This poetry section of the journal is dedicated to the work of Baron Wormser. Baron was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000–06, a beloved teacher, mentor, and friend to many writers. He published twenty-one books in all genres—poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. A new book of poems, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems will be published in January. Baron is known for his uncompromising moral vision and his wry look at the world and incisive insight into character and grief. As a poet he had a remarkable ear for music. I think of him as a kind of old-world intellectual who didn’t limit himself to one narrow lane, but observed and read broadly. He wrote on art, music, history, society, homesteading, and many other themes—always with integrity, profound insight, and intelligence. He was a remarkable person, a personal friend to many, and a real light in the world. The work he left us will keep shining.

We have asked five poets who were his students to share one of Baron’s poems and reflect on its importance to them.

—Betsy Sholl, Maine Arts Journal Poetry Editor

 

Marcia F. Brown on “My Last Borders or Poem Ending with a Homage to W.B. Yeats” (from Scattered Chapters, Sarabande Books 2008)

My Last Borders or Poem Ending with a Homage to W.B. Yeats

 

Once I read in a Borders Bookstore

In a sea of shopping malls in New Jersey

A man sat in the first row and pawed over

The poems he was going to read later during the open mic.

He never looked up at me but snorted occasionally

With vatic delight at his own precipitous genius.

The espresso machine in the rear of the café

Made troubled basso sounds like a dying cow.

 

I read in the café because the “events area”

Was hosting a talk on “Planning a Trust Fund.”

My books for sale were under a table on which a slide

Projector sat and showed screens like “Your House —

Your Greatest Asset” and “Tomorrow Does Come.”

 

A woman in the third row (there were only three rows)

Talked intermittently on a cell phone to someone named Yvette:

“Are you really staying in a hotel, Yvette?”

“You can get that much cheaper in Paramus.”

“I can’t believe you’re still seeing that loser.”

When people told her to be quiet, she said

That she liked to talk and listen to poetry

At the same time. She said she was “multi-sensory.”

After the reading she came up to me and told me

She thought I was going to be a hick from Maine

But I turned out to be a Jewish intellectual.

She informed me that she was Jewish too, that novelists

Were smarter than poets and that she had been to Europe eight times.

After the events director crawled under the Trust

Planning Table and brought my latest book back to the café,

She bought one of the two books that were sold that evening.

 

How sad am I to do these readings?

Just normal-aching-poet-sad?

Delmore-Schwartz-cornered-by-the-abyss sad?

Or cowardly? Afraid to be Sylvia-Plath-angry-sad

And barge through death’s sullen door,

Sick of human idiocy, including my own?

 

Later in the evening when I have repaired

To the poetry section to gather my slender wits,

I consult the oracle Yeats.

He never drove on Interstates among convoys of 18-wheelers,

Never searched asphalt acres for a parking space

Around Christmas, never took a self-assertion seminar

Or credit management workshop in a fluorescent warehouse.

The chains of commerce never danced for him.

 

He stood for the soul’s exactions, the flawed

Avid beauty of conscience. I read his poems

And feel better, which is to say, sadder.

 

I like to think that if “My Last Borders” had been first presented to me without attribution, I would immediately say that it has to be a Baron Wormser poem. A panoply of poetic pleasures—wry humor, close observation, humility, poignance, deftness with language, erudition, and Baron’s particular brand of rueful reflection—the poem captures so much that Baron understood about the poetry life in modern times.

With characteristic modesty, Baron enters the poem by skipping right over his own featured poet’s reading to capture adroitly “a man . . . in the first row” who never looks at him, but “paw[s] over the poems he was going to read later at the open mic” and snorts “with vatic delight at his own precipitous genius.” Anyone who has ever attended an open mic recognizes this man (and leave it to Baron to send us running for the dictionary).

As in so many of his poems and writings, Baron is keenly attuned to how many things can be going on at once. Here we have the absurdity of the reading being relegated to the bookstore’s noisy café due to the events area being given over to a talk on “Planning a Trust Fund”—the perfect foil to a poet’s impecunious life of letters. The espresso machine makes ghastly noises, a woman gossips audibly on her cell phone, claiming she likes to talk and listen to poetry at the same time, and later engages the poet in a surreal conversation of pseudo-intellectual nonsense. The poet’s books have been shoved under the projector table where the events director must eventually crawl to retrieve them, whereupon the talkative woman buys “one of the two books that were sold that evening.”

The poem might have ended there. Baron has rendered perfectly the uselessness and indignities of the evening’s endeavor in all its soul crushing fluorescence, and it is a vastly entertaining poem. Any writer who has ever given a reading in a similar kind of commercial setting can make common cause with “My Last Borders,” and Baron’s intrinsically generous nature intends for the poem to be that kind of shared commiseration. But Baron isn’t done yet. Saddened, but always in communion with fellow poets, he evokes Delmore Schwartz and Sylvia Plath. He contemplates “human idiocy, including my own,” and then repairs to the store’s poetry section to “gather [his] slender wits” and consult with “the oracle Yeats.” Musing that Yeats never subjected himself to the “chains of commerce,” but stood for “the flawed / Avid beauty of conscience,” Baron writes: “I read his poems / And feel better, which is to say, sadder.” There is, of course, a kind of redemption, an avid beauty and truth to those feelings of sadness. I don’t know if this occasion was indeed Baron’s last Borders. I hope it was. I’m saddened I can’t ask him.

Marcia F. Brown met and studied with Baron Wormser in the Stonecoast Summer Conference and MFA Program. She is the author of five books of poetry and an essay collection. Marcia served as Poet Laureate for the City of Portland, ME, and cohosts the monthly Local Buzz Reading Series at The Yarmouth History Center.

 

 

Glenn Morazinni on “The History Hotel” (from The History Hotel, Cavankerry Press, 2023)

The History Hotel

 

October, Someone lays a wreath on the derelict porch

of the History Hotel.

Shutters bang in the long-standing breeze.

The wreath layer thinks: This is for Aunt laura and her dog, Hansim,

Known only in a photo from 1933 in which Laura

perches on a rocker

And looks pensively at the camera

while at her feet Hansi sits obediently

waiting in that way dogs wait,

Understanding how time is empty and full and may offer a biscuit.

Word was that Laura had been “a maiden aunt.”

 

October, the season of dying disappointments,

Beloved of grave diggers, poets and dog walkers.

 

Later, someone else comes along and wonders

who laid the wreath,

And how come the hotel from who-knows-when

is still standing.

Is it a memorial? Did destiny get lost? That patina–

is it regret or verdigris?

 

A dog sniffs the abundant leaf litter.

 

October–you can feel time running down, the race run.

Will this happen to me?

More to the point, will it happen to you?

Yes, but not worth thinking about. Better

to straighten the wreath.

Better to call the dog’s name to which the dog answers.

With that eagerness that makes memory sob.

 

In the closing poem bearing the title of his last book, Baron Wormser reserves a temporary room for us. Unlike a house, we don’t stay long in a hotel. His crafty free verse sets us in October, month of fruition changing to loss. A tone of wry irony reminds: “beloved of gravediggers, poets, and dogwalkers.” We soon discover “someone” laid a wreath on the “derelict porch.” Baron has coupled a run-down hotel with the symbol of the evergreen, archetype for continued growth, unlike deciduous leaf-shedding. The figures it honors embody this duality: the dog knowing “time is empty and full and may offer a biscuit,” and its owner, Laura, “’a maiden aunt’,” the words in quotation marks slyly question if she wasn’t fulfilled. Baron moves on to “someone” later finding the wreath, wondering about the aging hotel. Does its patina imply “regret or verdigris?” Master of words, Baron chose verdigris, a green pigment used since antiquity for artistic purposes. The book cover by Janet Wormser powerfully depicts the structure’s heavy, weathered grandeur like our self, after the grandiosity has worn off. Yet, she also painted peaks in the roof denoting ascents, four making the quaternity of wholeness. Many windows look out at the world, even if some have curtains drawn. The building’s tall left wing is ochre red. A symbol of blood’s life-force, our distant ancestors buried the pigment with the dead in hopes of renewal. Before leaving this October, Baron booked a space for us to wonder, mourn, and wander. Among the great poets who’ve had reservations here: Frost’s “a temporary stay” against chaos; Keat’s elegies, envying ancient Greek figures in marble immune to transitory nature, unlike the poem with a fleeting nightingale’s song or the final one embracing autumn’s maturity with verse like verdigris not some “patina/regret.” Baron closes, calling the aunt’s little Hanzi, the dog, human companion for our instinct for “eagerness” in the face of “time running down.” “The History Hotel” is an artistic gift, a shelter for “will this happen to me?,” a place for desire even as “memory sobs” for what’s lost, like Baron Wormser’s passing.

Glenn Morazzini is an Italian-American poet whose poems have been published in Poetry, RATTLE, Poet Lore, The Brooklyn Review and other journals, has won the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award, an Amy Clampitt Residency Poetry Fellowship, a Maine Arts Commission Literary Fellowship and the Lit Fest Emerging Poet Fellowship.

 

Dawn Potter on “Mulroney” (from Mulroney & Others, Sarabande Press, 2000)

 

Mulroney

 

Where the hell do these people come from?

Mulroney asked me.

We were crumpling up a Sunday New York Times

That had found its way into the pile of papers

We used as packing filler for glass jars of honey.

We were wadding up the wedding notices—

Young lawyers in love with account executives.

Their fathers were surgeons and vice-presidents;

Their mothers were psychologists and counselors.

 

We were working as prep cooks at a ski resort

And packing boxes at a place down in the valley

To make a couple extra bucks.

Mulroney didn’t know anything except

Eat, fuck, sleep, ski. A regular physical guy,

He barely knew what Vietnam was

And it was 1975.

He could have lived any time, any place,

And for all ostensible purposes he was.

He’d wake up in the morning in the cabin

We shared and it was cold and he’d curse

And try to coax whatever woman he was sleeping

With to start the fire in the woodstove.

I could hear him cooing in his gravelly

Flattened brogue of a voice.

A few mornings the woman would get up, most

Mornings not. Defeats and victories and

Sunlight licking the frosted windows.

And Mulroney full of the dumb sap of time

And scratching his balls.

 

Where the hell do these people come from?

He asked me.

Mulroney, you dim honky ass, I said.

They are groomed to run the show

And he looked down at the crumpled vivacity

Of the young brides in newsprint

And he broke into an almost lovely smile

And he said in a voice that could have

Passed for thoughtful, How sad.

 

I have a sentimental affection for Mulroney & Others, in large part because it was published just as I began apprenticing with Baron. Certainly I was green, and any book would have impressed me in those days. But nearly thirty years later, I also recognize that I was overwhelmed by my first conscious engagement with two aspects of craft—the imagined, often ambiguous I; the complexities of dramatic cadence—that have become central to my own story as a poet. The title poem, “Mulroney”, concerns two young men who project a sort of Gatsby/Nick Carraway relationship: the speaker is both shocked by and envious of the crass world of his roommate; and, like Fitzgerald’s Nick, he also clings to a sense of innate superiority. Simply by sneering at the existence of class control, he reveals his own elitism and cynicism. Thus, by the end of the poem, Mulroney, that ass, is the only one of the two who is able to “[pass] for thoughtful.” If you knew Baron, you understood that he was neither of these men: not “regular physical guy” nor judgmental slummer. The miracle to me, as a young poet, was that he was nonetheless able to inhabit both bodies so fully, to carry their complications so comically, and tenderly, and incisively. And here, I think, is where his control of cadence stepped in. Baron’s poem sonically tracks the pacing of memory. The educated voice recalls his youth, in the way that certain educated voices do when they’re trying to remember something that matters, yet don’t quite understand why. The voice begins by reprising the sound of Mulroney, then jerkily sets the scene, and then, in the second stanza, rushes forward into the vision of this Other, so strangely beautiful, even in his stupidity. The final stanza returns to the sound of Mulroney, his naïve question, and the speaker’s self-righteous retort, and then we are left with the sudden taut slowness of Mulroney’s “How sad.” In other words, each narrative turn also involves a cadence shift. The drama is propelled by the push and pull of sentence length and speaking style. As a young poet, I was enthralled when I first recognized this synthesis. Sound and story are the same work. Living inside other bodies is thrilling. Baron’s poem showed me why I longed to be a poet.

Dawn Potter is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry, most recently Calendar. Her poems and essays have appeared in many journals. She directs poetry and teaching programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland, Maine.

 

 

Ian Ramsey on “A Visitation” (from Impenitent Notes, Cavankerry Press, 2010)

 

A Visitation

 

Dude–tall, vegetarian thin,

Hasn’t had a steak ever,

Clear, watery blue eyes

That don’t look through you

Because you can’t believe they’re

Seeing anything they’re so pale–

Dude shows up in the evening–

Before midnight–

Says he knows so-and-so who knows

So-and-so

And he’s got

In any case

Some Mary Jane and he’s willing

To offer a sample

And we’re not looking around

Too many corners because we’ve

Figured the universe is quaking

Plasma anyway

So our opinions,

Outlooks and forecasts

Are the jive

The ego tells itself

To high-five

The anxious dark

Which is to say

That to tutored eyes

He doesn’t look like a narc.

 

He fires up a fat spliff,

Passes it around and I get

That earnest doper vibe from this cat,

One of those for whom herb

Is the First Church of the Metaphysical Thirst.

 

He has on a sort of white linen

Sailor blouse and I told you about the eyes

And he looks a little otherworldly

Even before I inhaled what turned out

To be some quality weed–

You know, two hits and you’re floating

Over whatever walls your mind has erected–

The glum shit of your past,

Your parents, your body–

Your transcending, which is why

The whole thing is against the law.

 

When I ask the guy his name, he says

In a light, high voice as though he’s been

Doing nitrous since the fifth grade,

“Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley”

And I say, “that’s an old-fashioned name,

Because that’s all the thinking I’m capable of

And he smiles and leans back on the ratty couch

And says he heard about us and wanted

To check it out–the Dead on the stereo,

“The unfettered breasts” (his phrase),

The shimmering kiss of the Day-Glo anima.

 

“You know,” he says, “here is here.

You might as well dig it”–and similar

Dope wisdom, which is cool because we’re all

Spacing out real sweetly and he’s with the flow–

No need to pull poetry out of his back pocket

And wow us with words, no need to get between

The mind and its sensory gift-wrapping.

 

When, toward dawn, he split,

He left a phone number that I called

Some days later, looking to score and hang out,

But what I got was a Chinese restaurant

Offering two-for-one chow mein.

 

Had we been prone to wondering, we might

Have searched further but we weren’t and didn’t.

Spirits fell from the sky regularly.

Each lost day exhumed eternity.

 

To read Baron Wormser’s poetry and prose is to know that his life as a poet was informed by the sixties: the music, the spiritual awakenings, the politics, the rebellion against cruel pro-forma institutions. But, even as part of the idealistic back-to-the-land generation, Baron, an outsider by nature, was always skeptical of easy answers, always ready to interrogate the delusions and gaps in humans’ bumbling perspectives, even as he also inhabited compassion and insight. All of these things collide in his fine poem, “A Visitation,” which imagines the poet Percy Shelley as a late-sixties-dope dealer. It is a collision of so many things: the sixties and Victorian poetry, vatic ecstasy and counterculture, revolution and scratch-your-armpit normalcy. And, like so much of Baron’s work, it uses humor to hold the whole thing together, and to undercut the atmosphere of mystic realization that flows through the poem. Baron’s lifelong practice, as Federico García Lorca wrote of all poets, was to be “the pulse of the wound that probes to the other side.” For me, this poem does that as deftly as any verse that I know of.

Ian Ramsey is the author of Hackable Animal. Based in midcoast Maine, he directs the Kauffmann Environmental Writing Program and his work can be found many places, including Orion and Terrain.org. For more information, go to his website. 

 

 

David Stankiewicz on “Once” (from The History Hotel, Cavankerry Press, 2023)

 

Once

 

I was a candle

Carried upstairs downstairs

One room to another

A scholar making modest inroads

Interrogating shadows

Ardent lucid

But wavering shamefully in any draft

And untrustworthy

firing a stray sleeve

Or curtain

My communicable sincerity a disaster

 

Lost and lost

      disappearing

A stub a memory

And then seemingly nothing but liable

To be reborn

     my puddled dissolution

Remelted and molded

One of the incarnated

Who supplied a modest sign

To the doubters

One who knew there was no end

To light however faint

 

In an email to friends, Baron called this poem “particularly dear to my heart.” “It . . . comes from what I like to call the deep place, the place of primal imagination,” he wrote. “Such poems seem to come as gifts.” As a student, friend, and reader of this great soul, I would concur. The metaphor here is about as primal as they come: fire and light. Tellingly, Baron imagined himself as a “candle/Carried.” A candle isn’t the flame and doesn’t create its own flame. A candle bears the flame. There is no self-aggrandizement here (as there seems to be so much of everywhere these days, even in the pages of poetry). There is only gratitude and humble acknowledgement of something almost deeper than a life’s work that Baron embodied so faithfully as a poet and writer, a teacher, a seeker after truth, and a person trying to live a meaningful life on the planet in strangely inhuman times. At its highest, poetry is visionary. In this poem, Baron achieves a clarity of vision in a profound affirmation of what it meant for him, and what it means, to be “One of the incarnated / Who supplied a modest sign / To the doubters / One who knew there was no end / To light however faint.”

David Stankiewicz is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, where he studied under Baron Wormser (and which he chose based on a phone call with Baron where they connected over a mutual love of 20th-century Polish poetry). He is a Professor of English & Humanities at Southern Maine Community College and is the author of two poetry collections: Night Garden (Deerbrook Editions 2024) and My First Beatrice (Moon Pie Press 2013).