Interview with Baron Wormser and Jeffrey Skinner’s 607 Creative Writing II Class at the University of Louisville

Sarabande Books: This is Nickole Brown, Marketing Director at Sarabande.
I will be here for the duration of your interview with Baron Wormser. If
you have any technical questions or general comments on this interview,
please feel free to ask me.

Michael: just logged on.

Susan: just logged on.

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: just logged on.

Sarabande Books: It looks like someone just logged on without entering
their name. Would you please Log off and return again, filling in your
name before entering the chatroom?

Michelle Saxton: just logged on.

Linda: just logged on.

Jeffrey Skinner: Nickole, Jeff here. Is it the case that we should ask
short questions?

Michelle Saxton: .....just logged off!

michelle saxton: just logged on.

mary rotella: just logged on.

Jeffrey Skinner: Nickole, Jeff here. Is it the case that we should ask
short questions?

Sarabande Books: No, not necessarily. Just consider this a natural
conversation between you and Baron... just keep in mind that longer
questions might require more time for longer responses.

Andrew: just logged on.

Carolyn Biggs: Hi Nickole

Sarabande Books: Hi, Carolyn! Great to see you here!

Linda: Hi, Nickole. It's Linda from the English Department. How are
things with you. I miss seeing you on campus.

case: just logged on.

Andrew: Less talkin more rockin

Andrew: Its cold in here

Sarabande Books: case, he is currently in Vermillion, South Dakota. He
is a visiting poet at the university there this semester. Baron lives,
however, in Hallowell, Maine.

case: Right now there's an in-class discussion of the merits of mp3's

Andrew: Howdy Baron

Baron: just logged on.

Andrew: If this isn't exiting I'm going to Hampster Dance .com

Jeffrey Skinner: Baron, welcome! We've been looking forward to our chat.
Is it cold up there?

Baron: Greetings from South Dakota

: Baron; Do you find it easiler to lift a plot from your own
experiences, or to construct one from events that you personally had no
part?

Sarabande Books: Hey there, you without a name... would you please log
off and return by filling out your name? It would help me a lot in the
logging of this chat. Thanks!

Baron: I make things up, I take from my life, I combine both. None of
the above are easier or harder.

Baron: It's been tropical. No snow, in the 50s and 6os.

: .....just logged off!

Stuart: just logged on.

Linda: Barron, which of your poems (in MULRONY AND OTHERS) is your
favorite poem, and why?

Baron: In many ways

Sarabande Books: Baron, did that sentence get cut off? Are you still
there?

Baron: Whoops, in many ways "For the Yiddish Poets" because the Yiddish
poets have meant so much to me and Yiddishkeit generally has a fair
amount to do with my work. So personally that's my favorite. I dig
saying Poof so much too.

Jeffrey Skinner: Baron, here comes a long question. Be patient. Thanks.

Baron: Just a gaffe on my part. Hit the wrong key.

Linda: Mary Rotella asks: I was reading "For the Yiddish Poets" when my
husband asked, "So how is this guy Wormser?" and I said, "judge for
yourself," proceeding to read the poem aloud. From the first "Poof,
poof, poof," however, I could tell I was killing the poem. I just
couldn't convey the sense of the words with my voice. My husband
intervened and, conjuring our New York Jewish best friend's parody of
his elders, read with exaggerated Yiddish inflection (complete with hand
gestures and facial expression) for much more satisfying effect. That
experience prompts this question: Did you have a particular voice in
mind for this poem, and if so, to what extent does that voice contain
meaning? More generally, how dramatic are your dramatic monologues and
how do you address the challenge of conveying the subtleties of sound
(inflection, tone, rhythm, dynamics, etc.) though words on a page? More
generally still, does poetry remain, irresistibly, an oral art form, its
success on the page depending on the reader's skill at imagining its voice?

Sarabande Books: Not trying to interupt, but just a suggestion...if
there are any more longish type questions, you may want to "write" them
in a word processing program, cut the question, and then simply paste it
into the message box.

Andrew: Geez Louise

Jeffrey Skinner: Yes, Nickole; we're working on that now.

Baron: Goodness that is a long question. For me it does remain an oral
art form. I feel that reading the poems aloud completes them, that they
want not just to be read but heard. I read them aloud as I compose them,
draft by draft. This matters because I think of my poetry as primarily
dramatic. I love the clashes -- between and among people and between and
among declarative sentences. Rhythm is crucial to portraying inflection
but sometimes, as in Poof Poof, well it's just throwing it out there on
the page and letting the reader deal. Not fair in ways because certain
backgrounds such as your husband accessed are a help. Certainly I had a
voice in mind which is exactly that garrulous Jewish voice I love, that
energy that mocks itself and loves itself at the same time.

Jeffrey Skinner: What do you think may be the advantages of poetry over
prose fiction in terms of storytelling? Have you written fiction? And,
if so, how do you decide which stories are better rendered in poetry,
which in fiction?

mary rotella: thanks, baron. I love that characterization of the
garrulous jewish voice that mocks itself and loves itself
Baron: Poetry is the art of essences and it can leap about in time and
space. It is an incarnational art and in terms of storytelling, well
fiction feels like laying bricks compared to the dancing of poetry. I
wrote a novel in my 20s that an editor at Knopf told me was a "poet's
novel" -- good sentences, no plot or character development.

Andrew: Who do you consider your major influences from the recent and
distant past?

Baron: Shakespeare. I read him pretty steadily. I can't get enough of
him. And pretty much all the poets except for a couple I don't much dig
such as Wordsworth. I read Italian, French, and German so a bunch of
poets in those traditions too. But certainly Auden and Frost have been
crucial to my art from the word "go."

Michael: Besides the age of the boy in "Portrait of the Artist," I would
like to know what you intended the connection to be between this poem
and James Joyce's novel of the same name. I noticed brief mention of a
father and mother in your poem, and in Joyce's novel, the parents play a
more crucial role in Stephen Dedalus' life

Baron: I was interested in the Catholic ethos and well Joyce is one of
the great evokers of that ethos. It's personal in a way too because that
book was a huge book for me when I was an adolescent. I (as many have
felt) saw myself in Stephen. No small trick considering my Jewishness.
That sense of the child's intuitions haunts me. Don Justice says
somewhere that artists know from quite early on that they are marked. I
tend to believe that.

Carolyn Biggs: In reference to "Satan Reviews the Cuban Missile Crisis"
and the lofty language -- is this an allusion to the Screwtape Letters
by C.S. Lewis? I had trouble telling what you were getting at in this
poem, could you shed some light? As an aside, there's a new book out
about the secrets of the Cuban Missile Crisis, documents that have just
been opened recently . . .

Laurene: Poet/playwright Jo Carson says that the only way to write a
poem or play or story is to begin at the beginning and proceed from
there till the first draft is done. Other writers -- Michael Ondaatje,
for instance -- writes spherically, working on the middle or end first
if they come that way. How do you work?

Sarabande Books: Please only ask Baron one question at a time...

Baron: Yes the poem comes from one of the books about the Crisis. The
poem is more concerned with Milton's Satan (hence the reference the
devil makes to Milton). The language is meant (as best as I could) to
evoke the clamor of Milton and certainly I wanted to salute Milton's
devil. Also the point of view seemed important given the horrifying
nature of what happened in terms of how close humanity came to nuclear
war.

Laurene: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

Baron: I start out and proceed. I barely understand the word
"Spherical." Just straight ahead and then filling in, cutting, adding...


Jeffrey Skinner: 5. John Branscum asks: In such poems as "Jack, Age 23,
In Canada (1972)" you seem to place a lot of weight on social
commentary. Do you consider yourself more of a social poet, emphasizing
the "big picture," than a confessional poet (emphasizing the individual
detail), or a contemplative poet (emphasizing the inner life)? Do you
think there's a strong need for social poetry today?

Baron: I think we live with others and in that sense poetry is social. I
think that our lives are constructed in countless ways from the
circumstances of history. Sometimes the history is patent -- fleeing to
Canada -- sometimes it is not so patent. But it always is there. The
particular challenge for me as an American is to write poetry that
retains the dramatic personal edge -- something is at stake, something
that deeply matters about a human life -- and write about the historical
actualities that enter into a situation. I think there's a need for
poetry that acknowledges the actuality of history, that makes history
convincing. That's not to blow off the "inner life." After all, I'm a
Buddhist. It's to say that history influences that inner life deeply.

Susan: In "The Great Depression," I am confused about stanza three:
"Definition is a horizon/Even dreams must obey as/They exalt on another
plane the burnished day." Could you explain these lines, maybe starting
with what "definition" refers to?

Carolyn Biggs: In reference to "Goethe in Kentucky" -- why Kentucky --
is this a reference to Kentucky being neutral in the Civil War? Kentucky
has also been called the Dark and Bloody Ground . . .

Carolyn Biggs: sorry, heavy finger . . .

Michael: Back to "The Great Depression": The fairy tale nature of the
poem, especially beginning in stanza 5, reminds me somewhat of the sense
of impending doom in e.e.cummings' "In Just." Starting with "Once there
was a little man with a mustache", was your use of this technique meant
to drive the sense of the Holocaust as being so horrific as to be
unreal?

Baron: I wanted to pick an unlikely place for Jewish immigrants but a
Southern place. My mother grew up in Kentucky and I visited there a
number of times as a childhood and it's a place that's in my
imagination. So Kentucky...

Baron: Yes. Fairy tales are full of doom. And the poem is about how
imginative realities replace human realities except that the imaginative
realities are made by human beings.

Amy Jackson-Sellers: What was the purpose in naming the book after the
"Mulroney" poem? How does "Mulroney and Others" best represent the book
as a whole?

Baron: Well, Mulroney is a favorite of mine because it's just basic, gut
level humanity doing its thing. I never want to get away from that.
That's my bass note.

Jeffrey Skinner: : "Explication du Texte" is a wonderfully wry and
accurate poem about both the anxieties and passions of poets in their
youth. In it the poet/narrator provides a critique of poets (with
Stevens as instance) whose work seems distant from their lives "in re
ality," who practice poetry as an escape from "the contingent pain of
mere flesh." What are your thoughts now on the intersection of a poet's
life and the work? Do you distrust the work of poets whose poems seem to
contradict or to be utterly divorced from the way they conduct their
lives? Do you feel the same way today about Stevens as the young poet of
"Explication du Texte"?

Baron: Well Stevens still feels uncanny to me but I think I am better
able to accept that uncanniness. I mean in many ways he seems a bigger
shaman that Allen Ginsberg but it took me a long time to feel that. I do
believe that there are profound connections between what a poet does
with his or her life and what the work is. But they aren't easy
connections to establish. I lived for 23 years in the Maine woods
without conventional power. Yet I haven't written that much about it.
But I know it gave me the ground (literally and figuratively) to write
the poems.

Ralph Polly: Evelyn Underhill once said that artists are failed mystics
-- that is they see the underlying unity which causes one to adopt
silence, etc. yet cannot let go of their (perhaps) excessive attachment
to the body AND the ego. Does this conflict ring any bells for you.

Baron: "than Allen Ginsberg" sorry

Baron: I don't honestly know because I'm not sure what a mystic is. I
mean I know numbers of Buddhists but they aren't mystics. Not to beg
your question -- it's a good one -- but it's a word I have a hard time
getting a handle on. And a "failed mystic." Somehow I feel that to be a
mystic must of neccesity be to fail -- and that's okay.

mary rotella: My favorite poem is "Briefly", which on its face seems
very different from the "Yiddish Poets", more contemplative, less
dramatic. Do you think these two dissimilar poems take two approaches to
the same feeling of the particularity and evanescence of imagination?

Baron: Yes. I do. As with many poets, evanescence is my middle name.

This chat goes on for another 28 lines, but they were unfortunately lost in the saving of this chat. If you would like to see the end, please contact us at Sarabande for a paper transcript of the chat.