Baron Wormser: Striving with a God
In his best poems, something elemental is occurring – the clash between a lone life and the accrued verity of socialized watchfulness, the adages that are spoken without a second thought.
Baron Wormser: The Loss of Literature
Literature challenges the very idea of right thinking, which is one reason tyrants have suppressed literature, though that suppression is ably carried out by any zealous group of chiding, censorious know-it-alls.
Baron Wormser: The Wand
Like many born in the years after World War Two, I spent a portion of my childhood watching Disney cartoons on television and in the movie theater. One thrilling aspect … Continue reading
Baron Wormser: The Refusal
We take, rightly so, poets and writers as people who, in some way, shape, or form, are involved in praising the sheer energy of Being and, in that regard, are saying yes to the life force.
Baron Wormser: “Gilgamesh Hector Roland” | On Zbigniew Herbert
If only we had the strength to acknowledge our weaknesses, how different we might be as creatures.
Baron Wormser: The Harrowing of Hart Crane (Among Others)
The fate of eloquence in modern times is played out in Crane’s poetry, not in some ultimate fashion but, rather, as a perpetual vision-quest one man puts himself through, a quest in which poetry is, at once, the means and the end.
Baron Wormser: Complicity | On Alice Munro
Munro has been likened to Chekhov but if one is looking at Russians the pertinent one seems to me to be Dostoevsky.
Baron Wormser: Greening
The contest between Trump and Biden represents an allegory come to life of the two forms of consciousness: one candidate who espouses a derisive and divisive let-it-rip individualism that is indifferent to, among other things, truth, and one candidate who has spent a lifetime ministering to the needs of the Corporate State.
Baron Wormser: After Poetry Month
The poet tries to be canny while practicing an uncanny art.
Baron Wormser: Prisoners of Virtue
Although the less-than-virtuous, the Toms and Hucks of this world, are constant threats—and thus the grounds for unremitting vigilance, if not outright alarmism—the posse of the virtuous remains snug and smug. Inwardly, they are rigid as dress parade soldiers standing at dutiful attention. Goodness is theirs.
Baron Wormser: Era of Ill Will
It’s easier to be against something than to be for something, particularly since any ideal is bound to have flaws.
Baron Wormser: The System
Humankind never has been very aware of the consequences of their group actions, perhaps because large groups, in particular, are inherently thoughtless.
Baron Wormser: Vistas
I don’t doubt that somewhere in the United States some class or reading group, as a way of girding their collective loins for the upcoming election, is reading or rereading Democratic Vistas, an 1871 essay in which Walt Whitman surveyed American democracy’s prospects.
Baron Wormser: Disunited Delusions
Donald Trump, as an unrestrained American ego, seems like an allegorical figure of the sort that Melville had a fondness for—the Confidence Man, par excellence.
