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Baron Wormser - Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems
Interview
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Your new and selected is a high point in your career—indeed, in any poet’s. How does it feel? And did you face any challenges when deciding what poems to include?
It feels humbling. Zagajewski has called poetry an “impossible art.” Thirty years down the road from when I started seriously writing poetry, I have more feeling for how impossible it is. As to what is included, I asked people close to me (family and some trusted writer friends), then I went on gut feeling.
For nearly twenty years, you lived on forty-eight acres without running water and electricity. How has living off the grid affected your writing? And has your writing changed now that you’ve moved off that land?
Living off the grid was about living simply in the natural world. It provided solitude and quiet and that abetted my writing. When one lives that way, one is immersed in one’s senses in very palpable and direct ways. I assume that directness affected my writing. As far as how it changed when I left, I did a great deal of writing when I left the house in the woods, including a book about living in that house. Loss tends to be my muse. Now, actually, we have moved back to the country and are living in a very rural situation again.
One theme that runs through your poems is the strange and abstract relationship we have with our words. One poem asks, “Do we think in words? / Or are they minions of appetite, brazing / And ordaining the venal complacencies?” In another poem, “The words, of course / could care less.” Could you discuss?
Writers tend to be self-conscious about language because they are so committed to it. I’m no exception. One wants to be wary of words and indulge them at the same time. One wants to avoid glibness while reveling in the sheer presence of words. Words can betray us. That’s part of the bargain of being a writer.
In a similar vein, many of your poems comment on poetry itself, particularly its pretentiousness and limitations. Do you think this is a good idea? Or have their been too many poems about poetry?
Some of my early poems do make fun of the place of poetry in the society. Given where I lived for many years that’s understandable. To say that people around me had no use for poetry would be an understatement but then not many people in the United States do. A good deal of poetry’s pretension is bound up in the awful ways that poems are typically taught—weighty with the anxiety of meaning. And then there’s the unhappy afflatus of genius. There’s plenty to ridicule.
Many of your poems, particularly the ones from Subject Matter, are fourteen lines long arranged in octet and sestet lines. Hayden Carruth described them as “much more analytical and even argumentative than sonnets are supposed to be,” that they were “more rooted in the materiality of existence.” Would you agree with his assessment?
Hayden’s a sage head, isn’t he? I tend to call the poems fourteen-line poems rather than sonnets. They were written in part to take on the demands of syntax and see how those demands could be met in a variety of ways. The fluency of the sonnet was not what I was after.
In that same vein, do you consider the poems you’re writing now to be regularly guided by any particular form?
Over my writing career, I’ve tended to nonce form. I still do.
Since your first collection, When, published with Sarabande over ten years ago, you have been known as the master of the persona poem. Is there anyone’s shoes you would be hesitant to step in?
Not really. I believe in the powers of imagination. Nothing ventured nothing gained. The book of forthcoming stories amps that up: one of the narrators is a woman who is the daughter of an interracial marriage.
When you won the Kathryn A. Morton prize in 1996, Alice Fulton talked about “a moral intelligence” in your work that “recognizes the personal and political intertwinings of American culture.” Your poems still have that political force behind them today without ever once feeling overly rhetorical. What advice would you give a young writer wanting to write like this?
A great deal of so-called political poetry is little more than self-righteousness. Such work rarely explores the actual culture of politics nor does it honor the acuity of imagination. Poems want to be something more than opinions, particularly opinions that however honorable are utterly predictable.
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