Baron Wormser
Poetry Reading: Tuesday, October 6
7 p.m. Bucknell Hall
Q&A Session: Tuesday, October 6
4 p.m. Willard Smith Library

Baron Wormser is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Scattered Chapters (Sarabande), a volume of new and selected poems. He has also authored two books on teaching poetry, a collection of short stories, and the nonfiction work The Road Washes Out: A Poet's Memoir of Living off the Grid (University Press of New England), which has gone through four printings.

Wormser teaches in the Stonecoast MFA program and the Fairfield University MFA program and directs the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching in Franconia, New Hampshire. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He served as poet laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005 and received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from the University of Maine at Augusta in 2005. He has received the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize along with fellowships from Bread Loaf, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Wormser lives with his wife on twenty-six acres in Cabot, Vermont.

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Anti-Depressant

What a pig happiness is. Plus
I’m a body living with an anti-body.
You probably don’t know how that goes—
Bound and unbound at the same ill time.

The pills hold sincerity down….
Once, I bled a true blue streak; now
I reference mute science shyly as
The next penitent. I’m chemical

And it hurts. The calibrations shine then dull;
R&D works overtime. I should be pleased
And some days am. It wavers and feints
And my smile is ghastly but I can walk down
A street and see the ratty English sparrows
Foraging in the litter and not start to cry.