'We Are Conspirators in Our Undoing'

I’ve just learned that Herbert Morris’ papers are now held by his alma mater, Brooklyn College. This is modestly reassuring news. That so good a poet so recently dead (2001) should have virtually vanished is criminal. I’ve written about his poems fairly often, and each time I hear from readers who prize his small body of work, much of it once published in prominent journals – Poetry, The New Criterion, The Hudson Review. Two years ago, a publisher who hoped to collect all of Morris’ work in a single volume contacted me and said the project was stalled by surviving relatives. I wrote to them several times, emphasizing the importance of Morris’ work, the publisher’s enthusiasm, the love the poems inspired in a small circle of readers, and heard nothing. 

Most of Morris’ poems are dramatic monologues written in blank verse, often composed of lengthy, endlessly qualified sentences. This makes them difficult to quote without distortion. They are not for careless or impatient readers. The prose his poems remind me of are Henry James’ in The American Scene (1907) and W.H. Auden’s Jamesian Caliban monologue in The Sea and the Mirror (1944).

 

Poetry hosts the largest online collection of his work. One of my favorites among his poems is “Magic,” originally published in Salmagundi in 1984 and collected in Dream Palace (Harper & Row, 1986). The speaker is invited onto the stage by the performing magician. This happened to me some sixty years ago and I still don’t know how he pumped milk out of my elbow. You can read all of “Magic” online if you have a Jstor account. Here is the final stanza:    

 

“Magic, I tell myself, is transformation.

We are conspirators in our undoing.

Still, there are weights and depths to be determined:

what kindness is, the nature of assistance.”