Baron Wormser: The Poet as Novelist Brattleboro Literary Festival, October 14, 2018   The fact that you’re here today probably means that you’re expecting to hear from Baron Wormser the poet—the former poet laureate of Maine and, as you can read in the program, the author of fourteen volumes of poetry. Well, that’s wrong. Baron has also authored prose works that, in a saner world than ours, should also be called works of poetry—everything Baron writes is a work of poetry. And as much as I revere Baron’s poems, I submit that Baron’s greatest poetic achievement so far is his novel, Tom o’ Vietnam, a book that combines Baron’s cunning wit, his dazzling skill as a wordsmith, and his tragedian’s sense of the bottomless absurdity, wretchedness, and longing of the human condition—and if all that ain’t poetry, then what the hell is?       Tom o’ Vietnam is a novel like no other. First of all, it is a novel, a story: Tom, a U.S. Army veteran, returns from the war in Vietnam deeply traumatized by the suffering he has witnessed and at times inflicted. “Something’s broken in me,” he says. The thing that he carried while soldiering through the jungles of Southeast Asia wasn’t a tomahawk or a treasured photo but a battered paperback copy of King Lear, a play whose poetry and pathos became his obsession. Lear’s world of senseless, arbitrary cruelty and self-immolation, Tom realizes, is no different from the world of an army at war—an insight that has rendered him “unfit for peacetime” as he wanders America, a holy fool in search of healing, love, meaning, and inner peace. Tom’s story is a beautiful and relentless meditation on Shakespeare’s play, and how, as Tom puts it, “every word is working, how the play is a big poem.”       Tom o’ Vietnam is a big poem, too—maybe Baron’s biggest. Please welcome novelist, critic, and, above all, poet Baron Wormser.   © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont October 2018   top of page   other essays   e-mail to Mike   Fox Paws home page