Issue 2, Interview

 

 

 

Baron Wormser

“WE DON’T KNOW WHERE A POEM COMES FROM”

Interviewed by Andrey Gritsman

Andrey Gritsman: I would like to ask you about our new international poetry magazine INTERPOEZIA, to see what you think about the idea and about the first issue.    

Baron Wormser: I think it’s an excellent idea. I think there is a strong desire on the part of many people in America who are interested in poetry to be able to know about contemporary poetry in Russia. And I also think it would be wonderful for some degree of American poetry to be known in Russia. I had a poem translated in the eighties for a publication distributed by the U.S. Information Agency. They were doing an article in Poetry Magazine and I was very excited to have a poem translated into Russian.

AG: So you believe in this exchange of information between the cultures and certainly there is a question about translation. I am a bit frustrated about the quality of translations of American poetry into Russian and particularly translation of contemporary Russian poetry for various anthologies and such, university anthologies.

BW: How are you frustrated? I am curious.

AG: Because I think mainly a superficial layer of Russian poetry is being presented for American readers. It’s really not a translation of the spirit of someone’s work. The selection is very random. Someone knows somebody, there’s no systematic meaningful approach to this. Of course, there are good exceptions to this. Therefore, a traditional question for you. How much poetry can be translated at all?

BW: I think translation is very important.  I obviously wouldn’t confuse it with reading the poem in its native language. But I think for people it’s very important and precious to have a sense of the idea of who the poet is because oftentimes that idea is a very nourishing and important idea for poets in other cultures and I think that matters a great deal to be able to have. Even though it’s an approximation, it’s an important approximation because especially with other cultures you’re confronting wholly different sensibilities and backgrounds and I think in many ways that’s what makes us grow as artists.

AG: I remember you mentioning several times that you particularly have a feeling for Mandelstam.  I wonder why. Is it the strength of metaphors or the topics?

BW: I think it’s a quality of word choice that you have a feel of even in another language. You have a feeling for the choices the author’s making in terms of his or her vocabulary and those choices are very different choices from what you’re used to seeing poets make in your own language.  Of course it would vary from poet to poet, sensibility to sensibility, but certainly in reading Mandelstam in translation, I get a very strong sense of him – just an extremely unique and sensitive poet.

AG: You used five times in several sentences the word sensibility.   What is sensibility? What is the definition of this word?

BW: I think sensibility is the whole cultural and personal background that forms the inner world of a writer. Think of the difference along those lines between, say, Gary Snyder and Elizabeth Bishop. The whole approach to many things in life – they’re very different poets. Sensibility is the taste a writer has in terms of what he or she likes and dislikes; it’s also the taste of the writer in terms of what a writer is like, what a writer gravitates to aesthetically.

AG: Is it related to cultural upbringing, to ethnic origin?  Or it’s purely personal, sort of genetic in origin?

BW: I think, it’s related to everything.  I think it’s what Buddhists call your “karma” – the totality of your circumstances as you exist in time.

AG: You’ve mentioned, if I understood you correctly, that Buddhism is really not about your relations with God, is not about your route to God. Is that correct? 

BW: That’s correct. 

AG: Do you believe in God? 

BW: I believe in God some days and some days I don’t. No, I don't believe in God every day. So, then I don’t believe in God.

AG: If you can’t answer that question, why did you choose this way of Buddhism, practicing meditation, a Buddhist approach to life?

BW: I wanted a spiritual practice that I could engage, put into my daily life.  I reached a point in life where everything I was doing was not doing anything for me spiritually and my identity, or avocation as a poet wasn’t doing it either, and I needed a definite spiritual practice and by meditating every day one is able to do that.

AG:   You mentioned again several times the word “spiritual.”  So saying spiritual, you are not using this in a religious sense related to the idea of God, but in some different sense?

BW: Right, but it’s a sense of the soul or a spirit trying to find the degree of whatever you want to call it – peace, calm, awareness, oneness, whatever you want to call it. I certainly would consider meditating to be a spiritual enterprise. Strange as it may seem, Buddhism doesn’t care about God. Who made this world isn’t an issue. We’re here. The issue is what we are going to do about it beyond telling ourselves stories. 

AG: How do you know what is good and what is bad, what is evil?  Where does this come from? What is the notion about this in Buddhism? 

BW: Buddhism doesn’t have doctrines, it doesn’t have laws.  It does have very simple rules, however. When you become a Buddhist, you take vows.  They’re very simple vows but they’re still connected with what we in the West would call right and wrong.  You vow, for instance, not to take things that belong to other people, you vow not to act out of lust, you vow not to take in substances to the point of losing mindfulness.  So there is a degree of awareness of what we call right and wrong but it takes a different form than Western religion, where you have more commandments and laws, the way in Judaism you have so many laws. Buddhism stresses mindfulness and compassion. Those are fairly good guides as far as encountering good and evil. And Buddhism recognizes human depravity quite candidly. People are full of ignorance, anger, violence and desire. Buddhism isn’t idealistic. 

AG: On some other occasions we were talking about making choices in order to be able to write, to create poetry.  You obviously made your choice and built your life around it, as I understand.  What is interesting is that it seems that you made this choice before you really started writing.  You moved from Baltimore from a prospectively normal sort of “life of the middle class, normal, Jewish background, university,” etc. and all that, to rural Maine.  It was really before you started writing, say professionally, and before your first book came out.  What was that, just a feeling of your predestination? 

BW: Well, I wanted to live in the country.  I had a very strong feeling that I wanted to live in a rural area which I’d had ever since I was pretty young – a very strong feeling about living on earth.  I think that feeling was reinforced at the end of the 1960’s in America where a certain number of people felt similarly about moving to the country. I knew I couldn’t live where I grew up. I couldn’t deal with it.  

AG: Now, the issue of language and the author, language and the poet: this simply saying, what do you think comes first?  There is that old notion that there is language and the poet is just the author, the writer who is merely servant of the language.  This was very strong in Brodsky’s concept. What do you think about it? 

BW:  I believe that poets are mediums – that it’s passing through them and they don’t know where it comes from.  I believe what Auden said is correct, that if you’re honest as a poet, after you’ve finished a poem you have to say that you don’t know if you will write another poem because you don’t know where it comes from. In that sense I agree with Brodsky.  

AG: In other words, you agree with the idea that the poems kind of exist already, and you just overhear them? 

BW: Absolutely.  That’s the way I feel.  I feel very strongly that for each poem I have a sense once I start to get it down on paper about how it might take form. I get very involved in trying to achieve that form, and that is the ideal that exists on many different levels, that it exists in terms of sound, it exists in terms of the form, such as stanzas, of the poem, it exists of course in terms of word choice.  But there is an overall form and I have to locate it.  

AG: Is it incidental that when you were talking about this, you first used the word sound? 

BW: No, it’s not incidental because I compose very intensely in terms of sound and I speak my work aloud to myself and I very strongly believe that poetry exists first of all in the mouth and my sense of sound and rhythm is crucial. It’s why I am so attracted to poetry. 

AG: You write, as a vast majority of American poets, in free verse. So it is interesting, this idea of the sound being first in the poem is not really shared by most American poets. What you are saying is very close to the Russian sensibility and understanding of what poetry is all about.  You don’t feel that there is a contradiction between writing in free verse and working mainly on sound? 

BW: I don’t consider myself really writing in free verse.  I write much closer to a loose meter.  If you scan my poems you will see lines and passages that are utterly iambic and so to me my practice very much takes a lot from T.S. Eliot. I’m very interested also in Robert Lowell, in that boundary between so-called formal and informal verse. So I don’t consider myself writing free verse in the sense that the iambic norm has been tossed out. I’m always working within that norm. It’s how I perceive rhythm. 

AG: Where do you draw the line between poetry and prose?  What is the difference? 

BW: Poetry honors the line.  Prose doesn’t. 

AG: Anything related to the approach to a topic, to the delivery of a theme? 

BW: Prose is organized around the sentence.  Poetry is organized around the line. 

AG: So again you are talking mainly about the construction. 

BW: Sure. 

AG: Anything related to the sensibility in the approach to the topic? 

BW: I don’t think so.  Not to me. 

AG: I’ll rephrase my question.  How much do you feel that in poetry or in the poem something should be said?  What do you feel about leaving things unsaid or just implied?  Also following this question, does the poet have to exactly know everything what he’s talking about?  Or one leaves some dark corners, never really knowing what’s in there? 

BW: I think very much what’s left out is just as important as what you put in and that it is natural to leave things out. All so-called creative writing is about leaving things out. As far as poetry is concerned, I’m not very interested in poetry that’s strictly of a declarative nature.  I’m much more interested in poetry that’s dramatic in its intent. There are spaces between actions and those spaces are mysterious, whereas in declarative poetry if one is simply declaring oneself about a topic, there tends to be less mystery. Mystery doesn’t mean incoherence, however, or fuzziness. There can be plenty of mystery in a simple, direct, imagistic poem. Poetry as it proposes sentences that don’t proceed in a strictly logical fashion is inclined to implication by nature. 

AG: How can you qualify yourself?  Are you a lyrical poet?  Are you a political poet? 

BW: I would think of myself more as a dramatic/narrative poet.  Because I’m writing about people, I’m writing about people going through situations in life and responding to situations in life, many of which are of a dramatic nature. 

AG: Not a philosophical poetry? 

BW: No. 

AG: I personally consider much of your work as a philosophical poetry with an interesting twist or rather a method you use which is kind of on the surface and could be understood by anyone.  But what you’re really saying is underneath. 

BW: Well, that’s true.  There is a philosophical, intellectual layer, texture or impetus to the poems that’s woven into the drama.  

AG: What is your feeling about the possibility of writing poetry not in a native language?
This is obviously a question which I have a great personal interest in and I would like you to be very candid about that. 

BW: I don’t feel it’s insurmountable because people have done it in the past so I don’t see why one would feel it’s insurmountable.  I also think that that’s a bogus idea that you necessarily have to be born into the language.  What does it matter?  People are different, people assimilate languages differently, so I don’t see how one can make a judgment that way, a categorical judgment.

AG: Could you give some examples?

BW: Samuel Beckett.

AG: Then this is, of course, an imminent question: your relation to Joseph Brodsky, what  do you feel about Brodsky as an American writer?

BW: He isn’t an American writer.

AG:  Could you expand a bit on that matter?

BW: He is a writer from Russia writing in English which he learned from books, heavily influenced by poets, by the classic great English poets, and also by W.H. Auden. Brodsky was composing literature in that tongue.  And that tongue is an utterly distinct tongue that is not American.  But that is not necessarily to denigrate his achievement because it can’t be judged on the basis of American poetry, because it isn’t American poetry.  Does that make sense?

AG: It makes perfect sense.  But you feel that it was important what he was doing in terms of his achievement in language in his strange alien sensibility?  Is it interesting for you to read his work?

BW: To some degree but I would never classify him as a great English poet, not at all.

AG:  How about your feeling about his poetry in translation?  When you take his really great Russian poems – what do you feel; does it come through as in the case of Mandelstam, for you?

BW: It does. I think it comes through in some of his poems. Again, it’s through translation and of course it’s the work of the translator too. Cape Cod Lullaby, translated by Richard Wilbur, or Anthony Hecht.  I just think that’s an astonishing poem, a great poem.

AG: What about his essays, Less Than One and On Grief and Reason?

BW: They’re wonderful.  To me, they’re some of the greatest writings about literature in the twentieth century.  His piece on Auden’s poem is a masterful discussion of what’s going on in a poem.

AG: As I remember you were saying: not on Robert Frost.

BW: Not on Robert Frost.  He was trying to put Robert Frost on a Procrustean bed; the bed is Dante, and Robert Frost really doesn’t fit on that bed.

AG: How about his style, style of his writing?  Do you like his style?  Is it just the topics of his profound thought, or style in writing?

BW: I think it’s the style too, very much so.  There is an amazing, again, sensibility at work in terms of its range and balance of feeling, philosophical acuteness. But also, its sort of slangy later half of the twentieth century attitude.

AG: It sounds to me you feel that he is a very successful and really great critical personal essay writer, which is basically prose, and somewhat artificial or not as great English language poet.  That’s what it sounds like to me.

BW: That’s true.

AG: Who are very important Russian poets for you?  Obviously I’m asking all these questions because this is directed to the mixed Russian-American audiences.  Who are in the past and currently important Russian poets for you?

BW: I think I’m probably fairly typical in that my real reading has been focused on what to us Americans I assume are the four major Russian poets of the twentieth century, which is to say Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Akhmatova.  But, to you, hearing your translation of Annensky, I find him an absolutely deeply engaging writer whom I’d love to be able to read more of in English.

AG: Obviously you know the work of the poets of the sixties generation, Voznesensky, Yevtushenko.  Is there anyone you know coming from Russia after Perestroika who is really not very well known?

BW: Well, none.  And also for me personally I focused a lot more on Polish writing.  So I’ve been very engaged with contemporary Polish writing in a way that I haven’t been engaged with contemporary Russian writing.

AG: And why is that?  Why Polish?

BW: Because Poland has produced such remarkable poets in the late twentieth century, Milosz, Szymborska.  The Nobel Prize certainly should have gone to Zbigniev Herbert and as a younger poet, certainly Adam Zagayevsky is also a world-class poet.  These are four extraordinary poets.

AG: And they come through in translation?

BW: They come through, I think, in translation quite strongly.  And also the people who are translating them are very good translators. 

AG: Let’s get into the “killing fields” of American poetry.  Who is important for you in the recent American poetry? Frost, obviously?

BW: For me personally, I think the three poets who were really critical for me, who were twentieth century poets, because American poets tend to say Walt Whitman is their father and Emily Dickinson is their mother, would be T.S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes.

AG: So not Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams.

BW: Frost is a very important poet for me. Not quite to the degree of the others but very important. Stevens and Williams much less so.

AG: Whom of leading American poets would you like to mention as very important to you?

BW: It’s very hard to single out names in the generation of our elders.  You could put together a very strong anthology of five or six best poems from twenty to thirty poets perhaps and I think those poems would hold up over time.  For me personally, perhaps the two most important poets would be Hayden Carruth and Donald Justice.

AG: Out of your generation?

BW: My generation shouldn’t be judged yet.  Everybody’s still writing.

AG: I think you expressed an idea some time ago that there were times of the giants or great writers and now it’s a time when there is just a lot of good work being produced by a number of good writers. There are really no great genius writers, but there is a lot of good writing going on. What do you think about this?

BW: It’s a rationalization.  It just seems like a conceptualization.  A lot of major writers all managed to live at the same time in the first half of this century and I don’t really think that this is the case now.

AG: What is your opinion on the development of contemporary American poetry? 

BW: I’ve been more engaged in reading poetry from a place such as Poland because I haven’t been that, how to say, engaged with contemporary American poetry. American poetry has tended to focus on self a great deal and personal issues, personal stories, declarative kind of poetry in the last twenty or thirty years and that’s not the mode I’m really that interested in.  That’s not to say that I don’t read my contemporaries, and that I don’t feel there are people who aren’t doing strong work because there are.  But for me personally, overall, it’s not that engaging.

AG: I heard many times you being critical about “official academic” poetry in America.  Why?

BW: Socialization forces out art.  It’s as simple as that.  When you have some sort of new academy, then people create so-called art.  It’s based more on socialization than it’s based on the true individuality of art.

AG: But in this society there’s no really official “party rule,” so to speak.

BW: People create their own party rule in this society.  As we were saying before, that is needed for consensus. That need to establish a sort of public opinion party line is very, very strong in America.

AG: And why is that?

BW: I think America is an anxious country and it’s understandable; in its confused and often unwilling fashion, it has been trying for a couple of hundred years to construct a pluralist society.  It’s not an easy thing to do – to live with one another.  We need to establish various sorts of consensus even though they may be counter-productive, shallow and limiting.

AG: So you really were never tempted to get on the path of being socially integrated into the academic system of literature.  You teach part-time, but you never were really tempted to get incorporated into this system and teach and become a professor.

BW: Well, I was once upon a time studying for a Ph.D. and I left academia.  I just didn’t have the personality for it. Living my adult life in rural Maine was a world unto itself and very distant from academia.

AG: What is your feeling about the trend in American poetry in terms of style? There were some significant changes which occurred in the twentieth century from the nineteenth century.  I’m just curious to see where do you think this is going?  I’m talking about style of writing – free verse, formalistic poetry, topicality.  Obviously what Walt Whitman was doing, William Carlos Williams, that already is past phase in a way, this way of discovering this country.  This country is already mature enough. 

BW: Well, that’s a big question.  I think my generation so far hasn’t broken much new ground in terms of form, in terms of forging distinct styles.  I think very much they exist in the shadow of earlier poets, those of the modernist generation and the most recent generation.  I think there’s been a strong tendency among many people to “sign on” to different signature styles and write in those styles.  Personally, what interests me the most I would say are the people who are trying to tighten up, do more with rhythm and sound but not necessarily make a, how to say, smug label about it, which is what a lot of neo-formalism is.

AG: You mentioned modernism and neo-formalism.  What is postmodernism?  What do you think about that? Everyone is using this term.

BW: It means nothing to me.  It’s a conceptual term that just doesn’t mean anything to me.  I don’t see how ages can really label themselves. 

AG: What was your original stimulus when you started writing poetry?  Why did you start writing poetry, which was relatively late, as I understand?

BW: I really didn’t seriously start writing until I was thirty. 

AG: Which is rather late, very late as a matter of fact for a poet.  Why did this happen, what happened with you?

BW: I don’t know.  I’d always read poetry.  I liked poetry and I read poetry day in and day out and then I just one day found myself starting to write poems.  I’ve been writing poems since then.

AG: How do you feel about your early poems, which is going back more than twenty years?  When you look at them now?

BW: I like a fair number of them.  Someone came up to me recently and said they’d reread my first book and they thought it was a strong book and it wasn’t, how to say, a throw-away first book.

AG: So, it was your natural development in the writing?

BW: Spontaneous.  It just evolved.

AG: You mentioned Polish poetry. Besides Polish, who else in European poetry is important for you?

BW: Irish poetry is very important for me. The whole achievement of twentieth-century Irish poetry.

AG: Yeats?

BW: Yes, but also contemporary Irish poetry, John Montague and Derek Mahon are really important poets for me. 

AG: You didn’t mention the name of Seamus Heaney.

BW: He’s not so important to me.

AG: Why not?

BW: His writing just doesn’t move me the way the others do.

AG: Do you think he is over-playing with “kind of political themes, this Irish pain,” a little bit over-politicizing poetry?

BW: I think so.  I think that’s a leading question, obviously.  But I’m inclined agree with you.  I think there’s a degree of safety as far as his politicizing is concerned.  Someone once remarked to me that he has a bit too much equanimity for his own good as a poet.  I think there’s some truth to that.

AG: Why do you think in contemporary American poetry this group of great outsiders, all these Nobel Laureates, are so important for American literature, American culture – Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Derek Walcott, Czeslaw Milosz, heavyweights of the literature, so to speak – why the American literary system is so fixated on them, why is it so important?

BW: I don’t know much about the American literary system.  It may be that all those poets are literary in a way that academia likes or favors.  I don’t really know the answer. Maybe they are sort of totems that allow people to ignore the messy heterogeneity of American poetry. I know many poets of their generation were very talented American poets, which is to say the generation of my elders.  I know some of them are less than enthused about the degree of acclaim that those people have been given.  Many poets did not at all like Brodsky being picked as poet laureate of the United States. 

AG: You’re talking about Hayden Carruth, I guess?

BW: Many poets. 

AG: One of the reasons I was asking was because it is a bit strange that the poetry pages of The New Yorker are filled with those foreign greats.

BW: That’s because The New Yorker is trying to be cosmopolitan.  The New Yorker is not interested in American poetry in the sense of the genuine diversity and weirdness of the society.  It doesn’t play well with the ads and the notion of the publication. The New Yorker is interested in an idea of cosmopolitanism and those poets quite authentically fulfill that notion of cosmopolitanism. To consider the poetry in The New Yorker to be the sum of American poetry would be a ghastly error.

AG: What are really important serious literary magazines that publish good poetry, in America, if you could name a few?

BW: I don’t read consistently any literary magazine in America.  I couldn’t say. I tend to read books more than magazines. Probably though I would recognize The Manhattan Review. It has been at it for over two decades and has published a lot of marvelous work, including an interview with Zbigniew Herbert that was life-changing for me. Philip Fried is the editor.

AG: You mentioned the other day Yiddish poetry, it’s so strong and you obviously are very close to the world of Isaac Bashevis Singer. I’m curious how it lives together with you being Buddhist, you actually spending all your life in the woods of central Maine.  How important is Jewishness for you?

BW: Well, it’s very important because if you’re a Jew you’ve been a Jew, so to speak, for thousands of years.  It’s in your blood, it’s in your bones, and whether you make a different choice about religion in your adult life doesn’t to me at all negate my feeling for being a Jew, for having grown up among Jews and for being obsessed with Jewish history.

AG: I will ask you a question about the Bible.  You mentioned a couple of times to me that this book, if you can even call it a book, something more, is not really very important to you. I know that you are an avid reader, and you don’t spend your life reading the Bible. How so? 

BW: The Old Testament has never made emotional sense to me. I’d have to say the New Testament makes more emotional sense to me. The figure of Jesus is a powerful figure.

AG: I wonder if you could subdivide American contemporary poetry in some groups.  For instance, I can divide Russian poetry:  poets of the sixties, who are still persisting, there is a conceptual poetry – very strong and very loud, persisting greats from the Soviet times; poets of the Underground which came out; poets (a very talented group) who capitalize on Soviet language and recycle it many times; and of course there is us, poets of Diaspora.  Could you divide American poetry into some kind of trends? Is it possible?

BW: Obviously, there is a degree of poetry that emanates from New York that’s connected with being in New York and being part of the literary world in New York.  Probably the largest body is connected with writing workshops, MFA programs, people getting books published, people getting jobs, teaching other people in MFA programs. There aren’t that many poets really who are publishing three and four and five books who exist outside the world of the university in contemporary America.  How do you get into being able to do books?  It’s heavily weighted to people who are in writing programs.  You could break it further down in terms of ethnic groups, gender, aesthetic proclivities, you name it.

AG: You touched a very interesting question about ethnic and cultural groups.  Very few Russians write more or less seriously in English, very few. But there is a very strong Hispanic group of writers, Mexicans and non-Mexicans. They have different sensibilities.  They have different images and there is a Hispanic world in America.  What do you think about the influence of the ethnic groups in terms of their writing on American poetry?  Are they always going to be at the periphery of the process?

BW: I don’t know.  I’m interested in art.  I’m just interested in individuals trying to make art.  I have no interest in ethnic groups as blocs.  I can understand it from the point of view of the history of America, because we are, as when we came here, asserting ethnic identity because otherwise we feel lost, rootless in America and I think that’s perfectly understandable. Ultimately one is judged as an artist.  I’m not interested in literary journalism in the sense of designating groups and processes.

AG: Now a question about literary culture in Diaspora.   Our children are not going to be writing in Russian.  They actually will be writing in English?

BW: Well, as we talked yesterday about poets who write in Yiddish in America, that poetry is not known now. If it’s known at all it is in translation, and indeed the world around it has died, dried up, but the poems still exist.  One never knows.  Latin is a dead language.  But people still read Latin.

AG: Last question about Puritanism and also about your book of memoirs that I believe you will be completing soon.  You talked to me many times about the very important role of Puritanism in the American sensibility.  And I know that you have some very interesting pages, perhaps some chapter in your book of memoirs about Puritanism in America. Could you comment on its role in American culture and sensibility and particularly of its continuing influence, if there is any, on the development of the American poetry and American poetic sensibility?

BW: Well, that’s another huge question, but briefly I feel that this country is very much a Puritan nation in the sense that it is obsessed with salvation and virtue. It believes that it has a mission and it is not inclined to accept those who don’t buy into that mission. What frightens about Puritanism – and writers such as Hawthorne and Flannery O’Connor knew this very well – is that salvation can obviate conscience. What replaces conscience is self-righteousness. In this sense, and it’s very troubling, Puritanism is close to the narrowness of Communism. Of course there are huge social and economic strains on the Puritan outlook and that is part of the comedy and dark hypocrisy of America, a society that is trying to earnestly square morality with greed. Good luck. In terms of poetry, Puritanism opposes the pleasure principle that is at the heart of poetry. Puritanism could live very well without poetry. And most of America does. It doesn’t want the sensual thinking of poetry. American poets variously try to work around Puritanism. Whitman tackled it head-on by proclaiming the ethos of democracy that dwarfed Puritanism and Dickinson sought to subvert it in its lair by tackling the Puritan God. That’s one reason why they are our two geniuses. They believed in poetry – not as a career but as a practice that is at once sensuous and spiritual. As you once noted to me, you don’t see boats in this country named after the likes of Hart Crane. And it’s not going to happen tomorrow.

 

BARON WORMSER is a poet and teacher of poetry who lives in Hallowell, Maine. He is the author of six books of poetry and the co-author of two books on teaching poetry. His last collection from the Sarabande Books, Subject Matter, was published in 2004. With Donald Sheehan he founded the Poetry Seminar at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire and the Conference on Poetry and Teaching. He teaches in the Stonecoast Low Residency Program and works in schools with teachers and students. 

Selection of poetry by Baron Wormser was published in the Issue# 1 of INTERPOEZIA.  Translations of his poems into Russian are published in the Russian Issue#2.