The Poetry Life Ten Stories

Baron Wormser brings to life the immense force poetry can have in people’s lives. In stories funny, tender, sad, and edgy, the narrators register how poetry has changed how they see themselves, how they live, and what they care about. As it bends genres by adapting aspects of fiction, biography, essay and monologue, The Poetry Life shows how poetry can be lightning in the soul.

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.

Probably you’re thinking that I learned about John Berryman in college because where else would you learn about a guy like John Berryman? You’re not going to see his poems on billboards or in local newspapers next to ads for septic tanks cleaned and snow tires. No one is interrupting a TV show to do a John Berryman commercial. Et cetera. The fact is I did go to college for two years before I quit and took a course that had some poetry in it. Our professor was a woman who told us we only were going to read women writers because the guys had gotten too much of a say already. It was ladies’ night, so to speak. I didn’t go to the class much. To tell you the truth, I didn’t go to many classes at all. When I was there I listened to her talk about the male hegemony. You can see that I’m educated because I used that word, “hegemony.” I can’t say I use it with the people I work with in the carnival because no one would know what the fuck-all I was talking about. Still, that’s what professors are paid for—to know words like that. I could dig it. Even if I was a guy, I didn’t begrudge her. I didn’t turn in any work and I didn’t pass either. And I didn’t read anything by John Berryman.

Baron Wormser has pulled off a miraculous feat—he has written a collection of stories that reveals the absolute necessity of poetry in our lives. His prose style is riveting, and his characters are as diverse as a phone book. Each voice conjures up a passionate portrait of inner life, telling us—through episodes both comic and tragic—that the world of the deceased poet remains eternally relevant to our own.
— Clint McCown

“Poetry,” Baron Wormser writes, “is about generosity.” So too are these ten stories you hold in your hands. They are about generosity. And mystery. And loneliness. And life. They are about how poetry helps us “stay in our skins.” You will fall in love with these stories and with the ten poets who appear in them. What Baron Wormser says about William Carlos Williams, I say about him here, “He nailed it.”
— Ann Hood

A book of stories not about poets but driven by the presence of poetry and the shadows of poets: madness undoubtedly. But the best kind of madness! With this book, Baron Wormser invites us to reconsider the connection between poetry and our lives, to remember that we really do live hungry for inner vision, for small insights that can save us from the slag heap of goofdom and pointlessness. It’s a wonderful book. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to stay in the world.
— Tim Seibles

April 2008
210 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.25
$18
978-1-933880-05-1