Poet draws on life’s brief moments

SUBJECT MATTER: POEMS, by Baron Wormser; Sarabande Books, Louisville, Ky., 2003; 72 pages, paperback, $12.95.

Somewhere in between deep personal seriousness and detached postmodern meaninglessness floats the poetic world of Maine’s poet laureate, Baron Wormser. His sixth collection, “Subject Matter,” contains the microscopic linguistic refinement we have come to expect from him over the past two decades, together with his characteristic bemused, ironic, quietly puzzled tone.

Wormser has a fascination for the tendency of life’s moments to flee, and many of the poems in this collection focus on memories of peculiarly uneventful events. In “Tattoo,” the poet recalls a butterfly inked on the back of a (long-lost) girlfriend, and reflects on how little anyone knows or even sees of anyone else. In “Old Movies,” he recalls an evening spent watching a 70-year-old film and later recounting it to a friend, who scolds him for wasting his time – and he agrees and wishes he could have filmed the (now-lost) moment of the scolding.

Throughout these poems, the impassive observer of fleeting time scents some deep personal meaning, only to versify about it later. The versifying turns out in most poems to be a mixed blessing because Wormser’s world is made of cosmic interpersonal distances which language is incapable of bridging and usually seems to make worse. For not only do words fail to make bridges, they tend to disperse the original whiff of meaning, so that in most Wormserian cases, the characters are left intensely alone. In “Romance,” strangers in a bar are so psychically distant from each other that their efforts to frame conversations fail in all imaginable human ways.

No punches are pulled about the ambiguity of human distances and the language’s inadequacies, though. We learn in the book’s opening stanzas that:

A moment from life – a husband holding up

A tee shirt for cursory inspection;

A child trudging home from a dull school day;

A tree in heavy wind – when placed within

The careful rails of verse acquires the dear,

Facile pout of meaning.

These lines tell us that, on one hand, poetry gives meaningful shape to routine events, but on the other hand the meaning it gives is a “facile pout” – which means superficial, childish displeasure and disappointment. The word giveth and the word taketh away.

These are familiar literary themes in our time, and Wormser’s approach to them is also familiar. His lines plod forward in defiantly simple, precise grammatical constructions, yet in constantly perplexing combinations of words: “Oblivion is a big, long welcome” – a simple sentence to open “Road,” but a semantic puzzle to understand.

One reason Wormser, of Hallowell, rose to the position of Maine poet laureate is that he is a virtuoso at fashioning these deceptively simple verbal thickets. Few poets in our area have Wormser’s deftness for finding exactly the right wrong word, and very few create effects that actually play underneath the emotional and rational surfaces most of us – and way too many of our poets – bob around on. Wormser stirs disturbing ironies with subtle flair, and he distinguishes himself by not mistaking plain dullness (of language and subject matter) for subtlety.

“Subject Matter” is a good book, for its time and place. It’s likely to weary the fans of Longfellow, but to gratify the cognoscenti of nada.

Dana Wilde is a Bangor Daily News copy desk editor and English instructor at the University of Maine. He can be reached at dana.wilde@umit.maine.edu.