A Note for Hilda Morley:
A Blessing outside Us

Hilda Morley I've happily known for years now, one of those insistent sisters who invite the world with seemingly innocent provocation of its own dumb vulnerabilities. Put more clearly—I recall so freshly the fact of her then, like some extraordinary English milk-maid, walking along through 'Black Mountain' as on some summer day. One time she and her dear husband, Stefan Wolpe, invited Olson and myself to dinner, paella , as I remember—which was excellent, and we ate with great satisfaction until a small bit of Brillo surfaced in Olson's plate, occasioning disgruntlement on his part, but I like to think I would myself have eaten it, had the honor been mine.

It is now, of course, years later, and I read these extraordinary poems with another sense of honor, and wonder for their physical clarity, their reliance on sensual dimension, whether or no the terms of human life elsewise the case be simple. Possibly the despair at some times confronted, the painful sense of anguish, even the frailty or weakness a human reality has finally to admit, are survived, literally, by virtue of the body's appetite, to move, to see, to feel, to know, to eat.

Her grace is truly of that order. As she says, "so the heart's fire was shaken/ into its powers . . ." Robert Duncan remarked that American poetry is not characteristically sensuous —as if the Puritan tradition we have had, each one, to survive had left this specific mark. In contrast—and despite what they have otherwise at times to 'say'—these poems dance with such a human body, and that health survives all.