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• On Vivian Maier
  an essay about a photographer who has set the standard for artistry in anonymity

• Magical Thinking and Modern Times
  an essay about the kind of cultural quest for knowledge that leads to ignorance

• An essay titled “In Praise of Quentin Anderson”
  published in Solstice, Spring 2012

• An Essay/ Review about Mark Doty’s The Art of Description: World into Word
  first published in The Manhattan Review, Fall/Winter 2011-12

• Vendler versus Dove
  a discussion about authority and the task of poetry anthologies

• Fairfield University MFA Commencement Speech
  Fairfield CT, July 2011

• Thoughts on Race and Poetry in America
  a response to Major Jackson’s essay “A Mystifying Silence: Big and Black” that appeared in 2007 in APR. Given the recent flap over Claudia Rankine’s response to Tony Hoagland’s poem, I am surmising that the topic remains a vexed one and thought I would post this as a token of my own grappling over the course of my lifetime.
  

• The Arc of Teaching a Poem
  a teaching statement composed by Baron Wormser and Dawn Potter (also posted on Dawn’s website)

• Donald Sheehan: A Memorial
  a brief speech given on Frost Day in memory of Donald Sheehan

• Introduction to John Haines: Descent
  the introduction to a collection of Haines’s essays, reviews, chronicles, memoirs, and poems

• The Wire and The Wasteland
  an essay first published in The Manhattan Review, Fall/Winter 2009-10

• Jack RIP
  a remembrance of Jack Wiler

• Three Definitions
  an essay about teaching three genres—poetry, memoir, and fiction

• Foreword to We Mad Climb Shaky Ladders
  by Pamela Spiro Wagner, CavanKerry Press, 2009

• An Excerpt from “Poets on Teaching”
  an essay about teaching poetry using John Haines’s “The Long Rain,” first published in The Spoon River Poetry Review, Summer/Fall 2008

• On the Passing of Hayden Carruth
  a remembrance

• New England Young Writers Conference Keynote Speech
  Bread Loaf, Ripton VT, May 2008

• Mr. Unpleasant and Mr. Pleasant
  an essay/review of William Logan and Billy Collins, first published in The Manhattan Review, Fall/Winter 2007-08

• Political Poetry
  an essay about Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” and “Political Poetry,” first published in The Manhattan Review, Fall/Winter 2006-07

• An Excerpt from The Road Washes Out in Spring
  University Press of New England, 2006

• A Talk Given at Festivo
  Belfast ME, October 2005

• Stonecoast MFA Commencement Speech
  University of Southern Maine, July 2005

• An Excerpt from A Surge of Language: Teaching Poetry Day by Day
  by Baron Wormser and David Cappella, Heinemann, 2004

• Building a House in the Maine Woods, 1971
  a poem read at the inauguration of Governor John Baldacci, January 2003

• Nonfiction Brouhaha
  an essay about writing what’s “true”

• On Revision
  an essay about a process that doesn’t have to end

Featured Poem

Calendar (1956)

Rabinowitz tries to crawl
Inside the numbers.
He multiplies, for instance,
The days of the year times
A fortunate life span
And arrives at an impressive
Figure—Twenty-five thousand
And five hundred.
Still, it is a poor unprepossessing
Number beside the tree
From which millions of leaves fell.

Rabinowitz sits with a calendar
Which he fills in
With names such as Shulamith
Or Schmuel or Hersh or Reva.
Each day of the calendar
Gets a name and he says
The name when he looks
At the calendar in the morning,
A sound he makes
For the sake of sound,
A wafer of prayer,
A blue speck of feeling.

During the last week of December
He fills in every day
Of the next year with names.
He dreams of thin black hair,
Frizzy brown hair, half-smiles,
Grimaces, sobs, small fingers,
Fat fingers, thumbs,
Old people and children,
Loud voices, murmurs.

This is the calendar
That awaits a new religion,
Braver than the previous ones.
Today is Tsaureh-The-Baker’s-Wife Day.
The Jews have their years.
The Gentiles have theirs.
Eternity cares nothing.

Existence plods on like
A trek to nowhere
But Rabinowitz has spoken for each day.
He dreams of reddish curly hair,
Dimples, long necks,
Dear serious soulful eyes
That bury oblivion.

from Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems (2008)

Read more poems . . .