Dawn Potter: Remembering Baron Wormser

“The hand that lets go”

.

In 1983, Baron Wormser published his first collection of poetry, The White Words. Now, more than forty years after it appeared, I open to the book’s second poem, “Of Small Towns.” 

It is this last image that brings me to tears. How, as young as he was then, did this city-bred poet step so surely into the harsh eloquence of rural loneliness?

            Baron’s wife, the painter Janet Wormser, spoke to me about the years when he was writing this first book, a time when they were living with their two children in the house they’d built themselves off the grid in rural central Maine. He’d grown up in Baltimore, where, far too early, he’d become his dying mother’s caregiver and was left to manage a fractured, uneasy household. The wounds were deep. In Maine, she said, “he was so happy just to be left alone.”

            And yet for many of us who came to know him as a poet, a colleague, a teacher, his great gift was helping us notfeel alone. A friend, the poet Bruce Spang, recalls visiting that house in Mercer: “We would sit by a kerosene lamp, [Baron] on one side reading my poems, me on the other, anticipating a response. [He] would read and give one of [his] long, thoughtful sighs, and I knew, right off, I was in trouble.” 

But with Baron, trouble was what we craved. I, like Bruce, underwent these sessions of patience, sympathy, and implacability. With every draft I shared, Baron made it clear that writing poems might be the most excruciating task I would ever undertake in this world. Still, being his apprentice was like being born again. A poet had looked into my mind, had seen what it was, what it was capable of. Baron gave me, and so many others, the gift of our vocation.

In his memoir The Road Washes Out in Spring, published in 2006, Baron wrote: “What brought me to the woods was grief” over his mother’s “protracted, harrowing death.” But also:

What brought me to the woods was the prospect of living with nothing between me and the earth. . . . What brought me to the woods was an impulse to get lost, to be almost literally off the map. . . . What brought me to the woods was generational, . . . the little tide of people who wanted to return to a countryside they had never experienced. . . . What brought me to the woods was pragmatism. I wanted to learn to take care of myself. What brought me to the woods was being an urban Jew who was ready to leave behind the vestiges of assimilated religion and culture that had been bequeathed to me. . . . What brought me to the woods was the longing to be with words in an undistracted place.

These agonies and desires echo throughout Baron’s many books. But as he wryly concluded in Road, “when we look for one thread of motive, we are, in all likelihood, deceiving ourselves.” Throughout his myriad poems, essays, and fictions, he underwent rigorous self-examination, rigorous observation of the world. And then, again and again, he pivoted into unknowingness, an almost Whitmanesque dismissal of any pat moral conclusion. His life’s work was to see life—squarely, and slant.

Despite the grief that bubbled up in all of Baron’s work, the pursuit of beauty was central to his days. The poet Ian Ramsey grew up near Baron and Janet’s homestead:

I remember visiting the house . . . to play with [the Wormser children], how the homestead, surrounded by forest and flowers and woodpiles, felt elegant and simple and clean and healthy. Their home—filled with art and light—felt like something of a refuge from the papermill-and-poverty culture of the Kennebec Valley. I remember playing on that dirt road and in those woods, doing charcoal drawings with Janet, and how Baron was around, often quiet, often insightful.

That atmosphere lingered in all of the places they later lived—a palpable fusion of daily physical work, daily engagement with art, layered with a sort of airy spaciousness, like a Carl Larsson painting.

I met the Wormsers at the end of the 1990s, not long after they had left their off-the-grid home and moved into town. At that time my husband and I, more than half a generation behind them, were still in the woods: in the throes of raising children; struggling with money and jobs and art and firewood and loneliness; enacting a version of the life they had lived before us. Anxious, unformed, uneducated as a poet, overwrought about leaving my children, I’d signed up for a weekend workshop with Baron. Afterward, he’d taken me aside. Looking directly into my eyes he’d said, “You could be a poet. I’ll work with you, if you’d like to do that.” And so began my apprenticeship.

I have never taken a graduate-level class. Instead, Baron became my university, and these regular visits to his kitchen table allowed me to experience a household of focused intent: two artists, for whom creating was a way of being, whether that required putting together words, or mixing colors, or planting tulip bulbs in autumn. From Baron and Janet as partners, from Baron as a mentor, I began to recognize not only the artisan minutiae of a poem but a larger lesson of making. The material for art can reside in daily labor. Thought and deep emotion arise from the work of the body.

            Of all of the poetry collections that Baron published, I remain closest to Mulroney and Others (2000), probably because I first read it when I was trying to reconcile the exigencies of poetry with my woods odyssey. Baron’s facilities with language were legion: his ear was exquisite; his dramatic control could feel Shakespearean. But Mulroney was my first introduction to the power of the ambiguous I. What stunned me, as a student poet, was his willingness to enter imaginatively into other lives—not only via straightforward persona poems but in poems that sometimes made it impossible to tell where Baron ended and the imagined character began.

            Janet recalls, early in Baron’s career, the moment “when Tom Hart, the editor who kind of discovered his work in Poetry magazine and got his first book published at Houghton Mifflin, first heard [Baron] read at the Blacksmith House in Cambridge. He said, ‘Now I know what a prophet sounds like.’” Musing over what Hart’s comment might imply, I wonder if it was linked to this ability to enter into imaginative fusion with other lives. Again, Whitman comes to mind as a poet able to cross such barriers. Prophets deliver messages that must be heard. They are the consciousness of our kind.

            The poem “Portrait of the Artist” exemplifies the imaginative first-person fusion that drew me into Mulroney. The speaker, re-seeing himself as an eight-year-old child, recalls the apartment’s odors of cat and kitchen, the struggle to dress himself, then asks:

            Baron was a central figure in developing and leading poetry programs at the Frost Place. He taught in graduate programs in Maine, Connecticut, and elsewhere. He spent years as a public school librarian. He worked tirelessly with young people and their teachers. Yet though he surrounded himself with people, his essential loneliness was always evident. It was, perhaps, why he was able to respond so exactly to another person’s pain.

            The poet Stuart Kestenbaum recalls a moment in 2001, when Baron was teaching at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. It was October; “it had been only a month since my brother was killed on September 11.  Baron read his poem ‘Briefly,’ and as he was introducing it, looked across the room at me, where I was standing by the door. The moment, his compassion, stayed with me.”

            “Briefly,” also from Mulroney, begins with the physical—“To throw slush into an April stream,” “Or spit into a puddle,” “Or let a stone plummet” “Is to be seized by the plight of vertiginous wonder.”

Plight. With miraculous precision, the word moves us into the heart of loss:

The hand that lets go

Seems godlike

                        and the pang of that moment

When some minute presence

                                               is borne away for good

Is dizzying

As the dry beech leaf rides

                                            and bobs and darts

Or the snow turns gray

                                     in the water and is gone

And the illusion of anything

                                           being fixed in time

Are tangible

                    and briefly imaginable.

“Just typing [the poem] now,” Stu told me, “feels like its own memorial service.”

Baron’s influence as a teacher was both broad and deep. On learning of his death, numbers of former students from his days as a rural high school librarian recalled him as the person who first led them into a real relationship with words. Over the course of his teaching career, he brought hundreds of students, of all ages and experiences, into this rare space. Among them was Ian Ramsey, who as an adult rekindled their connection:

He opened me to writers like Miłosz and Ahkmatova, Carruth and A. J. Leibling. . . . I began to really comprehend the mechanics and metaphysics of a poem, . . . learned that it is OK to be heterodox, to go your own way. . . . I learned what it means to be a teacher and mentor, what true commitment means. I learned that poetry is a life, a path, an endless ocean where you never touch bottom. I also had the gift of knowing Baron at the height of his poetic powers, when he had the metaphysical equivalent of a 100 mph fastball, and it opened my eyes to what mastery really means. . . . In my daily life as a teacher and writer, not a day goes by when I don’t consider how Baron’s example is reflected in my actions and being. 

Both students and colleagues remember this generosity. The poet Jeanne Marie Beaumont writes:

From 2015 to 2019, I was fortunate to co-teach nine private classes with Baron Wormser in his “Being with Poets” series, weekend-long intensives devoted to the close reading of selected poets and poems. These were intimate groups, limited to a half dozen or so participants so that each one had a voice and room to think aloud within the group. The “being with” aspect spoke not only to the time spent paying close attention to the written work of the poet under consideration, but also to being with each other, as poets, and hearing each other fully, as fellow travelers on the poetic path. In addition, always for me (and I am sure for others), it was a way of being with Baron, for I never taught with Baron without also learning from him how to be a better teacher, a better reader of poems and a better listener. Baron had a knack for creating a sense of keen attentiveness and nearly holy purposefulness to our sessions of reading poetry together, while also maintaining an atmosphere of delight, wonder, and surprise. His sense of managing time was also instructive—when enough had been said about a poem, when we needed a break from the intensity to grab a cup of tea, when to probe, when to quietly sit, or simply, when to break for lunch. The days flowed.

Another colleague, the poet Meg Kearney, recalls his democratic approach to workshopping: “He invited not only [faculty members] but every student around that table to form our ideas, confusions, and suggestions for each poem into questions instead of comments.” As I learned myself from Baron, such small shifts in sentence formation can have remarkable results, not least because they open apprentice poets to the rigors of personal choice rather than keeping them dependent on outside expertise. It was vital to Baron that his students learn to find themselves, and he always made it clear to me that my responsibility as an instructor was to teach myself out of a job. Yet even as he eschewed the role of poet on a pedestal, he was always, always casting his spell. As Jeannie writes, “the connections made in these workshops—developed line by line, discovery by discovery, person by person, voice by voice, and poet to poet—cannot be undone.”

            In the last decade or so of his life, Baron shifted much of his focus to prose, producing scores of essays as well as two novels. But the poetry never left him. Before he knew he was ill, he wrote to me about his final collection, James Baldwin Smoking Cigarettes and Other Poems:

Realistically, since I turn 78 this winter, this looks like the last book of poems, though one never knows. In a lot of ways, this book feels like what I’ve been aiming at since the very first book. Not that those books are negligible but for me something sort of came clear when I sat down to organize this book. . . . I like to think I’ve applied some of what I’ve learned from writing novels. . . . And I know you’ve thought a lot about novels and how to get as much life as you can get into a collection of poetry. 

            As I’ve read and reread this collection, I’ve returned to these words: “What I’ve been aiming at since the very first book.” And of course the heartrending generosity of “I know you’ve thought a lot about novels and how to get as much life as you can get into a collection of poetry.” Always he reached a hand to bring the rest of us into the circle of lamplight.

            What did Baron see in this collection that, to him, felt entirely familiar while offering a new sort of clarity? When I spoke to the poet Betsy Sholl about the book, she immediately mentioned its use of the ambiguous I: that same drive to inhabit other lives that had pulled me so fully into Mulroney, published nearly thirty years earlier. In James Baldwin,though, many of those lives belong to women. Betsy said, “I did think of [Randall] Jarrell when I read those poems,” a nod to Jarrell’s habit, in his late work, of adopting the personae of women. But Betsy’s comparison to Jarrell extends beyond point of view. According to the scholar Suzanne Ferguson, Jarrell would “ask always, both explicitly and implicitly, whether the poem tells the truth about the world; whether it helps the reader see a little farther, a little more clearly the dark and light of his situation.” She might just as easily have been speaking of Baron’s work.

            The first section of the book is constructed primarily of female voices. Even when the speaker is male or omniscient, the poem’s arc follows the woman’s perceptions. For me, the most touching of these poems are those in which the speaker imagines himself into the mind of his mother. Again, this particular pain is an old story in Baron’s writings: the opening of The Road Washes Out in Spring turns precisely on that grief. But what feel new to me are the glimmers of joyous free will that flicker in this imagined habitation of a mother’s life.

            I’ve often thought of Baron as a humane pessimist, a man who loved life yet was skeptical of hope. Many of his essays directly lay out this conundrum, and it persists, in various forms, throughout his poems and fictions. James Baldwin does not backtrack from such complications, but it does linger, with a certain wistfulness, on its characters’ wide-eyed and reckless yearnings—for instance, in “Katherine Hepburn,” the second section of the long poem “My Mother at the Movies”:

“Hollywood,” my mother, who grew up with black

And white, would sigh at the movie’s end, which meant

Rank melodrama, implausible happiness, actresses

Adjusting their stardom to dialogue and dresses 

.

(“Katherine Hepburn played Katherine Hepburn”)

And rueful dismissal of glamour, the tinsel-town

Effect that searched out obscure emotional corners

And threw my mother’s longings into a limpid,

.

Remorseless light that led to more sitting

In the socially permitted darkness, everyone quiet— 

Anxious bodies at rest—as the basic tale

Unraveled its breathless self, the one of love

.

Overcoming unlove, of a woman clutching

Whatever she could clutch—a man, a child, 

A rolling pin, a steering wheel—and looking straight

Ahead at what did not, could not await her. 

.

            Often the poems seem to work to articulate men’s bumbling cluelessness about the inner lives of women. Baron didn’t exempt himself from such blindness, nor did he rest hubristically on his imaginings. His tone can be tentative, as if awkwardness itself is an after-the-fact, half-lit epiphany. In “Feather,” he stacked questions, arranged images, crossed time, answered nothing.

As Betsy Sholl notes, even when such poems edge up to polemic, “music and the surprising turns of mind save them”:

I . . . think of how he was drawn to writers like Dante, Miłosz, Baldwin, and many Eastern European poets—writers who didn’t limit themselves to one narrow lane, but whose curiosity and wonder branched out to many fields of knowledge.  Baron was like an old world intellectual and in that capacity very concerned with culture, ethics, or morality.   Maybe if he hadn’t had a sharp tongue and a sense of humor, that might have become deadly, but he did have all that wit and irony. . . .

The other thing that really strikes about Baron’s work is his ear. He had a great ear for voices—timing, pacing, diction, etc.—and also for music in general—rhyme, assonance, consonance, sudden lyric eruptions. . . . It is almost as if he had two strong impulses, one to make music and one to make sense. 

Again and again in the collection, the poet followed these impulses as he strained to unbox the unwieldy, illogical argument that is, and has always been, America. In that regard, the title poem, “James Baldwin Smoking a Cigarette,” serves as an homage not only to that great writer but to Baron’s own decades-long mission to “examin[e] . . . the messy strictures of truth,” “more history / than one lifetime could swallow.” Still, set against the rest of Baron’s dense body of work, there’s something different about the collection. Perhaps that difference lies in the way in which certain of these poems—“Where,” for instance—simply rest in innocence:

Wonder persists. Irony and cynicism, morality and evil, even the poet’s own anguish: they cannot stamp it out. There it lingers, green under the fallen leaves.

            Early in my apprenticeship, as I was wailing about not being Keats or Dickinson, Baron shook his head in exasperation and told me, “Listen. You’ve got to use your stuff.”

I wish could have talked to him about the stuff of this collection, though in a sense I’ve been talking to him about his stuff for thirty years. The hard work of imagining. The hard work of sound. The hard work of existing. The hard work of humility. In his note to me about the collection, he said, “Something sort of came clear when I sat down to organize this book.” With these poems, we are left to speculate on “something” and “clear.” We are left to linger among his glints and shadows. 

After learning of Baron’s death, the poet David Dear, a participant in the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, wrote to me: “I happened to be standing near him as the group broke up, noisily saying their goodbyes. He spoke Shakespeare’s ‘Our revels now are ended,’ and looked around but no one seemed to hear. Then he saw me and I smiled to show that I had, and he smiled back. That smile: one of those brief moments of human connection that has stayed with me.”

Baron’s smile . . . weary, wry, lonesome.

How well we knew it. How hard to accept its absence.

As he wrote in one of his final notes to me: “Alas.”

And then, as always, “Love, Baron.”

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Copyright 2026 Dawn Potter

Dawn Potter led poetry and teaching programs at the Frost Place for more than a decade and has served as a visiting writer at the Solstice MFA Program, Smith College, Endicott College, and many other institutions. Dawn is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry–most recently, the poetry collection Calendar. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and her memoir, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, won a Maine Literary Award in Nonfiction.

Dawn lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband, the photographer Thomas Birtwistle.