(A Blessing Outside Us is Morley's first published collect...)
A Blessing Outside Us is Morley's first published collection of poetry. Judith Graff, critiquing A Blessing Outside Us for Open Places, commented that the poems centered around Morley's grieving "achieve an amazing fusion of intensity and serenity."
(Cloudless at First presents 30 years of Morely's poetry, ...)
Cloudless at First presents 30 years of Morely's poetry, including her most recent work, in the same sure, lyrical voice. Hilda Morley's poems, even the elegiac ones, are a celebration, almost ritually so, steeped in the wine of what Donne called 'the ecstasy.' She is a poet of loss, and she is a romantic as much as she is a metaphysician. The years have not diminished her amazingly youthful ardor.
(This is a collection of transformation poems. They map th...)
This is a collection of transformation poems. They map the poet's turning toward a healing from grief and brokenness. They explore the rich textures of friendship and render, with clarity and delicacy, both outer and inner landscapes.
Hilda Morley was an American translator and poet associated with the Black Mountain movement. Recognition for her poetic accomplishments came relatively late in life. Until the 1970s, Morley's poetry could be found only in literary journals.
Background
Hilda Morley was born Hilda Auerbach on September 19, 1916, in New York City, into the family of Russian-émigré parents, Rachmiel and Sonia Kamenetsky Auerbach. She was a cousin of Isaiah Berlin through her father. At 15, she moved to Palestine with her mother.
Education
Morley received a rich and varied education. As a youngster, she attended the experimental Walden School in New York City. Hilda Morley began writing poetry as a child and studied Hebrew, French, Italian, and Latin. At the age of fifteen she moved to London to study at the University of London.
Hilda Morley began her career at the Committee to Aid Jewish Refugees from Germany, and at that time she married Eugene Morley. A painter with a circle of Abstract Expressionist friends, Eugene Morley introduced her to a vision of art that would influence her poetry’s detailed attention to the world around her.
Hilda and Eugene Morley divorced a few years later, and she went on to marry the avant-garde composer Stefan Wolpe. This relationship greatly affected the trajectory and tenor of her career, beginning with their move to Black Mountain College in 1952, where she taught English literature. Her time working with the Black Mountain poets proved formative to her poetry, as she developed a more deliberate use of spacing, breath, and line breaks. This understanding of stress and movement comes across more subtly in her work than in other poetry of the Black Mountain School.
Along the way, she taught English at a private school in England and at Walden School in New York, where she also worked as a researcher for the Zionist Youth Commission and as a Hebrew translator for the Office of War Information. Once recognized as a poet, she took academic assignments, lecturing leading poetry workshops and judging poetry.
Ms. Morley published five books of poetry in which she articulated emotions and feelings in free verse, but a type of verse as measured as dance or music. Morley’s first published collection of poetry was A Blessing Outside Us (1976). Many of the poems in this volume are elegies to Stefan Wolpe, who passed away in 1972. Stanley Kunitz describes the poems Morley wrote after Wolpe’s death as “born of an obsessive grief” while simultaneously “celebrative, almost ritually so.”
After What are Winds & What are Waters (1983), she received the Capricorn Prize for Poetry for her third book of poems, To Hold in My Hand: Selected Poems 1955-1983 (1983); much of the work in this collection had previously only existed in manuscript form. She went on to write Cloudless at First (1988) and The Turning (1998), which follows the poet’s trajectory into healing out of grief.
Hilda Morley got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1983, and she taught at New York University and Rutgers University, among other universities. She also served as Northeast Missouri University’s resident poet in 1992. Hilda Morley spent her last few years in Sag Harbor, on Long Island, before moving to London in 1997 to work on a biography of her late husband. She died on March 23, 1998.
Hilda Morley wrote that her poetry was shaped by the visions of Abstract Expressionism, which can create metamorphoses. Artists like Klee and Picasso, she said, gave her the means to create word canvases depicting the world around her. Her poems are permeated with the sense of loss, yet filled with a sensuous joy.
Quotations:
"I am a daughter of the daughters of Jerusalem."
Personality
Morley considered herself an inhabitant of the world. Critics speak admiringly of Morley's courage and self-effacing modesty, of her unflinching determination to experience all of life fully, of her "combined lyricism and intelligence."
Quotes from others about the person
You have held to those you’ve cared for with great compassion, let them be actual, made them present in your love. Your poems take them from your heart into that same world you have so honored by seeing it is there.” - Robert Creeley
"Morley manages to speak clearly and sparely of what is least sayable: the sense that we inhabit a living web, not as separate beings but as molecules of a larger and elastic whole." - Village Voice contributor Geoffrey O'Brien
Interests
Writers
Hilda "H.D." Doolittle
Artists
Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse
Connections
Hilda Morley was firstly married to the painter Eugene Morley but their marriage lasted from 1945 to 1949 and ended in divorce. Many of Morley’s free verse poems are related to the times with her second husband, avant-garde composer Stefan Wolpe, whom she met in 1948 when she translated his composition “Songs from the Hebrew.” His death in 1972 of Parkinson’s disease led Morley to look back on their lives together and reveal her thoughts about his death and her loss through poetry. Ms. Morley is survived by a stepdaughter, Katherina Wolpe.