On Baron Wormser's Legends of the Slow Explosion: Eleven Modern Lives

Carl Little reviews a collection by Maine's former poet laureate, Baron Wormser: Legends of the Slow Explosion: Eleven Modern Lives (Tupelo Press, 2018). "He offers one commonality among his chosen roster of writers, civil rights activists, artists, and thinkers: they 'speak from the era’s Cold War heart,'" writes Little at Hyperallergic. More:

Wormser explains up front that his “legends” are not “strict accounts,” although they contain details of their lives. “If we cannot trust the bold outlines an exceptional life creates,” he proposes, “then we have little to go on as we move blankly forward in the modern times of another century.” First up is Rosa Parks, with this riff to get things going:

Where it started was uncertain. There was Africa. There were the ships. There was the auction block: twelve bucks for sale, ages twelve to twenty, and two wenches. There were thousands of wombs available to the master and his sons.

And there was the dinner table, Wormser writes, where it was “Pass the bread. Pass the butter. Pass the Negroes who are as much our property as the bread and butter.”

Wormser revisits her famous stand-off protest in Montgomery, Alabama. Blocking the “accustomed course of obedience,” he notes, Parks “might as well have been a mountain there on that bus. All her spirit congregated in her unmoving body.”

From Parks, Wormser moves to Hannah Arendt, the renowned German-American political theorist and philosopher. He touches on episodes in her life—her affair with Martin Heidegger, the suicide of her sister Clara, her coverage of Adolf Eichmann’s trial—but also imagines how she might have reacted to hearing the Beatles’ “Help” while standing outside a record store in New York City...

Find it all at Hyperallergic.