Impenitent Notes

by Baron Wormser

Wormser’s poetry is emphatically about people―how they do and do not accommodate themselves to the ever present hand of time. Whether following the life of a rock band through its various incarnations or imagining the meeting of Rilke and Babe Ruth or speaking to a mother who has lost her soldier son in Iraq, Wormser gets inside his characters’ hearts and minds.

Genres: Poetry

116 pages, Paperback

First published March 8, 2011

Reviews

[Diann Blakely]

Why, I wondered, glancing over a list of books about “living off the grid” published last year in the LOS ANGELES TIMES, didn’t I see among the titles not only one of the best and most original--if not the eponymous exemplar--but also perhaps the most important volumes on the subjects since Thoreau’s WALDEN, poet Baron Wormser's THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING (UPNE Press, 2006)? There is great pain behind his search for a kind of purity, or at least purgation; and perhaps the seeming contradiction will make better sense if I mention that I've been to Utopia, TX but found it too hot and dry for my precarious lungs, though the town's one restaurant makes terrifically greasy hot fish sandwiches--"ain't nothin' any good without a little grease on it," as another of my patron saints, and no, I'm not alluding to Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Faulkner, Lowell, O'Connor, Tennessee Williams, or Plath, but Tina Turner.

Little did I know, at the time, how brilliantly Wormer could handle either the blues stanza, among other forms in which he works in SCATTERED CHAPTERS (Sarabande, 2008); or the biographical short story, as in THE POETRY LIFE (Cavankerry Press, 2008), which have now joined with THE ROAD WASHES OUT IN SPRING, and, most recently, IMPENITENT VOICES (Cavankerry, 2011), would become true touchstones for me. I’ve read several reviews of the last, and could quote from several poems, but I don’t think I could improve on a single descriptive sentence by Dennis Nurkse: “Like all real subversion, [Wormser’s] poetry hinges on responsibility.” For this would seem to be an ontological contradiction: isn’t subversion dependent on ‘60s-style radicalism, i.e. occupying buildings, burning draft cards, even detonating bombs in the name of tearing down the power élite? Not necessarily. Sometimes the most crazed and least socially approved act can be empathy wedded to the exact craftsmanship typical of Wormser’s aesthetic; indeed, for the genuine startle this combination can provide, as well as the continuation of this strand of metaphor, one need look no farther than “Missile,” the first poem in Wormser’s new collection.

And if you want to go further into the mind that produces these works of dark magic, watching it weigh the political cf. the poetic, there's no better starting point than the three following essays: http://baronwormser.com/pdfs/08 Wormser_Political Poetry.pdf, http://baronwormser.com/pdfs/20 Wormser_Race.pdf, and http://baronwormser.com/pdfs/21 Wormser_Fairfield Commencement.pdf. It's typical of Wormser's generosity that he makes such works available to us now rather than ticking off the months until a SELECTED ESSAYS appears.

[Sacha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some wonderful, I mean wonderful words. Still, it is not my moment to connect with Mr. Wormser.

My personal history: read an intriguing poem, read a few more online. His name came up in Brilliant as a back-to-the-land person so I checked this collection out from the library.