Near the end of September, I sent an email to Baron Wormser to let him know I had quoted him in a review of a show of Ralph Steadman’s work at the Bates College Museum of Art. The Art New England review began:

In a recent Substack posting on the subject of “Law and Order,” novelist and poet Baron Wormser wrote: “The delusion is that the society is in charge when, in truth, the mania is in charge, and the society is acting out whatever psycho-drama—fear and loathing being a large one—speaks to the particular moment.” Wormser’s words are a perfect fit for the work of the British artist Ralph Steadman, who has used his brilliant artistry to highlight that mania and those psycho-dramas and render, through what are perhaps his best-known images, the fear and loathing that accompanied a national political trauma.

Wormser replied a few days later through his son, Owen, who typed for his father: “Baron loves Ralph Steadman and Fear and Loathing is one of his favorite books. He’s grateful that you included him in this description.” He added a salutation: “Fear and loathing forever.”

I didn’t know at the time that Wormser had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. He died a few weeks later. With him went a voice of reason and resolve, of someone who loved the world even as he rued its injustices and malfunctions. His words confronted and comforted.

Wormser had started his Substack The Exciting Nightmare: A Series of Essays on Modern Times a few years back to share thoughts on a wide array of subjects. In his first posting, he honored a French Renaissance philosopher and signaled his mission: “The essay, that equivocal lancet that Montaigne forged, has afforded me a handy means of confining large matters in small spaces,” he wrote. “My goal is not that different from his—to locate my own dignity within the flux of heedless purpose.” Wormser also cited Emerson: “We know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of its million disguises,” adding, Though my conclusions often are chastened by the ravages and conceits of modern history, ‘the true fire’ remains.”

On his Substack, Wormser mused on the beauty of June light; zombies and Gaza; Flannery O’Connor; the death of Garth Hudson; people who ask why; daffodils, Mondrian and the Rolling Stones; and Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness. His essays manage to intertwine the personal and universal as in the essay “The Garden (earth and Earth),” which starts out remembering the joy of fifty years of gardening with his wife, Janet, and moves to “the legend of Eden,” which tells us, he writes, that “we once were children captivated by the Earth.”

One of Wormser’s postings riffs on the Bob Dylan-inspired novel he published in 2019, Songs from a Voice: Being the Recollections, Stanzas, and Observations of Abe Runyan, Song Writer and Performer. “What interested me,” Wormser explains, “was the legendary quality of Dylan, how much he took in and how much he trusted the poetry that a song could embody, how free he was.”

Using inventive means, the novel offers the musings of Abe Runyan, né Abraham Starker, a Jewish Midwesterner who is finding his way in life, with girls and music and wanderings. Wormser’s portrait of the young aspiring singer/songwriter brings to mind the youthful Dylan emerging from a small Minnesota town to become a legend. It’s a kind of brilliant channeling, as in this response to the criticism Abe/Bob received:

When I stopped singing songs for various good causes, some people gave me serious grief. I wasn’t being good. I was selfish. I was cynical. I was hopeless. Some simple answer on my part—as in, I wrote the songs and sang them and then I wanted to write some other songs and sing them—wasn’t a sufficient answer … I had stood on the side of justice. I still thought I was standing on that side, but other people told me I wasn’t.

Janet Wormser, cover art for Impenitent Notes, 2011.

Wormser’s final Substack, #52, recounted a visit he and Janet made to the homestead in Mercer, Maine, where they had lived for twenty-three years and raised their children, Owen and Maisie, before moving to Vermont. The place, around which his celebrated memoir, The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid, revolves, had changed but hadn’t. “Standing inside the house,” he writes, “I felt a flood of bittersweet feeling: this was the place where I came to know the earth in ways that dwarf my words. A depth of being once more made itself felt, a particular feeling, at once vast and modest, cosmic and workaday, that went with the house.”

Over the years, Wormser has written essays and articles on a wide range of subjects for diverse publications, including Solstice Literary Magazine, American Poetry Review, Vox Populi, and The Manhattan Review. He wrote about Willem de Kooning, David Lynch, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Shakespeare, the “Era of Ill Will,” race and poetry in America, Hannah Arendt in New York, and “The Wire and The Wasteland.” He also penned reviews, analyses, and remembrances of poets Mark Doty, John Haines, John Berryman, Hayden Carruth, Theodore Roethke, and others. I foresee a Collected Essays of Baron Wormser.

“Although history will have the final word on who among us is read by future generations,” Michael Simms, editor of Vox Populi, wrote in a tribute to Wormser, “I’ll put my money on Baron. His writing represents the best of the American spirit.”

I last saw Wormser at a gathering hosted by the Word Festival in Blue Hill some years ago. I reminded him of the T-shirt I once wore promoting his poetry collection When and how we joked about going on tour, he, the rock band, me, the roadie. He was an enormously generous human being and a wicked fine writer.

Wormser on the “inerrancy of the Bible”:

I have been rereading [Sydney] Ahlstrom’s magisterial A Religious History of the American People and what hits me foremost is that there is one basic theme in American life from the beginning: the inerrancy of the Bible. Everything follows from that and the endless struggle here has been between modernizers and those who believe in the unchanging authority. How thorough is this? Beyond Amy Coney Barrett (‘I’m not a scientist’), consider that Donald Trump is, in essence, the Bible—no science, no rule of law, no need to compromise on anything. He is the truth. This is lunatic Caesarism but also quite in the American grain of the shadow theocracy that always has insisted on its point of view, putting God, among other places, on our money. So no matter who has shown up on these shores and how they were brought here and what happened to the people who were here, there is only one story—the Bible on which everyone swears to tell the whole truth. And the truth is what a person in ultimate power declares is the truth. Like the Bible. Stay tuned for further self-righteous and often murderous misadventures.

From The Poetry Life: Ten Stories, Cavankerry Press, 2008:

Stories [I rise before the sun does]

 

I rise before the sun does. Each morning I sit on the edge of the bed with my feet planted on the unlovely linoleum floor and I say slowly but quite distinctly to the darkness, “Sweet joy befall thee.” I feel like an actor speaking the first words of a play except my life is no play nor does my soul need an audience. What I do need is confidence. I’ve built my life up from very shaky ground and William Blake, the man who wrote that line, has been a godsend to me. The human voice that speaks a poem rises from a powerful well; we take it for granted but a voice is an advent of spirit. I know from attending numerous churches during my haphazard childhood that the joy that preachers trumpet comes in a box with grievous dimensions. Their salvation is a machine of wrath; they break your back on hell so you can get to heaven. The joy I invoke can go where it chooses because it resides in our being alive. The joy I invoke is Blake’s Jerusalem, the city we can build each day through kindness: “The most sublime act is to set another before you.’” No one has ever called the place where I work “sublime,” so I need that word, too.

A listing of Wormser’s writings is here. The Poetry Society of Vermont’s tribute to him includes a video of one of his readings. Sandy Phippen interviewed him on Maine Public Television show nearly twenty-five years ago. His James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette: Poems will be out in 2026. My essay on some of Wormser’s other prose writings appeared in Hyperallergic.

Full view of the image at top: Baron Wormser (photo: Janet Wormser). Click to enlarge.