Baron Wormser | Teaching

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 (see "Links" www.frostplace.org). 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.

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

Featured Poem

An Island Romance (Maine)
Note

Imagine everything being in place.
I don’t mean only the pins in the drawers
Though I mean that too but I mean
Your feelings—not squashed or pruned—
But right in place and everything around
You in place, too. That’s what
An island is, that kind of chance.

I know you can say that everything is
In place already, that trees can’t dance
And birds shed feathers not leaves
And that’s the rightness of place that counts—
And it is—but love gets mixed in here,
The love between men and women,
Husband and wife, that we say
We understand the way we understand
Anything that we do over and over
Till it becomes a kind of weather
But I’m talking about a man and woman
Living together more than forty years
On an island and no one else there.
I’m talking about a real man—
Black hair, medium height, a trace
Of a limp on his left side—and a real
Woman—blonde hair, high voice, small hands—
Who sometime in the late 40s—how about
’47?—came to Sheep Island which no
Longer had any sheep and which had gone
Back to spruce and built a house of cement
He rowed over bag by bag from the big island
And of those spruce he cut and fit into cement
Until it looked like a house in a fairy tale—
Each window casing made by hand,
Each pane set in the sash just so,
Each window placed for the fullest light.

He fished enough and she knitted sweaters
And they lived and people wondered but
They weren’t bothering anyone. They had as
Much claim to live on a place that no one
Wanted to live on as anyone. When you saw
The two of them together in Cundy’s store
As often as not they were holding hands.
They were neat looking—combed and clean—
But you felt a little uneasy because
You felt how deep love could go,
That it could pull you off into a world
Where you stopped caring about what
Others thought, that the merest touch
Of another hand could make your blood simmer
And softly growl with feeling that had to go off
By itself it was that strong.

They never invited
Another soul out there ever. They got older
And they used the boat with the engine
Instead of rowing over but they still held
Hands and lived in that house we
Could picture because we had seen it
In children’s story books. That’s why
The blather about years and bags
Of cement is just blather—the sorry lint
Of facts, the believe in make-believe.
These two people had the sea for ears
And the sky for eyes and when they
Came together as man and woman
The pity of fathoms, the cold ocean notes
That sang outside their windows seemed to waver.

I know about age and death, as did they,
But think of the mornings when they sat
By the cook stove they’d hauled out there,
When he came back from the out of doors and she
Put down her handiwork and they sat there
With each other, drinking their tea and
Their mouths making little in-drawing sounds
And their putting their cups down
And how the fullness of being alive
Was the rich heat of their imagining.

Author’s note: The poem “An Island Romance” was sparked by the story of Nan and Art Kellam who lived for decades as the sole residents on an island off the Maine coast. My poem is an imagining of that shared life but a recent book, We Were an Island by Peter Blanchard tells the actual story of their life. It’s a haunting and beautifully done book with excellent photos.