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L I F E G O E S O N ~
Happy 100 James Merrill! WEDNESDAY 29 APRIL, 7PM
Cambridge Public Library
449 Broadway, in the Lecture Hall
article by Michael Todd Steffen
With the Hastings Room Series, I’ve had the chance to edit, organize and direct “choral” readings (with three or more readers) of major long poems, including a centenary presentation of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, Donald Hall’s The One Day, Seamus Heaney’s Station Island, and, for his 460th birthday in 2024, Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece.
None of this would have been possible without Bob Scanlan (1948-2025) and the work he did to help revive The Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge. In fact, I had Donald Hall’s The One Day in my backpack, with a dream of a theatrical reading version of that poem in my head, as I sat down beside Martha Collins in Sanders Theater at Harvard one evening, in September 2014, to attend a multi-reader presentation of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. Bob had assembled a cast of American Repertory actors and local poets, some biggies like Erica Funkhouser, Ben Evett, Cherry Jones, Christopher Lydon, Lloyd Schwartz, Fred Marchant, David Gullette and others to read, in spotlights, before microphones, standing, or on stools, from scripts they held.
Joyce Wilson called the performance “a passionate delivery of word, riddle, yarn, ballad and song,” noting the event was “in celebration of the centennial of the birth of Dylan Thomas,” as well as marking the Poetry Theatre’s revival after a ten-year hiatus.
Going back to its original founding in 1953, the Poets’ Theatre gathered an admirable constellation of names, not least its Dublin-born founder Mary Manning (aka Molly Howe). Others include Thornton Wilder, William Carlos Williams, Samuel Beckett, Archibald MacLeish and Dylan Thomas. Its revival in 1986 brought many more onto the recitation stage, including John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Joseph Brodsky, Amy Clampitt, Christopher Ricks, Martha Collins, Derek Walcott and our own David Gullette and Lloyd Schwartz,– as well as our present event’s spotlight James Merrill, a theatrical script of his epic poem with the title Voices from Sandover being produced with the poet and co-readers Leah Doyle and Peter Hooten.
The choral reading, or Poets’ Theatre performance, opens the opportunity to celebrate major poets and their major works, with due amplitude respecting visionary power and stay-with-it resilience. God knows it’s hard enough just to write a sonnet through to the 14th line! And it gives us the chance to come together and enjoy our comradery in the art.
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. A writer of astonishing elegance and wit, highly adept at wordplay and puns, and a virtual master of traditional poetic meter and form, who also wrote a good deal of free and blank verse, Merrill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for Divine Comedies. He would win almost every major poetry prize, from the Bobbitt to the Bollingen, including two National Book Awards for Poetry.
His oeuvre falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled The Changing Light at Sandover (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career.
Between those two periods with their styles, a third form, a narrative poem of a few pages, emerged in what Helen Vendler characterized as “the creation of both the long tale and of a new sort of lyric” exemplified in the poem “Lost in Translation” from Divine Comedies.
When editing the script for this reading, the success of those shorter narrative poems, like “The Broken Home” and “After the Fire” insisted on presentation alongside the celebrated purer lyrics like “The Victor Dog,” “The Mad Scene,” “Mirror,” “The Octopus” and the two Hourglass lyrics—the pieces that determined him as one of the best American love poets of the second half of the 20th century. So much of his emotional genius resides in the whispering intimacy of admiration, the longing and hurt heart and its discourses of complaint, its labyrinthine arguments for concession and reconciliation.
Though it would be unwarranted to deem the accomplishment of Merrill’s epic alongside Homer, Virgil or Dante, the most recent of whom has lasted now for over 700 years, The Changing Light at Sandover does boldly and memorably affirm a divine creation. Merrill’s astonishing contribution to mythological typography may well be the idea of trial and error; his divinities are prone to err but not to regret or retaliate… So, this idea of nearly visible trial and progression – nearly like a Darwinian chart – of animal species and specialization, experimenting for a form to bear their perfuse awareness, memory and care.
It’s understandable how the founding of Rome might interest nearly all educated Romans, or how the journey of spiritual salvation, from a fallen state of lostness (damnation, Hell) through the trials of redemption in Purgatory to Paradise would interest nearly every educated Christian or European reader from Dante’s time to our time. An epic proposal demands a wide public appeal, which Sandover acknowledges in its discussions with the other world, especially in the work’s topical interest in the foreseen perils of nuclear war and its potential for mass destruction, possibly of civilization itself. Everybody’s involved in that question. In Sandover the theme is initially treated at a remove in a parable of ancient Egypt, with the supposed discovery of the fabled elemental power residing in the structure of the pyramid:
WHAT IS NUCLEAR ENERGY BUT DESTRUCTION OF THE
ATOM’S SHIELD? THE PYRAMID THE EGYPTIANS UNDERSTOOD
WAS THAT EXACT PRISM OF LIGHT ENERGY THEY COULD ONLY
REPORODUCE IN STONE. SUCH EXACT STRUCTURING IN QUARTZ WOULD
HAVE MADE THEM MASTERS OF THE WORLD. THE SUN KING AKHNATON
DID THIS: HE HAD MADE IN ROCK CRYSTAL 15 METERS HIGH
SUCH A PYRAMID. EVEN THO ALAS A FRACTIONAL
MILLIMETER WRONG ITS GLOW WAS SEEN IN MINOAN SKIES.
UNDER THEBES TODAY IS THE MELTED LAKE OF HIS JEWEL
“Full of unfulfillment, life goes on,” the poet elsewhere states, in his well-known poem “Lost in Translation,” a narrative about a childhood summer the young Merrill spent with a French-speaking governess, in vivid anticipation of a jigsaw puzzle ordered from a rental company.
Another of Sandover’s major themes intimating the dangers also in—with an emphasis on the Greek prefix—telecommunications, figured in his talks with the revelatory spirits via the Ouija board—prefiguring our immersive attention in today’s Internet, that pinnacle of com and con, our 21st- century tower of Babel.
The 869 pages of poetry in the authoritative Knopf Collective Poems of James Merrill, which does not include the 600 some pages of the epic trilogy: that’s a lot of poetry to choose from for a single event celebrating the milestone of the widely read and admired poet on his centenary.
Editing the text was like assembling a collage of my favorite passages from Merrill. These were also, of course, the best of his poetry… Looking for likely places to cut and paste, I wound up finding and revealing correspondences, as, say, that between macrocosmic and microcosmic perspectives. In plain language, what is happening to oneself is telling about what’s happening in the world and vice versa. Root, stem, bud. So the EARTH IN FLAMES passage from The Book of Ephraim seemed to segue oddly yet comprehensively, not to mention smoothly, with the leveling mood at the opening of “The Broken Home” sonnets, in the picture of the private lonely life of an individual:
Crossing the street,
I saw the parents and the child
At their window, gleaming like fruit
With evening’s mild gold leaf.
In a room on the floor below,
Sunless, cooler—a brimming
Saucer of wax, marbly and dim—
I have lit what’s left of my life.
In a volley with Ephraim, Merrill and his partner David Jackson’s otherworldly interlocutor, a “golden-eyed Greek Jew who only learned The modern languages after being put To death on Capri by Tiberius,” the answer to the question of questions—What does a visiting spirit want from their human host?—is at once simple and deeply dimensional: a mirror.
So that friends who’ve died
May see us when they speak from its far side.
A mirror brings reflection, validation of presence, often of oneself, in light, awakening. From the theater of sleep where things come to (or at) us, as in primordial creation, where our control is reduced, sometimes to little more than flight and victimization, in nightmares, but also in sweeter visions, as recipients of the returns of lost loves, good and even wondrous sensations and understandings.
From that dark aquatic-like, floating, yet potentially frantic and reactionary state, the mirror represents the grace of knowing one’s desires and will in the arbitration of articulate consciousness. It is the inward (figurative) looking glass of our being. As such, mention of the object gleams and chimes in Ephraim’s seemingly nonchalant perhaps somewhat bawdy request for it, this medium, a mirror, of mutual peeps and regard. It is an enhancement and extension, a variation on the primary contact they share in language. Mirror mirror on the wall, incants the Wicked Witch. To hold a mirror up to nature, proclaims Shakespeare. And one of the coolest, most upsetting visuals we get from vampire movies is the life-draining monster’s failure to reflect when he chances to lean in front of a mirror and look into it.
The trope occurs early in Merrill’s lyrical career, in his second collection From the Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), in the poem titled “Mirror,” composed in couplets of half-foot buried rhymes:
I grow old under an intensity
Of questioning looks. Nonsense,
I try to say, I cannot teach your children
How to live. –If not you, who will?
Beyond interesting, it is critical to note the persona element of the piece. The poet has taken on the voice of the mirror—and of those who reply to its reflections, those who look into it. The setting gives rise to the warmth and intimacy of Merrill’s voice, welcoming and confiding. It overrides the analytical ego to the trusting id. Yet in perspective, the poem puts on display the paradox about the private character of poetry (and much of fiction) in publication, that is, intended for the public at large. It begs the rich question: Is this the endeared personality, James Merrill himself, or the genius of lyrical poetry, the spirit of a discipline?
The verse, in the scheme of the couplet, pulses out and chimes with the idea of the order yet reduction (half a foot shorter) of art, in the figure of the second or responding or mirroring line.
The mirror as a metaphor for poetry makes the rhyme (Nonsense of intensity) while its measure is tapered, i.e., shortened, diminished, framed, from that of its natural subject seeking its reflection in the work of art.
A book in its cover bears the intimate nature so much more convincingly than a cell phone popping up everywhere with ads and easily scrolled from post to post. When I purchase an item online then notice my media pages leaking with ads for a like item, I’m likely to get offended by the transactional presumption in AI’s targeted and profitable motives to appeal to my identity. Their trying to personalize themselves to me.
I note this to call awareness to the difference media does make to the text it presents. We mustn’t be deceived into thinking the Internet an adequate replacement of books and other printed materials and libraries, as online marketers and budget-slashing politicians may try to convince us.
In spite of the famous “weirdness” Harold Bloom heralded Merrill’s work for, there’s a deep vein in this poetry, pulsing with a biologically nostalgic urge, to scale down what is so special about himself, a weariness of the higher-keys—for a readier fit into common clothes, shorts, tees and sneakers, Rock music, watching ball games with beer and chips… Great energies, as meteorologists know, derive from the contrast of atmospheres.
Our readers for the Merrill script are:
Linda Bamber grew up in Paris, Bonn, and Athens, where her father was posted as a U.S diplomat. She returned to the United States to attend Vassar College and went on to earn her M.A. from Columbia and her Ph.D. from Tufts University. Her book on Shakespeare – Comic Women, Tragic Men – was published by Stanford University Press. Her poems, stories, essays and reviews have appeared widely in journals, including The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New York Times and The Missouri Review.
David Gullette is one of the founding editors of Ploughshares as well as literary director of the revived Poets’ Theatre, which presented his adaptation of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf in December 2015 and his Boston Abolitionists in March 2017 at the Boston Athenaeum. David has acted with the ART, Christmas Revels, Actors Shakespeare Project, and NPR’s The Spider’s Web. His book of poems Questionable Shapes was published by Cervena Barva Press in 2017. His novel Dreaming Nicaragua was published by Fenway Press in 2011.
Lloyd Schwartz is the Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in criticism, Lloyd is currently a regular commentator on classical music for NPR’s Fresh Air. Schwartz’s books of poetry include Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press) and the forthcoming “Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948)” and other poems (Arrowsmith). Lloyd is the 2025 recipient of the David Ferry-Ellen LaForge Annual Poetry Award for his poems, translations, reviews, and editorial work.
The reading is free and open to the public. We hope you’ll join us!
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