The History Hotel
The History Hotel by Baron Wormser. Fort Lee, New Jersey: Cavankerry Press, 2023. 68pp. $18.00 (paper)
The title of Baron Wormser's eleventh collection evokes the image of an impossible edifice, a building of galactic width and breadth, immense enough to encompass "the housing of infinity," a timeless place of all times and all places in which each room may house either a nation or a single consciousness, an era or a nanosecond, a true story or a fantasist's concoction. While a single volume of poems can only present a sliver of that immensity, a sampling of human experience as filtered through the poetic imagination, it can nevertheless transcend a book's physical limits through the quality of its visions and the communicability of its momentary truth. Consider then, each poem in The History Hotel as a room of its own among innumerable others. Turning the pages as you venture from one to another, you might glimpse Sophocles returning from the ice machine in the lobby or discover that the noise across the hall emanates from an 1890s opium den.
But for all that, The History Hotel is not a compendium of poems that recount or explore actual historical events or figures (e.g., "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "Paul Revere's Ride") as much as journeys into the poet's interior, the shared records of an individual's encounters with the collective human experience that can flare into an unanticipated insight. In contemplating John Singer's Sargent's Gilded Age studio, for example, Wormser senses a connection between the painter's instant of epiphany and the poet’s:
The easel's stolid murmur, nods at transience—
Children, street scenes, a bowl of fruit—all
The same, beauty's terrors being hidden,
The depth beneath the beguiling sheen, time's
Stoppage though not death. Something ever elsewhere,
A tingle and presentiment and then—there!—
In that mélange of colors in the guise
Of immemorial moments, more feeling than any deft
Hand had the right to touch if not to grasp.
("John Singer Sargent")
That's about as accurate a description of the moment of artistic creation as one can find, the snap of neural ignition when the poet or painter comprehends and seizes the elusive "something ever elsewhere" they've dedicated their lives to rescuing from the "depth beneath the beguiling sheen" of everyday life. At the same time, Wormser subtly captures the complementary — perhaps simultaneous — vision or recognition apprehended by the painting's (or poem's) viewer (or reader).
While it would take a physicist specializing in the block universe theory of time to explain the simultaneity of past and present, in a sense poets have been demonstrating such temporal coexistence for as long as poems have been written. Wormser's nine-line poem "Sentence" encapsulates a kind of ars poetica for the idea that poems are vessels that preserve the interiorized intersections of past and present together in a kind of aesthetic amber:
Easy to wake, enjoy this day where someone named "I"
Goes forth to smell the flowers, drive a car, swear
At some small annoyance while wondering how to
Hold this day not just in present-tense focus but keep
The past of it there, the grit in history's pipes, the
Fear beneath the bed and school and office where the dead
Can be heard faintly rattling bones, spitting upon
The presumptions of persons who think (or wish) that my
Life has no shadows, who say to death "never mind."
The thematic similarities between "Sentence" and "John Singer Sargent" aren't random or accidental. Wormser detects reverberations of the past in the most mundane contexts. In "Aces," the card playing narrator ("I'm a captive / On the far coast of compulsion") conjures the kindred spirit of Dostoevsky ("I salute his urge / The drama of our giving in"), whose addiction to games of chance and the losses that ensued led to his writing of Igrok (The Gambler) in payment of a debt. Wormser reaches back into history even further in "On Empire," in which a regular-guy protagonist mows his lawn:
A small empire but nonetheless
A realm over which an ego
Might tower, not Nero petulant,
But stoic, briefed in care's duties...
Only one quatrain later we find the poet drawing an analogy between an ordinary act of suburban control and the oppression of a patrician slaveowner who presides over "Lives mowed with brazen, deathly power." While "On Empire" may stretch the comparison a bit too far for some readers, Wormser skillfully sells the premise.
But for readers who appreciate an imaginative stretch now and then, Wormser doesn't limit himself to evocations of recorded events and times. He includes a few alternate histories as well, what-if poems that recast real personages in strange, often darker roles. "Herr Plath Doktor" finds the troubled confessional poet's consciousness subject to a mad scientist's experiment to rid her of psychological pain and suffering:
This apparatus vanquishes the shades
This unmetered force unnerves all wishes
Lifts your bleak mental skin
Sends you into a bright no-place
It's a surreal piece of work, and knowing Sylvia Plath's life and poetry as we do, the result of the experiment is not likely to be happy regardless of which alternate universe it happens in. Like the titular protagonist in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Herr Doktor's intentions are essentially good, even altruistic, but the poem ends on an aporic note, an emotional paradox that finds Plath's spirit "fresh brittle empty / Clear as some mythical pond / Where passion forgets and joy shrieks." Strangely yet fittingly, that might be the kind of joy Plath would have understood all too well. On a somewhat more positive note, we have the poem "1910," in which history's mistakes are unmade, de-imagined:
Lenin gives up his rhetoric to raise orchids.
Trotsky turns to the Kabbalah and ponders the wisdom of mystery.
Capitalists renounce their riches to become mendicants.
And the outcome of this deceleration of history? "The Americans do no not become lost. / The Russians do not have to become Soviet."
Accomplished poetic craft has been a hallmark of Wormser's poetry through more than four decades, and those who fear that the art's traditional virtues—form, assonance, rhythm, deft rhyme—are endangered species will find them alive and well here. (How many young poets today would construct a villanelle on the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman from a drug overdose?) Note these graceful couplets from "Dylanesque":
The river of plenty ran through my heart
Glimmered and glinted till you wrenched it apart.
I trusted your kiss, trusted your touch
Then you said love didn't amount to much,
Was a dog on the street, cloud in the sky,
A wish waiting for time to reply.
Though the poem is an homage to Bob Dylan, the reader might be forgiven for thinking of Dylan Thomas when reading lines such as "Through an inner prairie of glass" or "A man and a woman do more than pretend," as if hearing an echo of an echo. The poem's penultimate line could serve as the summation for every song or poem either poet had written about romanticized love: "We make stuff up, then act like it's real."
Wormser often confronts that ancient discrepancy between the reality we attempt to create through desire or belief and the reality we'd rather not accept, and not only the delusions we entertain when in the throes of love, but those we employ to deny mortality: "The lies a person / Tells to age," [39] or "the fated / Vanishing identity" [11] that awaits the end of every life. Now in his mid-seventies and beyond the need for delusions, Wormser finds himself -- to paraphrase Yeats -- casting a cold — or at least a wry — eye on life and death while at the same time "Still pecking at the mystery" [1] of how and why things are as they have come to be, how nearly all we experience or perceive, no matter how personal or minute, might in some way reflect the collective inheritance of history. Wise, vital, eloquent, inventive, and more than occasionally funny, The History Hotel dares offer readers the core pleasures of a poetry — "The long, lush, explicit reach of it" [6] — caught in the spell of "ravenous eloquence" [63]
Reviewer Fred Muratori's three full-length poetry collections are Despite Repeated Warnings, The Spectra, and A Civilization. His poems and short prose have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Redivider, Cloudbank, The American Journal of Poetry, and Gargoyle.
