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.