Luray Gross: Small Fists Knocking
Is a poem a teaspoon of salt in the ocean,
one grain of sand placed carefully
on a turret of the castle
just before the wave rushes in?
Michael Simms: Baron Wormser (February 15, 1948 – October 7, 2025)
Although history will have the final word on who among us is read by future generations, I’ll put my money on Baron. His writing represents the best of the American spirit.
Baron Wormser: On a Sentence by Albert Camus
Sometimes, the illness of our world, the death-in-life that turns nature into nothing more than the source of raw material, seems so boundless that throwing the lasso of language on it seems impossible.
Baron Wormser: Distressed
Since grade school when I was hunched under my desk during an air-raid drill, I have been distressed by the specter of the atomic bomb.
Baron Wormser: If
If, as a poet suggested a long while ago, the center is not holding. If morality no longer has any practicable basis. If public statements are cant and platitude. If … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: What Nurtures Us, What Diminishes Us
Poetry is the remembrance and avowal of loss and is accordingly pushed aside.
Baron Wormser: Groovy
It’s fair to say that “groovy” has passed out of daily parlance. As words go, it was a bit silly, a bit mystic, a bit glib, a bit droll, a bit low-brow, a bit artless, and a bit wonderful. It spoke to an era and seemed, accordingly, germane to that era and almost sensible in its glad frankness.
Baron Wormser: Thought Nothing
The Separatists, as the religious settlers of New England were denominated, saw themselves as people similar to the Israelites in the Bible, people who were in a covenant with the Lord and who faced an enemy who stood in the way of occupying destined land.
Baron Wormser: Dark Time
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.
That place among the rocks—is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
Baron Wormser: The Fury
Politics requires suppleness, the ability to compromise, to fit means to ends, to temper principles for the sake of reaching agreement, to turn burning moral issues into administrative questions, to convert moral enemies into amiable opponents, the duel into a debate.
Baron Wormser: Dissident
Of necessity, the path of the dissident, since it depends on the exactions of conscience, is a solitary one. I think of Henry David Thoreau’s night in a jail … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: Bernie
Only one politician has come forward with a coherent response that he has taken to the people concerning what is occurring in the second administration of Donald Trump.
Baron Wormser: David Lynch (1946 – 2025)
In Lynch’s world, human beings are, so to speak, flammable animals whose electrical nature can be set off by a carnal gaze or by sinister forces that roam the ether and can turn one person into another with a mere zap. The zap can seem both hokey and terrifying.
Baron Wormser: The Missing Poet
Reasons abound for Republicans to not think twice or to dismiss poetry as elitist or more identity politics or whatever pejorative comes to mind. Much more important work is waiting– or so we are told.
