Impenitent Notes

Wormser’s poetry is emphatically about people—how they do and do not accommodate themselves to the ever present hand of time. Whether following the life of a rock band through its various incarnations or imagining the meeting of Rilke and Babe Ruth or speaking to a mother who has lost her soldier son in Iraq, Wormser gets inside his characters’ hearts and minds.

Baron Wormser is the author of twenty books including novels, a memoir, a book of short stories, two coauthored books about teaching poetry, and many books of poetry (including The Poetry Life Ten Stories, 2008, Impenitent Notes, 2011, Unidentified Sighing Objects, 2015, and The History Hotel, 2023, all published by CavanKerry Press). Essays of his appeared in Best American Essays 2014 and 2018. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. From 2000 to 2005, he served as poet laureate of the state of Maine and received an honorary doctor of humane letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta. He is the founder of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. He lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife Janet.

Taxi

Sometimes they don’t want to talk.
You are full of good feeling—
On your way to a tryst or surrounded
By comforting packages or suffused
With the soft fiery lift of distilled spirits
But the driver spits at the motioning lights,
Twists the steering wheel petulantly.

Sometimes they do talk—their native realms.
They have fled famine, inquisition, decades doused in war.
They have fled barren women
And women who gave them children.
They have fled a threadbare shirt,
One pair of exhausted shoes
Yet amid the hard words are trees and flowers,
The buried scents of childhood beckoning.
Suddenly, right there in the cab, they mimic a bird—
Whit whit woo, whit whit woo.
You start,
Perhaps you should make sounds too.
Instead, you listen politely
Then explain where you are from.
In your backyard cardinals nest in the elderberries.

Sometimes they don’t want to talk,
So you read the driver’s name
But aren’t sure how to pronounce it.
There are too many vowels
Or there are marks over consonants that make no sense.
The man in the ID photo is not smiling.
You wish to imagine the grace of his joy
But the bruise of loss intrudes.

Sometimes they say that this
Is not what it’s like back home.
America has more cars, they say,
Many, many more new cars.
They lift their hands from the wheel for a second,
Gesture with them—palms up—to indicate how much
Yet never enough.

Baron Wormser’s incandescent, exacting, generous intelligence never allows him the luxury of detachment. Like all real subversion, his poetry hinges on responsibility. If there’s irony, it’s the irony of reality, of tragedy: the only animal that claims to know itself cannot save itself. Wormser can show you what’s inside those emotions—hope, desire—whose outsides have names. Behind the playfulness, formidable technique and erudition; behind that, a mind that does not compromise. IMPENITENT NOTES is essential work.
— D. Nurkse

March 2011
116 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$16
978-1-933880-23-5