Letters to You: The Second Fame of Douglas Morea

Douglas Morea has just published a breakthrough collection of poems, Letters to You, with Broken Turtle Books. Written with an “epistolary pretence,” these poems address the memories, persons, events, places, and moral preoccupations of Morea’s life. Breakthroughs are thought to be the province of youth, yet Morea has developed a new language of poetry, more intimate, but no less daring than the verses of Keats.

Douglas Morea was publishing poems in The New Yorker in the early 1970s when he was about the same age as Keats in his glory. Douglas and his then wife Kass left the literary limelight of New York for the moated enclave of Delaware in the late ‘70s. Douglas remained productive, releasing short run chapbooks, essays, and cartoons, and reading at local venues his longer poems, typed on sheets pasted end to end somewhat like a scroll. I have long proclaimed Douglas to be Delaware’s finest poet. Letters to You demonstrates, I believe, that Douglas Morea’s craft and power have grown since his youthful successes at The New Yorker.

I had been speaking recently with Douglas about John Keats, who had been so clever and daring, before he died at 25. Douglas, who has a wide knowledge of science, said it was even common for folks in the sciences to peak in their youth. I thought of Einstein, who published his Special Theory of Relativity when he was 26.  So what’s new with Morea since his day in The New Yorker sun?

Morea’s growth can be measured by comparing “Having Children,” a brilliant poem he published in the September 16, 1974 New Yorker, with “Hey Canada Geese, How Come Your Babies Almost Never Get Run Over Anymore?” from Letters to You.

In his earlier treatment of procreation amid life’s vicissitudes, Morea’s dominant metaphor is a scene where “brazen summer/wilts weeds in a city lot.” Describing the struggle of the weeds to thrive amid “gobs of tar, old tires,” Morea demonstrates youthful pyrotechnics of imagery, sound figures, and word play:

These growths are pale pith,

sweet and rank, piped in green fibre;

leaves ladder up them:

footholds gouged in the face of sheer cliff-air.

Sun pounds down on raised fingers branching

upon the ledge of bloom;

With such precocious flair, he was good then, but he’s even better now. In “Canada Geese,” he mutes the fireworks so we can hear a more intimate voice, one that tells a subtler tale. Noting how subsequent generations of geese have learned to protect their offspring from traffic, Morea, with defter music, work-play, and apostrophe, laments

While most of you arise by wise adults, seasoned on many seasons,

we get raised by raw near-children.

Humans mostly have but one shot parenting, then

we're shot.

Like you, we learn to keep them off the road, but often

not in time. Like yours, our wisdom grows, but ours grows only old,

and with us dies.

You can read the entirety of both poems at Letters to You Samples.

Some suppose that after his Theory of Relativity, Einstein’s production was restricted to thinking deep thoughts at Princeton until he died in 1955, although he published over 300 scientific papers.

Since his last piece for The New Yorker, Morea has published six other collections of poetry including How About Meet Me Where Nothing Has Ever Happened in the History of the World and Not Sterilized but You Won’t Die From It/The Even Newer Testament. An essayist and cartoonist, Morea wrote The Andrist: a Sexual Political Essay and Book of Crosses: A Thematic Cartoon Collection. His works have appeared in numerous literary magazines including Dreamstreets and The Mickle Street Review, which awarded him the Doris Kellogg Neale prize in 1984.

Like Keats, Morea achieved youthful fame. Like Einstein, his later works are famous to but a few. May the publication of Letters to You provide a second and wider fame for Delaware’s finest poet.

Morea was born in 1945 in Queens, New York City, and grew up primarily there, marrying and moving to Delaware in his late 20s, where he with their mother Kass raised two daughters to successful adulthood. He remains here now with his second wife, Karen.