Vox Populi

A curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature with over 20,000 daily subscribers and over 8,000 archived posts.

Baron Wormser: Agony

The agony I feel about the events in Israel, an agony shared by millions around the planet, many of whom may never have entered a synagogue, is very real. I wake up at night and lie there, held fast by grief, impotence, anger, and despair.

January 21, 2024 · 10 Comments

Baron Wormser: Five Easy Pieces

Bobby has the dis-ease that is bred in the easy-going yet overbearing ways of his nation.

October 29, 2023 · 8 Comments

Baron Wormser: The Dark Sky | Politics and Its Discontents

It may be that the love that lives within us cannot be turned toward something as large and seemingly abstract as the earth. But the earth isn’t abstract at all. Each moment is local and real and is always a place where we might begin.

October 8, 2023 · 7 Comments

Baron Wormser: Staggering

When each of us was alone, imagination often kicked in. Where else can a child go? What else can a child do? When asked what one was thinking, a child could answer with the blessed word, “Nothing.” 

August 29, 2023 · 12 Comments

Baron Wormser: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Epitaph”

 By tradition, poets have the authority to write epitaphs. It goes with their famous license, their claiming the verbal right to confront death in whatever context death presents itself while using poetry’s concision to arrive at a just, incisive summary.

August 6, 2023 · 5 Comments

Baron Wormser: Disconnected

[Tech companies] countenance evil—working children to death, creating environmental devastation, allowing labor practices to flourish not far removed from slavery, putting women in conditions that encourage sexual assault, paying people a pittance for dangerous work—while offering assurances…that no evil is being practiced.

July 9, 2023 · 7 Comments

Baron Wormser: On Moral Grounds

One can be humbled into silence and one can be humbled into words. Or one can feel both—the silence that underlies the words.

June 25, 2023 · 6 Comments

Baron Wormser: The Weight

Desperate for an assertive American task, people will grasp at some very wretched straws. 

June 4, 2023 · 7 Comments

Baron Wormser: The Holy War

What resides within Christianity… is the God-person whose life and times were radical and disruptive.

May 7, 2023 · 2 Comments

Baron Wormser: Fool

After the fool leaves The Tragedy of King Lear, where
does he go?
Home to see the wife, play ringolevio with the
neighborhood kids?

April 20, 2023 · 4 Comments

Baron Wormser: Within The Weeping Was Joy

Preface to the 2nd Edition of The Road Washes Out in Spring: A Poet’s Memoir of Living Off the Grid

April 7, 2023 · 7 Comments

Baron Wormser: The Good Life

It’s plain that the world as we know it is literally choking on its machine- and money-driven complexity.

March 19, 2023 · 11 Comments

Baron Wormser: Active Shooter

He could see something was out of whack. 

March 2, 2023 · 8 Comments

Baron Wormser: Poetry and Paradise

One of the defining aspects of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, is poetry. The novel, devoted to the boyhood, young manhood, and then manhood proper (which is to say—war, disillusionment, and lost love) of Amory Blaine, traces the evolution of Amory’s sensibility.

February 11, 2023 · 4 Comments

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