Before his death in October, 2025, we spoke with Baron Wormser about his new Slant book, James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette and Other Poems

So what’s with poetry?

It’s the essential art. I mean form, subject matter, language, feeling, and tradition, all of which, as the different aspects come together, can create both an uncanny immediacy and a rich complexity. That possibility has kept me writing for decades. I carry a sort of Platonic poem in my head, an ideal that isn’t anyone’s particular poem but the ultimate poem where everything works completely with each syllable in each line, where sound and rhythm are at a perfect pitch. It’s a sort of goad that keeps me on my dissatisfied toes.

And your history with poetry?

My mom was an English teacher who liked to recite poems, the American poets of the nineteenth century in particular—Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe. And I remember going with her to the apartment of an English teacher at my high school in Baltimore, a guy she met at one of her Master’s classes at Johns Hopkins and hearing a record of Dylan Thomas. Unforgettable. And I recall buying Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind and sharing it with my mother. His openness and humor thrilled me. I wrote poems in high school and took a creative writing course in college in which I got a C. After college I wrote two prose books that never got published, one about turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture, Louis Sullivan but Art Nouveau too, Viennese architecture, sculptural and decorative, anti-Bauhaus, and then a novel in which I retold Turgenev’s The Home of the Gentry in Maine in the 1970s. I kept reading poetry every day, however, very widely, just being with poetry including French, Italian, and German, also introductions to poetry like Western Wind and then when I was around thirty I started writing poems in earnest.

You were living in the Maine woods when you started writing poetry?

We moved in 1974 to an off-the-grid house on forty acres in a little town in southern Somerset County, which is inland Maine. My wife Janet designed the house (she studied architecture at one point) and we found a local guy—or more like he found us—who built the house. We did grunt work like shingling and pushing wheelbarrows of cement. This was very simple living—kerosene lights, pitcher pump, outhouse, all wood heat, one small stove that ran off propane, no refrigeration. Eventually we made modest improvements like a propane refrigerator, but basically we lived a very low-tech, close to the earth life. We grew a fair amount of our food, canned our tomatoes, had a root cellar where we stored carrots and potatoes. We didn’t have a phone for ten or so years. I wrote about this in my memoir The Road Washes Out in Spring. You could say we were part of the back-to-the-land movement of that era, people who wanted to live in the country and see what the trees had to say. We lived in that house for over twenty-three years.

Did that make you a nature poet?

No. I’ve always done a lot of reading. I worked as a librarian in my day job, and it probably goes without saying that there was no TV in the house. So my reading—poetry, as I said, but also history, fiction, biography, literary criticism, essays, and philosophy—filtered into my poetry, and then there was the fact of the solitude of our lives in the woods, the silence that helped make me a poet because poetry exists in relation to silence. I’m a poet who doesn’t write that much out of my anecdotal self. My poetry doesn’t begin with “I.” The impulse to try to get as much life down on the page as I could, which meant the whole range, past and present, has characterized my writing. Fiction writers like Balzac or Dos Passos in the USA trilogy have fascinated me. Unlike Elon Musk, I prize empathy. The opportunity to enter other lives and times and even creatures via poetry has seemed marvelous to me, almost magical. I like to make things up, too. Poetry is an act of imagination.

What is the place of poetry in the United States?

Obviously sketchy. The society is devoted to money, to commerce, to busyness, to novelty, to distracting entertainment, to brands of one sort or another, to its dubious sense of virtue, all of which has spelled a wariness (if not contempt) about the subjectivity of poetry and how poetry prizes sensibility. First of all, the society would have to recognize the value of subjectivity and sensibility. I don’t think we’ve caught up with Whitman and Dickinson in the sense that people who consider themselves Americans would know those two poets and spend their lives reading them because both are inexhaustible. They are our pillars, avatars of whatever soul this nation possesses. The notion that poetry can be part of a person’s life and not just a subject in school is remote for most Americans. Of course, exceptions abound, which is what I wrote about in The Poetry Life, my book of short stories about people who very much have poetry in their lives.

What have you done about this situation?

I suppose the main thing is that I started a conference at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, for teachers—where they could spend a week being with poets and have a chance to listen and talk about poetry. I think of teachers as underground railroad conductors who can make young people aware of poetry, an awareness the society-at-large, obsessed as it is with commercializing everything, does not do. High school is a crucial time as far as learning about poetry is concerned. Virtually every adolescent needs poetry but many don’t know it exists, certainly not in the fullness of the art. I’d make a course in reading and writing poetry available in every high school in this country, which means I am spitting in the wind. Nonetheless, the conference is continuing in Maine under the able leadership of the poet Dawn Potter. Teachers matter so much.

Are you a political poet?

Not in the sense of partisanship but very much in the sense of trying to embody in poems how politics inevitably influences our lives, how we cannot dodge history however much we try in the United States to wave the banner of personal happiness as if that somehow could banish circumstances. Poetry is drama for me, and the dramas stem from the circumstances, often political, that determine a life. You’re born into a certain sort of world and that world is your reality. Grappling with that reality has revealed infinite avenues, though one comes to understand that certain situations—the psychosis of mass belief or the alienation bred by modern times—repeat themselves. I believe that the great poets and writers (and other artists) can be like shamans who show us deep truths about the society of which we are part. That’s why I wrote Legends of the Slow Explosion, which is about various figures who had stories to tell us that were embodied in their lives and times. The people are various—Miles Davis and Hannah Arendt, for instance—but they all fit that legendary profile.

How does your new book differ from your previous ten books of poetry?

As I was putting the book together, certain groupings became apparent. I’ve written four novels and thought that chapters of a sort seemed relevant, so I organized the book accordingly with chapters that have titles taken from a poem within the chapter. Then I threaded between the chapters poems that use the “I’ one way or another. The title poem reflects my interest in James Baldwin that began in high school when I read Go Tell It on The Mountain and was awe-struck by the intensity, the language, the honesty. I’m glad I finally was able to write a poem devoted to him. Overall, I like to think I have a strong sense of the art based on the decades of work, but the art is so much vaster than I am. I suppose that’s what I’ve learned over the decades. It’s humbling but exhilarating too—being in touch with the actual art, all those hours spent putting a few words down on paper, which is to say I can’t write the first draft of a poem on a computer. I’m still back there in the house in the woods sitting by a wood stove. Legal-size writing pads and pens—I love it.

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