About This Show
Baron Wormser, one of the finest living poets and teachers, has just been named poet laureate of the state of Maine. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including The Paris Review, Sewanee Review, New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry. Wormser’s books include: Good Trembling (1985), Mulroney & Others (2000), and the most recent, Carthage, in which we cannot fail to recognize “a replica of a president befuddled by events he’s helped to create, yet cognizant enough to know that he can exercise enormous power…Through his droll and deft mediation and orchestration of effects, Wormser has imagined for us a man who’s a frightening mixture of power and banality” (Stephen Dunn). Here’s a sample:
“Carthage and Airplanes”
Carthage likes to ride in airplanes.
Up in the sky he can forget
About the schedules of earth.
It is almost like thinking,
Gazing out the window at the clouds.
He likes to ponder.
“We’re pretty high up,” he says
To his aides.
“I wonder if we could go much higher.”
Everyone looks thoughtful.
Back on earth ten-year-olds heft Uzis,
People drop dead on sidewalks,
Friendship sours like old milk.
How much better it is in the sky!
Too bad you have to be going somewhere.
Too bad the endless limo will appear
And some suit or turban or daishiki
Will greet you and start
Telling you about what’s going
To happen soon or happened yesterday.
“Why don’t you fly around more?”
Carthage would like to say to them.
If you live in the sky, nothing happens.
You don’t even see the rain.
It is almost like thinking.
Jack Wiler has been published in a number of little magazines, primarily Long Shot Magazine, which he was the editor of for six years. He has read his work extensively in New York and New Jersey. He was a Festival Poet this fall at the Geraldine R Dodge Festival of Poetry. His work has been anthologized in Aloud, the Outlaw Poetry Anthology from Thundermouth Press, Bum Rush the Page and, most recently, The Breath of Parted Lips II from Cavankerry Press. His book, I Have No Clue, was published by Long Shot in November of 1996. His second book, Fun Being Me, was published in September 2006 by Cavankerry Press.