Perched on the couches, chairs and tables in the Underwood Room, students listened to former Poet Laureate Baron Wormser, who read a selection of poems from his nine published volumes on Wednesday, February 23.
With a booming voice, Wormser conveyed the humor, solitude and imperfection of the human condition, focusing on people and their shared emotions in his selections.
“Wormser starts with the secret intricacies of human emotion and gradually and generously moves outward to larger questions about humanity,” said Lewis Robinson, Writer-in-Residence.
Jeffrey Domina, Chair of the English Department, said, “[Wormser’s reading] helped put a voice and a person to a poet, expose students to different kinds of poetry and keep them connected to writing outside the classroom.”
Wormser discussed the process of creating poetry and his writing process during his talk.
He called the experience of writing poetry a sudden flash, saying that whenever he starts writing it is like being struck by lightning, and after all the words seem to come out of thin air.
“Poetry is intuitive; it’s going into darkness, but if it wasn’t important we wouldn’t write it down,” said Wormser.
Wormser encouraged writers to explore language themselves, to read the dictionary and to not use a thesaurus when writing. He said that both enable a writer to choose the right word for his or her context carefully.
Wormser said, “A poet is someone who lies in bed thinking about the difference between small and little.”
Samuel Green ’13 said, “I liked [Wormser’s] very stoically insightful comments about the life of a poet, and I enjoyed the comedic irony that he included in the language of many of his poems.”
When one student asked about his writing process, Wormser replied that he usually writes with pen and paper for poetry, uses a computer for prose. He normally writes between thirty to forty drafts for each poem.
Wormser usually only shares his poems with his wife, whom he called a deft reader, and occasionally his kids. He prefers to tackle a poem one-on-one with a reader rather than the help of an editor or another poet.
He said that a poem works when every word is perfect, but a poem is never really finished—only frustratingly abandoned when the writer runs out of steam and loses interest.
Wormser read poems that addressed a spectrum of human emotions, ranging from “The Pump”, which conveys comfort and solace, to “The O’s” or “Carbone Blues”, which focus on the grief and unfamiliarity that come with the loss of a loved one.
Wormser drew from both current and past experiences of teaching, living in Baltimore, Maryland and surviving without electricity in the “backcountry” of Maine to write his poems.
Inspired by Shakespeare, Yates and Emerson, Wormser said he writes poems that fuse past people and literature with very current and real experiences in what he calls a “collision.”
Several other poems, such as “In the Grocery” and “My Last Borders”, symbolize the regrets of the past, while “Carthage’s Diary” and “Labor” look towards the future.
One of the most memorable of these types of poems is Wormser’s imaginary tale of Percy Bysshe Shelley, a highly regarded English Romantic poet, who comes back to earth in the form of a meth dealer.
Wormser said other themes in his poems include the process of individual maturation and experience, which he conveys through the use of vivid imagery and sounds.
The English Department hosted Wormser for a reading on Wednesday night and for presentations on Thursdays, where he met with English instructors to talk about his methods of teaching poetry. Wormser has also written two books on how he writes.
