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  • A Continuing Conversation with a Poet
  • Paula Deitz (bio)

My husband, Frederick Morgan, was a poet. We spoke on the telephone for four years before having our first lunch. We had only met once during that long beginning—at a party after a poetry symposium at the 92nd Street y. The only change after that meeting was that in subsequent talks we called each other by our first names. He was the founding editor of the Hudson Review, and I worked as an assistant editor at a small publishing company. He was a great friend of my editor, Jackson Mathews, and I had been an avid reader of his literary magazine since I had discovered it in the stacks of the Smith College library. Our conversations ranged over literature, advertising, travel, and general matters about the publishing world. Our developing friendship was solidified by the time we had lunch. The friendship soon blossomed into romance and marriage.

Early in our courtship Fred mailed a poem to me entitled "Words": "Words may not meet the occasion. / They tend to stray off and lose contact / while love, year by year, builds in silence." And yet words and conversations were our passion, whether about writers, once we began editing the Hudson Review together, or about the books he read aloud to me in the evening, or the music we listened to in the morning. The best conversations unfolded [End Page 290] during our long Sunday walks through Central Park when they covered a wide spectrum of topics and ideas.

I have a vivid memory of one such conversation that occurred at our summer cottage in Blue Hill, Maine. As we drove home one evening from dinner, we listened on the local classical-music radio station to Gustav Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), that haunting song cycle based on Hans Bethge's German translations of Chinese poems about the brevity of life on earth. At the end of the long drive through the woods, the music was still playing, so we sat in the car under a starry sky until the last note sounded with a whisper of the word Ewig (Forever). Fred told me then that this was his favorite cycle of songs, and we lingered to talk about it in that quiet setting.

Our final literary conversation, just before he died in the winter of 2004, was about Ezra Pound. I had taken Pound's newly published Poems & Translations to the hospital for Fred to peruse, and he was pleased that the Hudson Review had been properly acknowledged as the first publisher of "The Confucian Analects." Fred had himself published several translations from the Chinese in his own collections of poems.

Later that year as I was dining with a friend in Geneva, who had already read Fred's last book of poems, The One Abiding, he commented to me how much he admired the poem based on Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. I was stunned into silence because I did not know which poem. Fred never discussed this with me, even though he always read each poem to me upon completing it. I could not believe that I was left at his death without knowing this important fact about his life.

I faced the moment of discovery months later when I attended a performance at Carnegie Hall of the Mahler by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by James Levine with Anne Sofie von Otter and Ben Heppner as the singers, she replacing Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whom I heard sing it in 1998, before Fred wrote his poem. Of course, the moment I opened my program and read the text I knew: Fred's moving poem about leave-taking entitled "The Parting" was loosely based on Mahler's final section "Der Abschied" (The Farewell), a song in two parts after poems written by the T'ang Dynasty poets Mong-Koo-Yen and Wang-Wei.

During the performance I was filled with sadness that we had never shared this experience. When I expressed this particular grief to the friend sitting with me, she wisely said, "Just think of it as an ongoing conversation, the...

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