Dawn Potter: A Small Celebration of Baron Wormser and Teresa Carson

Lived-Time, Art-Time, and Friendship

Not long ago, during a visit to Chicago, I attended a performance of Winning Works, the Joffrey Academy’s annual showcase of young dancers and choreographers. Watching the performances was like watching an explosion, in the best possible way: the rigor of storytelling made physical; the escalation of that rigor. Escalation was a word that stayed in my thoughts long after the performance was over, no doubt because I’d recently been thinking about it in a different context. I’d been reading George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, a peripatetic excursion through seven nineteenth-century Russian short stories; and in the essays that accompany those stories, George writes perceptively about the notion of escalation, which he defines as “a meaningful alteration in the terms of [a] story”:

We tend, in discussion, to reduce stories to plot (what happens). We feel, correctly, that something of their meaning resides there. But stories also mean through their internal dynamics—the manner in which they unfold, the way one part interacts with another, the instantaneous, felt juxtaposition of elements.

I’m neither a dancer nor a fiction writer, but both of these experiences—watching the dancers’ bodies climb into beauty, watching George’s mind reread a beloved tale—unloosed something in me, something that seemed connected to movement through time. “We think of a story as a system for the transfer of energy,” writes George. This, I think, is true of any art. Bit by bit the creator builds a bridge, and bravely the reader, the listener, the viewer step forward, one foot after the other, though the bridge may look fragile as paper, forbidding as stone. And then things escalate.

            I saw those Joffrey dancers during a visit with my son. My son is twenty-eight and is way more capable and pulled together than I was at his age, though, like a typical doting parent, I still barely believe he’s a man. Just yesterday he was a bundle of shrieks and questions, a sturdy short tree-climber with a shock of duck-fluff hair and a passion for dump trucks. Who is this brisk, capable, confident, mysterious adult? In short, during my visit, even as I basked in his presence, I underwent a familiar ambiguous joy-gloom, a mess of pride and worry and pleasure and misery. I felt embraced by time and afflicted by time.

            Youth is for the young, or so goes that irritating adage. But time is for all of us, from the moment we take our first breath to the moment we take our last. And though art-time is not the same as lived-time, I do wonder if the way in which we manage time in our poems or sonatas or paintings reflects, in some manner, how we deal with the gifts and terrors of lived-time. Anyway, George’s book and the dancers’ performances and the notion of escalation and my itchy mournful devotion to my son were pushing me to consider this possibility. And as I did, I found myself turning to the work of Baron Wormser and Teresa Carson: two poets who particularly matter to me, poets I have known for decades, who were and continue to be integral to my own self-definition as an artist, poets I take personally but whose oeuvre is neither like mine nor like one another’s.

            Ouevre is a pretentious word, and I apologize for using it, but I can’t think of an English term that encapsulates the idea of creation and vocation as an overarching personal history. My poet friends and I are bound by many ties, but one of them, these days, is aging—which is to say, unlike those starry-eyed dancers, the three of us are all singing our water-under-the-bridge, how-much-time-do-I-have-left blues. It’s an odd place to be . . . work behind us, work ahead of us. We’re dogged, so that’s nothing new, but the weight of our cart has tipped. Unnerved, I stare forward into the mist and wonder which poem will be my last poem. Meanwhile, I’m lugging around all of these drafts and scrawls and rejections, and they get heavier and heavier, and the wheels of my cart strain against the spring mud.

            How does an artist address lived-time as art-time? How does a loving reader react? Is address even the right word? I’m not so much interested in my friends’ purpose for writing as I am in acknowledging the patterns they’ve produced. For pattern itself is an acknowledgment of time: a structure that loops forward and backward, inward and outward; a stasis that is constantly in motion; a beginning and a middle and an inevitable end . . . as in this poem from Baron Wormser’s new collection, The History Hotel:

Self-Portrait with Ball

If I had a sense of self, it was a rubber ball

That I was not bouncing or throwing or kicking

But that moved nonetheless would not stay still

But moved away—uncatchable—then came close

.

Within a hand’s reach but veered—uncatchable—

Then fell but bounced hugely—how great I am!—

Only to meet the ceiling of embarrassment and fall

Without grace or pluck and start rolling on the floor

.

Hither and yon as if seemingly directed pausing

Waiting for me—me?—to say something astute

Like “a ball cannot have a life of its own”—except

Here was the evidence, the first unnamable.

.

Baron was my first poetry teacher, really my only formal poetry education, and thus his poems, his opinions, his approaches to the art have colored all of mine. Given that he’s both my oldest poet friend and the master critic who lives in my head, this makes him hard to write about. I am anything but detached when I read his work. Still, this poem, “Self-Portrait with Ball,” hit me hard, and I want to try to explain why.

Unlike a short story, Baron’s poem has no plot. Nonetheless, it escalates, just as those plotless dances escalated, and this escalation constructs a version of narrative. But what tale is being told? Something is happening that pulls me beyond a single speaker revealing a single moment. I feel an entire life pinging back and forth, up and down, within these lines. In George Saunders’s words, the poem has become “a system for the transfer of energy,” a specific and frantic energy, one that is impossible to harness and that bleeds beyond the frame of the poem.

The intersection of lived-time and art-time in “Self-Portrait with Ball” can be interpreted in multiple ways, but I’ve found myself most attentive to how the unrolling of the poem’s single sentence feels like the unrolling of decades. Reading it rushes me down a river of clauses, logic, illogic, asides, second guesses, shock, hiccups, eloquence, awkwardness . . . all of this hurtling me toward a dam that is the poem’s final ambiguity: the word unnameable. Time in the poem passes rapidly even as it swirls back on itself, and the energy it transmits is electrical: a static sizzle, also a bolt.

“Poems aren’t either-or,” Baron told me early in my apprenticeship. “They’re both-and.” This poem enacts a lifetime spent wrestling with the perplexities of both-and, and reading it makes me weep a little, makes me want to croak out a bar or two of my own blues. Energy will subside to inertia. No matter what, a ball will stop bouncing. It’s a sad old tale.  

And yet.

That’s how Teresa Carson might have emended my previous sentence, for it’s the qualifier that vibrates throughout the following poem, the final one in her recent collection, Metamorphoses, Book XIV:

The Shades Ask Little

Dear Aninia,

.

Because your mother’s Shade might also be

exiled to Gallery 162, because

she might feel tristis this far from her home earth,

.

my friend and I performed—as best we could

considering the ever-watchful guard—

a Parentalia rite to perpetuate her memory.

.

Nothing akin to your pious offerings—

wine-soaked bread, garlands, loose violets—

(though we would have liked to, we couldn’t pull those off).

.

Instead, on the sly, we sprinkled Italian salt

around her sarcophagus, and tried to think of things

to say about her, and to, a Shade we didn’t know alive.

.

But you, dutiful daughter, accomplished your end:

eighteen centuries after her death

there we were. Remembering remains.

.

Teresa is among the many gifts I’ve received from Baron. More than a decade ago, he introduced us, and since that time we have become—what’s the word? More than friends, though we’re that too. Perhaps the closest description is partners in the art. Not collaborators, not workshoppers: we don’t send each other writing prompts; we rarely look at each other’s drafts. No, what we mostly do is read old poems together (collections of Homer, Blake, Rilke, Donne, among many others) and then spend hours on the phone talking our way into those worlds. We’re not scholars. We’re just two twenty-first-century bumblers who for some reason find it exciting to come into conversation with one another via these old writings. As a result, my relationship with Teresa is deeply imbued with notions of lived-time and art-time; and as you can see from “The Shades Ask Little,” those ideas also swirl in her work.

It intrigues me that “Shades” is an epistolary poem: it’s a letter from the speaker to the daughter of the Shade “exiled to Gallery 162”—a ghost who seems to be an ancient Roman, dead for eighteen centuries, her sarcophagus now on display as an art object. The only thing we know about her life is that her daughter seems to have loved her and that the sarcophagus is a symbol of that love. 

A coffin on display in an art museum: what could better embody the conundrum of lived-time versus art-time? The person who occupied that coffin has mostly been forgotten. What remains is the box created to honor her, yet the box has ended up superseding the person. It is the valuable object; the person for whom it was made has essentially vanished.

In one sense, this outcome seems to validate the notion, so skillfully expressed in Baron’s poem, that energy must succumb to inertia. But Teresa’s letter writer is unwilling to settle for this. Instead, she reaches out to the past; she stares the past in the eye; she directly addresses a person, a daughter, a mourner; and her voice implies that she, too, understands those roles all too well. She enacts an awkward rite; she buttonholes a stranger; she goes overboard; she insists that some act, some acknowledgment, is better than no act, no acknowledgment.

In its own way, Teresa’s poem is as purposefully clumsy as Baron’s is. Both writers are unwilling to resort to the poetical. Better to be awkward, to escalate, to make mistakes, than to avoid saying what needs to be said. I am alive. Someday I will not be.

And yet.

When I shared an early draft of this essay with Teresa, she pointed out that I was skirting my own conclusion. Wasn’t I maybe suggesting that pure escalation, with its charisma, its physicality, is a young person’s game? For instance, isn’t there something else going on in Baron’s poem, something deeply, provocatively still? Of course there is: for as he describes the frantic movement of the ball, he also draws me into a distrait concentration. The words may flip back and forth, back and forth on the lines, but what about those em-dashed asides—“uncatchable,” “uncatchable,” “how great I am!,” “me?” . . . and then “except,” dangling in the air? Each upends me, as if in the midst of a fast and chattery conversation, I keep shifting into cloud, where nothing is clear, nothing is solid. If the pinging-ball moments are a version of lived-time, then could these small blurred pauses be entries into art-time?

Because Teresa’s right: that’s what I keep coming back to. A young artist has freshness and energy, but what happens when art extends beyond freshness and energy? What happens when it becomes a lifetime? In Baron’s poem, I watch a poet who is consciously building and breaking patterns of engagement, layering them into an impasto of perception and question. In Teresa’s poem, I watch a poet who is not afraid to point a finger at me, to say bluntly, almost threateningly: “Remembering remains.” It’s a pun, and it’s a statement, but it’s also a directive. “Do your work. You don’t have time to waste.”

As I move toward my own death, I find myself ever more grateful for writers who, without fanfare, make room for that inevitability. From their art-time, I try to learn how to live. George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo—a novel all about death: personal, moral, national—does this work too, in ways that are not at all like Baron’s and Teresa’s . . . but this is the beauty and the mystery of the art: the simplest of notions framed and reframed, endlessly. I wanted to write about my friends’ poems, not just because I admire each of these pieces but because I admire and long to emulate the way in which my friends are living out their lives. I want to be like them . . . till the end, open to the murmur, the river. 

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Copyright 2023 Dawn Potter

Dawn Potter is the creative director of the Frost Place Studio Sessions as well as the director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, both associated with Robert Frost’s home in Franconia, New Hampshire. Her many books include Accidental Hymn (Deerbrook Editions, 2022).