The Hudson Review, Women, and Poetry

In the fall of 1977 I ran a poetry series out of a health-food restaurant called "Down to Earth" in the red-light district of New Haven, Connecticut. That winter I met Dana Gioia at a reception held by J. D. McClatchy and Alfred Corn in the master's apartment of a Yale college, and I invited him to read in the series; ever entrepreneurial, he helped me find more poets to fill up the weekly readings. Soon after that, at his suggestion, I invited Frederick Morgan, the distinguished editor of the Hudson Review, to come up to New Haven to read his poetry for no fee at an obscure restaurant on the wrong side of the tracks. To my astonishment he accepted the invitation. He arrived with his wife, Paula Deitz, who had become coeditor in 1975, and regaled us with poems that would be published in Poems of the Two Worlds (1979), Death Mother and Other Poems (1982), and Northbook (1982). McClatchy and Corn gave a reception for the Morgans, and we were all impressed by how gracious and lively they were. Soon after, I sent in poems to the Hudson Review; the Morgans accepted some and asked me to review for them, and before long I felt that I was part of a literary community with a common purpose.

What Eric Homberger wrote in his obituary for Frederick Morgan in the Guardian (March 2, 2004) accords with my memories of what it was like to work for him and Paula Deitz.

The Hudson Review was felt to be less a product of New York and its cultural dynamics than was the Partisan. Published, at first, from Morgan's family home on West 11th Street, in the west Village, The Hudson Review was explicitly literary. There were no political lines on offer, or hand-wringing about ideology, or crisis theology—just good writing. Morgan solicited contributions from Ezra Pound, then at St. Elizabeths sanatorium. Morgan was largely immune to the infatuations—Stalinist, Maoist, feminist, semiotic, deconstructionist—that turned New York into a blasted terrain in the culture wars. It made for an unexpectedly harmonious environment for his contributors, and one that has dated far less than its contemporaries and rivals.

Perhaps because the editorial team consisted of one woman and one man sharing responsibility and treating each other with esteem, I never worried much about "gender issues" at the magazine. At the Hudson Review Frederick Morgan and Paula Deitz oversaw every aspect of the magazine together: literary contributions, the reviews (film, poetry, theater, fiction, gallery and museum shows, dance), finances, personnel issues. Every Saturday night the two of them sat down and went over the poetry, essays, and stories that had been gathered from the great fields of "over the transom" and by formal or informal request, then winnowed by the staff and the written judgments of various advisory editors, and made their final decisions together. Moreover Paula Deitz was a successful professional woman, journalist as well as editor, and I admired her self-discipline and her sense of probity and tact.

To write this essay I have gone back to take snapshots of the Hudson Review at its inception, then twenty and forty years later, then at its sixtieth anniversary issue in the spring of 2008. The first issue in 1948 contains a touchingly idealistic manifesto written by the three inaugural editors (Frederick Morgan, William Arrowsmith, and Joseph Bennett), and offers poems by Josephine Miles, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, and W. S. Merwin. Miles, the first woman to be tenured in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley, published over a dozen books of poetry. Despite the restraint and formality of her own poetry, she was a champion of the Beat poets, and she persuaded Richard Eberhart to review Allen Ginsberg's Howl in the New York Times. In that first issue she wrote: "Not roof shelter, but leaf shelter / the tentative / crosswise cover / which a thousand light ideas give," lines that still seem like a good definition of poetry.

After that, however, through 1952, there is no poetry written by...