Workshops

Baron Wormser has given workshops throughout the United States on the teaching of poetry at such venues as National Council of Teachers of English conventions in Nashville, Tennessee, and Baltimore, Maryland, the New England Reading Association, Assumption College, the University of Maine, and the city of Worcester, Massachusetts. He has worked in dozens of schools at all levels. Wormser's work with schools stresses the principles employed in his two, co-authored books about teaching poetry. These are an emphasis on reading poems aloud and writing them down word by word, discussion of poems that focuses on word choice and the various aspects of the art of poetry employed in the poem, and writing poems based on the model a given poem presents. He believes that too often the teaching of poetry is reductive and produces fear and anxiety. The teaching of poetry should open students up to the experience of art, an experience that moves outward from the center of individual responsiveness to language. Poetry is a keystone of literacy and should be approached accordingly.

Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching

Wormser is the director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching held each year at the end of June at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. This unique conference brings classroom teachers together with poets for the purpose of talking about poetry and the teaching of poetry. Over the course of five days the conference includes talks on teaching poetry, workshops in which individual poets consider favorite poems, writing poems, sharing classroom practices, and poetry readings.

Learn about The Frost Place Poetry Outreach Project.

Read “The Arc of Teaching a Poem,” a teaching statement composed by Baron Wormser and associate director of the Conference on Poetry and Teaching Dawn Potter.

For information about workshops and working in schools with students and teachers, contact Baron Wormser at baronw@fairpoint.net.

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)

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