Gioia's Poetry Set to Music as Hudson Review Turns 60

In our fast-paced society, the quarterly magazine is a something of an anachronism — a covered wagon on the information superhighway.

Even so, the major quarterlies have had extraordinary longevity. The Sewanee Review, by far the oldest, was founded in 1892. The Kenyon Review began publishing in 1939, the Antioch Review — which continues, for now, despite Antioch College's closing — in 1941. The Partisan Review, of course, stopped publishing in 2003.

The Hudson Review, which was the new kid on the block in 1948, has just published its 60th anniversary issue, with essays by Seamus Heaney and Joseph Epstein, fiction by Penelope Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Spencer, and poems by Mark Jarman and J.D. McClatchy.

To celebrate the Review's anniversary this Sunday, the poet (and National Endowment for the Arts chairman) Dana Gioia will participate in an afternoon of poetry and music, part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's Works and Process series.

Six composers — Milton Babbitt, Kirsten Childs, David Felder, Stephen Flaherty, Jimmy Roberts, and John Harbison — were commissioned to set Mr. Gioia's poetry to music. Their pieces will be performed, and Mr. Gioia and the composers will participate in a discussion moderated by the pianist Sarah Rothenberg.

The Hudson Review was founded by three young Princeton graduates — Frederick Morgan, Joseph Bennett, and William Arrowsmith — though it was Morgan who would shepherd it for 50 years, after Bennett and Arrowsmith went on to other pursuits. In 1997, Morgan turned over the editorial duties to his wife, Paula Deitz, who edits it today. Morgan died in 2004.

The Review has published an astonishing range of writers over its six decades, including Thomas Mann; T. S. Eliot; Wallace Stevens; Ezra Pound; Dylan Thomas; Marianne Moore; Robert Graves; Donald Hall; Wendell Berry; R.W.B. Lewis; Maureen Howard; Irving Howe; Eudora Welty; Tennessee Williams; Thornton Wilder; Octavio Paz; William Trevor; Madison Smartt Bell, and Robert Olen Butler.

"The magazine has stayed youthful because the writers are always young or new or fresh," Ms. Deitz said in an interview.

Morgan and Bennett met at Princeton, where they edited the literary magazine, the Nassau Lit, and studied poetry with Allen Tate, Ms. Dietz said. When they graduated in 1943, Tate told them that if they survived the war (Morgan joined the Army, Bennett the Navy), they should start a magazine.

When they reunited in New York in 1946, they followed their mentor's advice, recruiting Arrowsmith, a classicist, to work with them. In the early years, they used their connection to Tate to solicit some of the big-name writers. Over time, they published many rising stars in fiction, poetry, and criticism.

Although the magazine has a stable of literary, theater, and dance critics, everything in the front of the book — fiction, poetry, and essays — is unsolicited, Ms. Deitz said. The staff consists of herself and three other editors. Because the small staff has to handle all the accounting and other practical tasks of running the magazine, "I explain to [job applicants] that you have to like business as well as literature," Ms. Deitz said.

The magazine is not supported by a university or foundation, and it has never taken a political position or allied itself with an academic movement. "The only criterion is excellence," Ms. Deitz said. Its income comes from subscriptions (it currently has 2,200 subscribers), advertising, and the sale of review books.

"I do a lot of fund raising," Ms. Deitz added. "I raise probably a third of our budget from individual donors and foundations." The Review also gets support from the NEA, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Mr. Gioia said that he recuses himself from decisions concerning the Review at the NEA, because he feels such a deep affection for it. When he moved to New York in the late 1970s after attending Stanford Graduate School of Business, he began writing poetry criticism for the Review.

Although he didn't yet feel ready to publish his poetry, "Morgan kept hectoring me, [so] I reluctantly sent him a group of poems. He accepted almost all of them and put them up front, and about a week later, the phone rang. It was the poetry editor of the New Yorker, who said, 'Why didn't you send these poems to me?'"

(Amusingly, Mr. Gioia said he didn't want to publish in the New Yorker then because "[p]eople at work read the New Yorker." Mr. Gioia was then a corporate executive at General Foods.)

Mr. Epstein, who has published essays in the magazine for years, said he has always appreciated the editors' heterodoxy. "From my own experience as a writer, if one wants to attack someone whose reputation is inflated, but who is obviously a god in the pantheon of the New York Review of Books and the New Yorker, the Hudson Review is the place you can do it," Mr. Epstein said.

Ms. Deitz encountered the Review as a senior at Smith College in the late 1950s. "I was taking an interdepartmental seminar on Japan, and I had to do a paper on the hero in Japanese fiction," she said. According to the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature (the Google of the 1950s), the Hudson Review "was the only magazine reviewing Japanese novels, and they had a wonderful article on [Yukio] Mishima, and I used it heavily," she said. She went to work at the Review in 1967, and she and Morgan married in 1969. (He had been previously widowed and divorced.)

"We did it together our whole married life and just loved it," Ms. Deitz said of editing the magazine. "He's very much alive here," she added. "We're always thinking about how he would have addressed a situation and a manuscript."

In addition to the 60th anniversary issue, the Hudson Review has recently published an anthology called "Writes of Passage," which collects stories and essays from the magazine on the general subject of coming-of-age. The anthology arose from a mentorship program the Review has run since 2001 in two public schools, in which writers go into classes to talk to students about an essay the students have already read and studied.