What the Poet Taught Me

in memory of Baron Wormser, February 4, 1948–October 7, 2025

The subject line of the email read “Bad news.” It was late September 2025, and Baron and I were scheduled to teach a weekend writing workshop together in early October. At first, I figured “bad news” meant a scheduling conflict. But the email read: “I’ve been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. . . . I’m going down. This happened suddenly—a kind of bolt from the blue.” The prose style was all Baron, but the content all wrong. I was sitting in my car, having just left Rosh Hashanah services. I looked out at the cows in a nearby field, then reread the email. I repeated this sequence again and again, unable, or unwilling, to comprehend.

I met Baron Wormser in 2009, when I’d been hired to teach fiction writing in the low-residency MFA program at Fairfield University. He’d arrived the year before, at the founding of the program. Each afternoon during the residency, a faculty member would teach a community-wide craft seminar. For the most part, instructors didn’t attend one another’s seminars, instead using the time to catch a nap, run to the liquor store, or read student work. But word was I should do myself a favor and go see Baron “do his thing.”

His thing, as it turned out, was to take fifty students—who ranged in age from twenty-two to eighty—through a few poems. As handouts circulated, I noticed the poems weren’t photocopied from a book but rather typed out, a practice Baron said offered him proximity to the poet’s particular rhythm and syntax. He began with e. e. cummings’s “now (more near ourselves than we).” First, he read the poem through to the end. Then he reread the opening line, stopped, and looked up. He didn’t ask what the poem meant, what we thought the poet “intended” or was “saying.” Instead he asked, “What’s happening?”—on the page, sure, but beyond that, “what’s happening” to you, the reader. This was how he worked, moving line by line, sometimes word by word, through a poem—and getting everyone to participate.

He could spend the better part of an afternoon on two poems. He was not asking us to dissect or analyze—he was showing us how to live inside the poem, how to have a full-body experience of it. When he tossed a question to those assembled, he did not direct the conversation to some final place he had in mind. With the cummings poem—which I found as penetrable a Zen koan—Baron wanted us to notice, just as the poet does. “The poet is always asking, ‘What is that?’” He directed us toward the simplicity of its language, the elemental nature of wonder. “Nothing needs to happen in the poem. Beingness is enough. All cummings has to do is expatiate on the thing itself.”

If a student said something off-the-wall, Baron might nod and smile, encouraging the engagement, before advancing the subject a little until the next student gave a try. He believed that most everyone in the room had the capacity to commune with a poem, and he kept drawing them nearer to the flame until each and every one of them caught fire. That belief—in both the capacity of poetry and the humanity of his students—was central to Baron’s teaching, his writing, and the way he lived his life.

~

By the time I met Baron, his profuse head of hair had already turned white. That beacon meant I could see him coming and try to think of something intelligent to say. Baron intimidated me because he was smart in a way one hardly ever encounters in academia. He’d gone for a graduate degree in English, but it had little or nothing to do with his education in literature. In the 1970s he and his wife had built a house off the grid, deep in the woods of central Maine. They raised two children there, grew vegetables, chopped endless amounts of wood, meditated, read, and read, and read some more. While I busied myself watching TV for a quarter century, Baron was reading everything, and writing. Poetry first and always, then a memoir, essays, and eventually fiction, too.

Baron disapproved of unnecessary words in both speech and writing; I can hear him editing this piece, traces of his Baltimoron—as he referred to people from his hometown—accent still detectable. He had a reverence for silence and humility. I can be a rambler and a re-stater. When he spoke, as when he wrote, there was a depth, a complexity, a clarity of thought and feeling, that if you had any self-awareness made you feel like a piker, and if you had any sense made you want to learn from him.

The two of us were, so to speak, landsmen. Fairfield is a Jesuit University; every room in the retreat space where we ate, taught, and slept featured a crucifix. Baron and I were pretty much the only Jews for miles around. During these marathon teaching stints, I’d feel the occasional need to break out some Yiddish. These geschreis—meant for an audience of one—got a laugh out of Baron, which is as worthy a goal as any I can think of in this life.

Some years into our acquaintance, he asked if I’d be interested in teaching a private workshop with him, outside the MFA program. Baron had taught at numerous writing centers around the country, including The Frost Place. For the next ten years—except during the Covid pandemic—we co-taught a couple of weekend prose-writing workshops a year. Teaching alongside Baron gave me a better writing education than I’d received in graduate school. Our workshops included close reading and then some writing based on prompts from the reading. For over a decade, I spent hours watching Baron teach, frankly trying to steal his pedagogical process, almost hearing the clicks in the minds of students, and, above all, learning to “attend to the prose at the level of the sentence,” to hear the music in it. As he did with the poems he taught, he typed out each prose passage to be shared with the workshop, no matter how long. Of course, I followed his lead, quickly understanding the power of this mimetic practice. Teaching with Baron was a tutorial in listening. He taught me to hear what he heard: the pure enchantment of art.

In the evening, after a long day of leading workshop, Baron would crack open the whiskey, I’d uncork the wine, and we’d talk about what we were reading and writing. If he had read something that moved him deeply and was well written, he’d tell me about the “real writing” he’d come across. A “real writer” was someone who consistently wrote about what mattered—high praise from him. In the workshop setting we had an easy rapport, but no matter how long I knew Baron, our personal conversations never strayed far from the safety of literature, history, and philosophy. Most of what I learned about his early life I gleaned from poems and essays. I knew he carried grief, but the quality of that grief was only exposed here and there in his writing.

~

The care he took with his students, the attention he gave their work—often years after he’d ceased formally teaching them—made clear it was a sacred calling for Baron: his commitment to connecting writers with their own sense of possibility. One night, he told me he’d decided at a young age that nothing would come between him and his imagination. Baron was mindful and intentional that way, in the micro and macro aspects of his life. I doubt I’ll ever again encounter someone so thoroughly aligned with his own integrity.

The day Baron emailed me about his cancer, I asked if I could travel to him in Montpelier. He told me to call his wife in ten days, after others in his family had left. When I did, Janet said he’d been unresponsive for two days and would likely go very soon. I’d been writing a letter to him, trying to get it right “at the level of the sentence.” Trying to find a way to tell him what he meant to me, to thank him for all he’d taught me, to express my gratitude for everything. And now it was too late. I wanted to find my own way of saying he was a real writer. But he knew that. He’d steered the course of his life by that true north. Graciously, Janet told me to email her the letter I’d finally completed. She would read it aloud to him. “He might still be hearing us,” she said.

I know I am still hearing him, and will go on hearing him. I know because Baron was the one who taught me how to listen.