’t interest him. Instead his poems were explorations of concepts: what is the self? why is The Fool important in the Bard’s plays? what light does the scholar follow? Each of his poems opens a metaphysical door only to find another door and another. The poems are a dance of ideas that end when the music ends, not before.
The Comet Lemmon was far from unique. In fact, comets arrive often, and most go unnoticed. But every few hundred years a chunk of ice and rock passes through our atmosphere just in time to converge with other events, and then we see something spectacular, the sky exploding with color, and we feel more alive having seen it. Baron Wormser arrived just in time to make us see ourselves more clearly and, I’m sure he would have hoped, more compassionately.
— Michael Simms
Baron Wormser’s Butternut Squash Soup
Perhaps creating something is nothing but an act of profound remembrance.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, in a letter.
I find myself in the Wormser kitchen. I am in fact in my own kitchen in mid-October of 2025 and having on the spur of the moment invited friends to dinner, have decided to make butternut squash soup. I find myself in the Wormser kitchen because I have pulled out Baron’s recipe, sent to me in November of 2002 following a visit during which I’d watched him make it. It begins: Bake at 375 a large or two medium butternut squash. For Baron, however, it didn’t really begin there; it had rather begun back in the spring when he planted the seeds. For this variously sized butternut squash in his recipe was squash he and his wife had tended all summer. I recall once coming upon several dozen squash spread out on the floor inside the Wormser house—an impressive hoard—and Baron explaining about the need to cure the squash in a warm place before putting it into cold storage for long keeping. So, the squash of his recipe was planted, tended, harvested, cured, and stored by the Wormsers. Mine, on the other hand, was picked up at the Sunday Farmers’ Market on West 79th Street. I hope it was cured. It would have to do.
Baron next adds: You have cut the squash into large sections and scooped out the seeds. Bake them oiled and face down. No time is indicated here in the recipe. How long to bake the squash is left to your own judgment. This is where the art of making soup and the art of making a poem begin to cross over a bit, for much depends on the instincts and skills of the individual maker. What do “large sections” mean to you? What type and how much oil will you put on? How precise is your oven temp and where is the rack positioned? You have entered into the process of creating, which is to say you are transforming energies in the natural world to make something new. You need to not only cut, heat, add, and combine but to conjure and coax, observe and adjust. Baron approached his gardening, his cooking, and his writing with the same care and fervor—all were part of the fine and ancient art of living one’s life on the earth.
His instructions continue: Under the cavities where the seeds were, put in a number of whole garlic cloves, unpeeled. Meanwhile sauté some sage leaves and then take them out to drain. These ingredients were also sourced from the Wormser garden. I happen to have sage leaves, which a friend cut for me from her urban terrace pot, but I have never sautéed sage before and will need to improvise. A bit of oil, a small cast iron pan, what could be so hard? But I do not control the temperature as well as I intended and wind up over crisping a few of the leaves, then rescuing the rest just in time to drain on a paper towel. (Baron, I should have watched you more closely.) As for the garlic, I am doing without that today. Baron once described Shakespeare’s art as “a mongrel art, a supremely adaptive art,” and cooking too is an adaptive art. Just as poets bring to each poem we write the many poems we’ve been influenced by, I have another recipe that is also influencing me today, and so I’ve decided in lieu of garlic to add some chopped apple, celery, and fresh ginger at this next step: Then sauté two onions, some thyme, the sage, a quarter cup of parsley together. Mix in with this two quarts of water in which you have dissolved a bouillon cube. I do not have cubes, but I can use some vegetable broth from the freezer, which I have quickly thawed. I am making a smaller amount of soup, but this too is an adaptable aspect of the process. And there’s another good ingredient to add—conversation. For I remember that being in the kitchen while Baron was cooking was always part of the ongoing conversation of the visit. A practiced cook, he usually refused any offer to “help,” but he welcomed the company. In adapting Baron’s soup, I feel again in conversation with him. I am reading his recipe. I am concocting the soup of memory.
At this point (you have been checking on it, right?) the squash, having been baked till it is tender (and whose skin has been removed, he adds helpfully in parens) is ready to be scooped into the soup. Plus squeeze the baked garlic pulp in also. Simmer this for around a half hour. Then puree. I recall that it was Baron who introduced me to the wonders of the immersible blender. Leave it to someone who had lived off the grid for two decades to be up on the latest electric convenience. And he was right. This particular invention was worth having; it worked like a charm and saved messy and cumbersome transfers in and out of a blender. I purchased one soon after and silently thank him as I use it tonight to puree.
By now you will have created a mighty satisfying and nourishing pot of soup. But if you truly want to finish it off à la Wormser, you should add some shitake mushrooms you have sautéed separately. (I alas do not have these on hand, but I remember how delicious it was when Baron added them.) The end of his recipe? There’s one more sentence: Oh yes when you put in the squash put in around a teaspoon and a half of salt. Oh yes, it is important to read the recipe, or the poem, to the very end. Take in the whole, get a general grasp of what is before you, then go back to tend to each step, trusting your instincts, improvising as needed. Remember. Make it your own.
— Jeanne Marie Beaumont
I first met Baron Wormser in the summer of 1993 when we were both Resident Faculty at the Frost Place. I knew of his name, but had never read his work.
When I arrived at the lodge where the faculty was housed, he was sitting on the wraparound porch, shielded from the bright sunlight. I introduced myself and we started talking, obviously, about poetry. Within minutes, we learned that we both shared a deep passion for the work of Zbigniew Herbert, his poetry and his prose.
That began a 32-year deep friendship, and when I read Baron’s poems during the week at Frost, I recognized that Baron was absolutely an American Zbigniew Herbert, and maybe has been the only American poet so fierce as Herbert in his calling for a moral order, for human integrity against the rot of a complacent society.
What Herbert was able to do was to bring the crux of moral decision-making into poetry, both as a subject and as a methodology. Powerfully, Herbert was never stentorian, his charge was always delivered with exceptional delicacy and wit.
the Senate is deliberating
how to not be a Senate.
(from Mr. Cogito on Upright Attitudes)
Or
in this way
on two legs
the left which can be compared to Sancho Panza
and the right
recalling the wandering knight
Mr. Cogito
goes
through the world
staggering slightly.
(from About Mr. Cogito’s Two Legs)
Now see Baron’s lines about his daughter in a remarkable poem “Some Happiness” from his first book, The White Words.
With a kiss, I dismiss her
And she dismisses me.
The morality of the gentleness between father and daughter, the equality of their humanness, radiates. Later in the poem
She is
All things that steadily, waveringly go.
It is not so much the quality of going that is so similar, though it is, but what is similar is the delicacy of choice, the freedom to dismiss and the freedom to not be a Senate, moral options given with an understanding of the rarity of integrity.
In “Rudinsky’s, 1953”, from his book, When, Baron makes clear what we are to choose:
But the bad things --- slipping was a bad thing,
Not adding up a check correctly, setting
The wrong dish down, forgetting to pour the water.
The waiters watched for each other and looked out for each other.
They were mothers and brothers to each other.
And Herbert, from the “Envoy of Mr. Cogito”
And let your helpless Anger be like the sea
Whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten
…
And do not forgive truly it is not in your power
To forgive in the name of those betrayed at dawn…
It is in Carthage, from 2005, that Baron makes explicit his concordance with Herbert and Herbert’s Mr. Cogito. Carthage is the President making war, a clear stand-in for George W. Bush, and the titles of the poems in the book, for example, “Carthage and the Crows,” “Carthage and Television” are explicit nods to Mr. Cogito.
Carthage is sorting the bad
From the evil,
A task that could give God a headache.
Only Herbert and Wormser had the ability to sound like that, to recognize the enormity of their task and the humor required to succeed, in whatever measure, poetry could and does.
Crucially, Baron, through all his books of poetry and prose, his memoirs and novels, never forgot the purpose of his work, the need for a moral stance, for seeing oneself and the other as both needing, deserving and offering integrity at every stop of life.
— Howard Levy
Baron Wormser. My friend of a lifetime. My model of assiduous adherence to the vocation of poet—a wonderful model who took joy in what he did even when the tone and/or subject were the deepest foibles and crimes of human nature, or the glories and comedies and graces thereof.
I first met Baron around 1982 or ‘83 when Houghton Mifflin, in the person of editor Tom Hart, (1944-2012), who also happened to be my husband, chose Baron’s first book MS to publish in Houghton’s series. My own first book, “Blessing,” was chosen in 1984 for the Princeton Series, and Baron and I thus felt like newbies together. His book was “The White Words,” and the family of Baron’s books from that time on did nothing but increase, as did his range and perspicacity.
Nine volumes of poetry, at least two — or is it four?– novels, books on the teaching of poetry, books of essays and his soon to be published, and, shockingly, last book, from Slant Books, “James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems.”
Baron and I, along with Danny Shot, had been slated to read at the Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge in January. When a date was finally selected and and James Frasier of the Grolier emailed us to confirm, Baron’s response left me almost senseless; he said he could not make the reading since he had just been told he had inoperable cancer.
When I spoke to Baron later that day what transpired was one of the hardest conversations I have ever been part of, and I was grateful far beyond any words I can find for Baron’s frank expression of his own grief. I was also shocked, stupefied.
But the gift and talent and shining art of Baron’s work will outlive him and this far too sudden stop. That word is not easy to write – “stop” — but the enduring life of his work –is a certainty. Though he indulged many genres with his gifts, poetry was his kingdom. He was generous with his talent, so that each book contained music and compassion and often, depending on the subject, rage, philosophy, deep humor, and always formal astonishments that were deft and moving, when they, seemingly of a sudden, revealed themselves in plain sight.
His poem “A Quiet Life,” the last in his collection “When” (1996) is a perfect poem in its simplicity, wit, factual truths, the way it melodically pours forth its essence (like one of Keats’s birds). As if it were easy! The poem can be read again and again.
The complex and utterly simple components of a perfect life are in “A Quiet Life,” though it’s about an egg, and a chicken, and humans, and their wisdom and foolishness. Baron could encompass all that in his work, and he did, time and again.
I could recommend so many of Baron’s poems for specific notice but here I will only note three, the first two from “The History Hotel” from CavanKerry (2023). The very beautiful cover of this volume is a painting by the artist Janet Wormser, Baron’s wife. The poems I refer to are the first two in that book, called “Once” and “Talk.” After these, there are so many more. And from Baron’s first collection, “The White Words,” I offer, as Baron did, “The Spirit That Speaks.”
— Christopher Jane Corkery
Late yesterday Howard Levy called to tell me about our mutual friend, the poet and writer Baron Wormser. I had met Howard and Baron at The Frost Place in the mid-90s. Both were aspiring poets looking, I imagine, to find a foothold in Frost’s shadow. Back then Franconia, New Hampshire, was idyllic—I had never been to a place so devoted to the legacy of a poet, and certainly, the legacy of New England Poets. A Westerner, I couldn’t have been more out of place, and yet almost from the start, Baron and Howard treated me like an old friend. I remember that first year in the late afternoon, the poets sitting on rocking chairs looking out at the valley. And there were many assembled on that porch who would go on to some stature; it was easy to feel out of place. When I walked into the barn, a poem to Frost from Bill Matthews was framed on the wall. And so you knew this was hallowed ground. You had to earn the view, and then I overhead Baron sharing a poem from my first book with Howard. That was my introduction to thirty years of Baron’s deeply-crafted, thought-provoking poetry and prose.
Nowhere was this more acute than in two early books: his memoir of living off the grid in Maine: The Road Washes Out in Spring, and his epic meditation on atomic conflict—Atoms, Soul Music, and Other Poems. His memoir was just republished by Brandeis University Press almost twenty years after its debut in 2006. It is a story of living through the long Maine winters by a wood stove and reading most every night with his family in that cabin they made. The outhouse was never far but always beyond reach in the cold night that became their lives.
They raised their children in that house and he drove on the dirt and mud to a nearby library where he worked to support them. This is how Baron and his wife, Janet, learned to live quietly, with intention, and frugality. It is a story of moving away from the center of American life, and plotting an existence defined by the regimen of the seasons. Think Walden but with harsher weather and a hundred-plus years later, defying the expectation of being engaged in labor and a lifestyle that others could readily understand. This was more than the back-to-the-land movement of the time. Almost no one would choose central Maine as a place to escape modern life. It was just too difficult—and yet, they did. The book is also a departure from similar stories. It is told as one long narrative—there are no chapters—and I think that was Baron’s way of asking the reader into their daily activities where so much was required to stay alive, warm, and fed. This extended period of living with considerable difficulty informed much of Baron and Janet’s values and the many books he would write.
A Jewish man by birth, he became a Buddhist-agnostic, which I often teased him about but not this: his Buddhist ideals were what enabled him to keep working at the regimen of cutting wood, heating the house, building a fire in the cook stove, hauling water, fixing the litany of cracks and leaks that kept the temperature just above tolerable, and driving the road to work in all weather. His neighbors became the through-line for how you live in community. They depended on one another, they helped when the ice damned the road and nothing moved except the cold. They needed each other and acted accordingly, another lesson Baron would not forget.
Living in isolation teaches you the lessons of wind, snow, black flies, and mud. It teaches you the patience required to excavate an onerous stretch of thought that might become your foundation. It invites you to consider what you do not know. Most of all, it is an avowal to live apart from possessions or at least, convenience. In this he was not unlike another New England poet, Hayden Carruth, and I suspect after reading Carruth felt an affinity for what he might be able accomplish in poetry given their respective values and distance from mainstream literary culture. Carruth spent twenty years living hand-to-mouth in Northern Vermont, and his poems from that time are sculpted from the land and the people with whom he shared his existence and the incalculable cold. This is what Baron’s memoir embraced: the unflinching determination to carve out an existence based on thrift, community, interdependence, and ultimately, an abiding order of peaceful respect. Values that might have been necessary in any American city, but ones he and his family chose when it seemed so unorthodox.
These same values underlie his book-length poetic inquisition of the atom. This was the ominous threat of our childhood; there was no running from its effects. How could a nation proceed with this knowledge of self-destruction and yet believe in its efficacy? A question we still have not answered, only placated because we do not have an answer. And Baron insisted on asking on us to reconsider this fealty to such a weapon. Poets, as a rule, are told not to implore a point of view but—just as emphatically—poets are told not be without one. Just weeks ago Baron quoted Carruth who asked the question: “Why are there so few poems about the bomb? It is the existential threat of our time.” This was in 1961—and indeed, in reviewing a year of Poetry magazine, Carruth found a paltry 2 out of 335 poems about the bomb, and yet here we are today trying to annul the fact of its existence. But not Baron. That book was prophetic—not least because it was an epic on an unyielding threat, but it also refused the narrative of this new technology being “good for us.” Atoms… asked us to carefully reconsider what we might be trading for this relative freedom—or at least the perception of peace-keeping by mutual restraint. Heady topics for a poet, but not if the consequences of feigning ignorance were far greater. This was a line Baron could not cross and indeed, why he felt so adamant about it: our very futures were at stake. Even a school child could recognize this. He took solace in knowing that Carruth, Levertov, Rich, and a host of other poets refused this same dogma. He was of a mind that was not apart from their voices of tolerant, non-violent resistance to what was openly shared as necessary for us to “get along.” A paradox if ever there was one. Remember when these values were formed: Nixon, Vietnam, and the fallout of repeated disingenuous leadership.
A decade later Baron wrote to tell me he had started on his first novel—“a new frontier for me,” he said. One by one they began to accrue—Teach Us That Peace (2013), Tom O’Vietnam (2017), Some Months in 1968 (2022). These novels are testament to what might have been an antidote to those same ‘60s when our country was bitterly divided over war, race, and inequality. Sound familiar, and still I remember being on the bus with Tom, the central character in Tom O’Vietnam, a soldier without a home, a distant family that once understood him, a patriot who might have found his way were it not for the confusion of being without an identity. A man who returned to America without a passage home. He did what he was told and there was little victory to depend on, little relief from the harrowing dreamscape of battle. And so he rides the bus, looking out the window wondering what has become of him, wondering if he will ever return to the man he knew, or just be an orphan, a soldier in name only, waiting for the right time to get off and walk into the distance where he might finally disappear.
A good writer leaves the reader wanting more and I always felt like I was catching up with Baron. He would call to say how much he loved the Polish poet, Zbignieu Herbert, or when I visited him in Vermont, he was reading The Sewanee Review after having stacked several cords of wood. In other words, I would never finish learning from him—maybe the highest compliment you can pay a writer. In late August he wrote to say his book of poems, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems, will come out from Slant Books next March.
He closed by saying “Summer is ending here. A bittersweet feeling.”
When Howard called it was to tell me that Baron would soon be gone. I could not imagine it then and I cannot imagine it now. I want to close with this poem from Baron’s Unidentified Sighing Objects, published by CavanKerry Press in 2015, used with permission:
Leaving
Not to be here anymore, not to hear
The cat’s fat purring, not to smell
Wood smoke, wet dog, cheap cologne, good cologne,
Not to see the sun and stars, oaks,
And asters, snow and rain, every form
I take mostly for granted, makes me sad
But pleased to be writing down these words,
Pleased to have been one more who got the chance
To participate, who raised his hand although
He didn’t know the answer or understand
The question. No matter. The leaving makes me sad;
So much was offered, so freely and completely.
— Shaun T. Griffin
Holy Smokes! Flying 39,000 ft above the North Atlantic en route to Rome, I was reading Baron’s When, a book I’m ashamed to say was on my shelf for many moons but I just read cover-to-cover, and WOW! Already I’d been dazzled when I met Baron about his astonishing pedagogical resource, A Surge Of Language -Teaching Poetry Day By Day, and we’d connected over Whitman, and I’ve loved so many of his books, most recently Unidentified Sighing Objects, which I get great delight from, especially the title. I’m sure I disappointed Baron by never publishing an article about the study I did under his mentorship about the entrenched fear of poetry evidenced in secondary English teacher training in 3 of these United States; it was a solid study, and now, so many moons later, in Baron’s honor, I’m determined to get that work somewhere where it could belong.
Baron modeled how to be, and I’m still learning from him.
— Rene Olander
The Saints Go Marching In
(for Baron Wormser 1948 - 2025)
The fact that we are not, then are, then are not
ought to help you catch the rhythm and once
you get the rhythm you begin to hear jazz horns
trumpeting, their bells flashing at us light we call
stars, the double bass wrapped around a rhythm
you feel like mercy, that points toward the earthen
things you loved, making a sad forgiveness easier
now that you recognize the tune and understand
you are in that number and always have been.
Good thing, because a man like you who witnessed
and "wondered how time can atone " lived always
on the cusp of giving up on all of us now left here
arguing about the best way we could love you and
say goodbye. Forgive us. Maybe not all of us, but
maybe, now, given your death, your release, maybe
even all of us. High-stepping, music in your bones,
sousaphones and trombones celebrating breath,
you're thrown another birth, a string of bright beads:
will you wear it? put it round your neck? Dear poet,
I am being selfish. Come back. We need you here.
— Richard Hoffman
[1] from “A Call,” Unidentified Sighing Objects, p. 47
