Wilbert Snow's grave has as stanza from the very moving poem "And Must I Say Farewell."
Another well-known poem of his is
Conflict
The sea is forever quivering;
The shore is forever still.
And the boy who is born in a seacoast town
Is born with a dual will:
The sand and the rocks and the beeches
Inveigle him to stay,
While every wave that breaches
Is a nudge to be up and away.
(Wilbert Snow)
The son of poet and editor, Frederick Morgan. Seth had a relationship, at first built on heroin, with Janis Joplin. Drugs helped to lead to an early death for Seth. Meditation at Sundown is in memory of Seth.
From the article "Seth Morgan's Last Ride," at the JanisJoplin.net site:
As a boy, Seth listened in as his father chatted philosophy and poetry with friends like e.e. cummings, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas. Seth was a bright child with a genius for wordplay and a talent for trouble; he bounced a devil-may-care swath through elite private academies in New York (Saint Bernard’s), Connecticut (Hotchkiss), and Switzerland (The American School). Vocational training was not a high priority, thanks to his artistic bent but also to the trust fund that would supply, at the very least, his mad money-between $26,000 and $30,000 a year.
Seth was also blessed with good looks and lady-killer charm, which no doubt brought many high adventures his way. He commenced one such exploit in 1970 when he dropped out of Berkeley to move in with singer Janis Joplin, whom he had met while making a cocaine delivery to her Marin County home. Joplin was crazy about Seth, and even called City Hall to inquire about a marriage license. According to Buried Alive the 1973 biography of the singer by Myra Friedman, Joplin pleaded with Seth to force her to stop taking heroin, but he thought it was simply a play for more attention. “We might have married,” he wrote in a biography for his publisher, “were it not for her untimely check-out.”
..."On October 17, 1990, shortly after midnight, Seth Morgan and Suzy Levine approached the right lane of the bridge at about 40 miles per hour. He steered too far to the right and nicked the edge of the median strip. The bike shot up in the air.
Seth flew forty miles an hour face first into the piling with such force that he uprooted the eight telephone poles. Seth “stopped abruptly,” Sergeant Barrios explains, then rolled another 24 feet, coming to a halt in the roadway. His rider, Suzy, missed the piling and soared beyond Seth, landing 45 feet away from the point of impact in a fetal position. both died instantly.
An autopsy found that Seth had cocaine and Percodan in his blood and .3 percent alcohol - three times the legal limit. Suzy had .28 percent alcohol in her blood.
“If she’d been wearing a helmet, she might have lived,” says Officer Carmine Menchel, who visited the scene later. “If he’d been wearing one, he might have had an open casket.”
From an article, "A Continuing Conversation with a Poet" which appeared in the Sewanee Review 115.2 (2007) 290-292.
"Since our summer place is situated on an old quarry site, I insisted on Maine granite for Fred's headstone in lieu of the customary Vermont granite ordinarily employed in theregion. A young neighbor, using his tractor after a summer storm had loosened the earth, excavated from those same woods a block of smooth granite, the sides still rough and covered with green lichen. Since it was too massive for one headstone, I asked a local stonecutter to split it into two, leaving the other half for me.
So finally there is the matter of my own inscription, for it is not considered morbid inFrederick Morgan was a poet and the founding editor of The Hudson Review. His wife, Paula, who is the current editor, maintains a website about her late husband.
The great Poetry Out Loud project is steaming up for another great year of poetry in all 50 States. In Maine, teachers and students can learn how to get involved, and go for the poet's gold at the rain of the endbow, at the Maine Arts Commission website. You can see information about past Maine winners too.
