Steven Meyer:: In posing questions I will be focusing on Merrill's trilogy, The Changing Light at Sandover. This should be understood, however, as meaning that everything is fair game, surely one of the guiding principles of Merrill's great, broad-ranging poem. I'll start, then, by asking about the feature of the poetry which is perhaps the broadest-ranging of all -- broader even than the poets encounters with the spirit world -- namely, the encounters he orchestrates between poetry and science. We have, I think, at least two members of the panel who might have something personally interesting to say about this. I believe Helen Vendler began as a chemist, and Richard Kenney's work engages contemporary science at least as much as Merrill's does. Perhaps you can address this question of the relation between Merrill and science, and between poetry and science, and whether there is any particular reason why it should be significant today?

Helen Vendler: It does seem to me that one of the new vocabularies is scientific vocabulary, which is at least as important to us now as, say, theological vocabulary was to the Middle Ages. And for a poet, any new vocabulary is fair game, whether or not this responds to a particular interest of the poet, or whether it's just floating around in the lexicon of the modern world. Ammons and Merrill offer two different interesting perspectives on the use of science. Ammons is a real scientist, that is to say, he did sciences as an undergraduate, physics and chemistry at Wake Forest, and has worked in a scientific enterprise in the glass factory in New Jersey before he went on to become a professor of creative writing at Cornell. He has a long acquaintance with and reading about science from an informed and trained and capable point of view.

Merrill has never worked in a lab, has never taken, presumably, an advanced course in chemistry, biology, or physics, hasn't got an advanced command of mathematics, is in no sense a scientist in any way in which we usually describe scientists. And his use of science, as I see it, comes from poaching on the lexicon rather than speaking from the processes in the same informed way as Ammons does. Ammons, that is to say, can convey the world as seen from the point of view of someone who habitually thinks of the world in scientific terms, and sees us very much at the edge of the galaxy, and by no means at the center of the universe. Merrill's view remains much more anthropocentric. I mean, all those creatures come down to talk to this one person in the room at Stonington. It is indeed an anthropocentric universe, and not the universe of the vacant intergalactic spaces that Ammons writes from. Ammons's view is, in that sense, truer to the facts as we know them about the physical world and the place of human evolution in the general evolution of the physical universe. And he is quite chilly, in fact, at times, because of that. Merrill's is far more a comfortable sense that God B is doing everything, so to speak, for us, doing the V-work, getting the V-work done for us. Getting new, interesting versions of human beings produced, and the helpful angels are all in the service of getting the V-work done and preventing disasters and so forth. So it is a very anthropocentric use, and I would say that Merrill's use of science is largely lexical rather than conceptual. And that would be the sort of distinction I would make.

Richard Kenney: Lets see. I think Professor Vendler's right, that this anthropocentric distinction frames the Poems of Science question perfectly. Just right. But we might infer too much, following the presumption that because Sandover's science isn't Ammons' or Carl Sagan's or Richard Feynman's science -- isn't real science, that is -- that its claims in this direction reduce to lexical poaching. I do suspect it goes deeper than that; I think the grammar's implicated, too, though I'm not confident I understand why well enough to make it plain. Lets see: here's a question: Do you believe in faeries? No. If we take a poll, people in this culture will say No. If someone replied, "Sure, why not?" -- well, that would be an embarrassment. But if the question is framed so: "Do you believe in Arcturans?" "Do you believe in Extra-Terrestrial Intelligences" -- the answer comes back "sure, why not? Why wouldn't there be? Why would intelligent life be localized here on this tiny nothing of a speck at the edge of this unremarkable galaxy -- right?" This is the vocabulary Professor Vendler rightly evokes; this is the humility that cosmological science is supposed to be teaching us. Anthropocentrism is laughable. Species of what used to be called Martians, maybe no longer quite so little or green as leprechauns, OK, certainly, because why not; but real leprechauns aren't for real. I think this is passing strange. The professional mathematician who believes in these space men is persuaded that, when the saucers arrive, he will be called upon to take the telephone. They will communicate in the common language of mathematics. Here's a fellow who cant speak to five people in the continental United States! -- this is Reuben Hersch's parable, a wonderful one. Is mathematics the shape of the curve of the universe, or the shape of the curve of the skull? What do we believe in, what constitutes a live hypothesis? Particles dreamed up by mathematical physicists solely in order to balance their accounts -- particles of no charge and no mass, say, which evince their presence once every four years as momentary traces in a vat of dry cleaning fluid buried in South Carolina -- no problem. Bats and dead poets showing up as traces on a Ouija board in Connecticut -- this isn't a live hypothesis. I'm not saying I don't believe in neutrinos, but I'm glad I wont have to defend them to the twenty-fifth century.

Look, oversimplifying things only a little, you can say that Science has for quite a long time now assumed half the function of a functioning religion. Its given us a creation story in which we believe quite literally. We really believe there was this Big Bang, and then certain physical and chemical evolutions, including us, which were its consequences. This is a cosmogonic tale -- half a religion. That Science hasn't yet commanded or satisfied the other function -- that it hasn't yet taught us how to live -- well, thats coming. The myth is still aborning. How does it go? -- Ecology will carve the tablets; Gaiea will be shown to have a sentient skin; that sentience will be understood and parsed in the confluence of psychology, sociobiology, and cybernetic neuroanatomy, or some God damn thing. You can bet that the precedence of the great precedent myths will be discernable through this synthesis, too, surely as Yule logs penetrated Christmas. I don't look for anything too pretty; you can feel the Puritan carrier wave swelling under us, already. Sandover's tonic there, too. Anyway, its in this second functional evolution that I see Sandover taking its place -- not that it provides plausible cosmology, but that its part of this leakage of scientific metaphor into the moral and social sphere. Its been a slow leak, for reasons which seem apparent: the problem with this Myth of Science is, its unpopulated. Its stories don't have people in them, apart from the scientists themselves, whose earnest lives are no substitute for the vagaries of gods. The metaphors are severe and mathematical and inhuman. They're senseless. This is a great story, but sense is just what it doesn't make. Why else has it proven so particularly resistant to art? Art has to be able to penetrate the thought, to carry it to earth, so to speak, break it smaller, bring it to local epithet. Now, surely as I'm an educated citizen of this half-century, I'm bound to be something of a fundamentalist: I'll light my candle in the cathedral of physics first, and second, I'll wear the green badge and gnash my teeth for my sins and the sins of my people and fear the latest apocalypse and apologize to The Planet, meanwhile. But I'm a poet, too, and when I see what James Merrill has teased out here, the strange, crank brilliance, the charm and seduction of it, this populous, anthropic otherworld, these improbable figures, charming in themselves and openly metaphorical, too, enacting a mystery play whose operation is spelling and whose lexicon is scientific and whose grammar really is congruent with those smug or scary predictions real science seems to be pointing toward -- well, I shake my head, I cheer. James Merrill found a way to terraform the myth! The great story, inhospitable and severe as it is, he found a way in, a way to live there awhile, to tap the immense power of it, to make sense of it. A postern, private, idiosyncratic entrance, surely, a seam which closes behind him. The rabble banging outside the front gate can only desist and cheer.

Steven Meyer: Anybody else have anything to add at the moment?

Rachel Hadas: I would just, as a footnote, recall the passage early in Mirabell [0.8 = p. 109 in Sandover] where Merrill says he'd gotten the order to do Poems of Sciences and says Ugh! and thinks of the schoolboy with glasses and he

Richard Kenney: Slug-faced. The slug-faced boy.

Rachel Hadas: Right. And many months passed "Before I sat me glumly down to read." Just here, one of the forms the breakthrough takes -- well, I would just enlarge a bit on what Helen said poaching on the lexicon. Its poaching a whole realm of ideas and images, not merely words. The passage is worth quoting:

Science meant
Obfuscation, boredom -; which once granted,
Odd lights came and went inside my head.
Not for nothing had the Impressionists
Put subject-matter in its place, a mere
Pretext for iridescent atmosphere.
Why couldn't Science, in the long run, serve
As well as one's uncleared lunch-table or
Mme X en Culottes de Matador?

I'd also mention, later, Maria with her "godforsaken box of buzzing lead" or the radiation treatments mentioned in "Santorini" -- all ways of, as it were, dramatizing or domesticating procedures we normally experience as inhuman, inhumane, utterly unpoetic -- of claiming or reclaiming them for poetry -- pretexts for some kind of atmosphere, iridescent or otherwise. The other things I'd say about Merrill's whole career, and I guess this comes under the umbrella of reprise, thinking about yesterday's lecture, is that he has maintained through the decades a curiosity, an alertness, an interest in how things are being done, how people look and talk. (I believe Helen mentioned this years ago in reference to Braving the Elements -- the sense that someone out there is writing down one's life.) Tyvek windbreakers, junky New Age stores, my son's technicolor orthodontia -- he notices everything. So to shut out the whole realm of imagery and vocabulary would be to risk repeating himself, sinking into boredom and nostalgia, in a way he doesn't want to do. (Contrast some of his agemates in poetry -- I name no names.) He's always on the cutting edge of something. I read a new poem of Jimmy's always with the sense of "This is the news."

Stephen Yenser:: Yes. Those are very full answers, to which -- picking up another end of what Helen was saying -- I would add that it is true that his universe is anthropocentric, and I suppose one might argue that it is a very optimistic view of things, that God and the angels take care of us. On the other hand, there are moments in The Changing Light that still give me chills when I read them, and its because of my sense of an absence at the center of things, not the presence of God B. I think, for instance, of God B's song, that ten-line, decasyllabic song, which seems to me terrifying. This is God, but he's lost, cut off, severed from anybody with whom he might communicate. So that ought too to be taken into account before we think of Merrill too quickly as a happy poet, I think. Another thing, I don't know exactly how this fits in, but it seems to me that in the way that some of us use philosophy and some of us use science, he has always used psychology. He has been an appreciative reader of Jung for a long time. He knows Freud, too, and he's always thinking of personal relationships, so there is a sense in which the science of The Changing Light is not just science, but also part of the psychological context. Its part of the relationship between him and David and him and other people. The science is perhaps here partly in the service of psychological portraits.

Steven Meyer: If I can pick up on that and then go on to another question. You suggested that the fearsomeness of some of the verse is embodied in this brief ten-line song. Later on in the poem there is a reprise of the song, also ten lines in length and again in the voice of God B. When I read these lines, I cant help hearing Beckett, and it seems likely to me, although I haven't asked Merrill about this, that the place in which God B finds himself is very much the place of late Beckett. It is certainly inhabited by Beckett's diction and the rhythms of his prose. On the one hand, then, theres the question of Merrill's spirituality, his spiritualism, and on the other hand there is the question of how that spiritualism is related to this other very noticeable feature of his poetry the presence in it of earlier writers as characters. Its not just that he echoes the verse of earlier writers but he embodies the writers themselves, evoking and recreating them, as it were, in the flesh. When, then, is the particular nature of this form of spirituality, what kind of story can we tell about it? Where does it differ, for instance, from Yeats's spirituality? And what of the spirituality that William James invokes in his 1909 essay, "Confidences of a Psychical Researcher", where he describes the hazy penumbra in us all where lying and delusion meet, where passion rules belief...[W]however encourages it in himself finds himself impersonating someone else, either signing what he writes by a fictitious name or spelling out, by ouija-board or table tips, messages from the departed. Our subconscious region seems, as a rule, to be dominated either by a crazy will to make-believe, or by some curious external force impelling us to personation? Is this adequate to explain what Merrill is doing with his impersonations? In other words, can one draw a continuous line between him and James, or does he do something in his poetry that James doesn't account for, perhaps doesn't even allow for?

Stephen Yenser: It's not quite clear to me how self-conscious the process is that William James is outlining. If this is meant to be self-conscious, why the, I think you can see light between James and Merrill, so to speak. But if not, why perhaps not. I mean, I remember -- this is no place, I guess, for this kind of recollection -- but I knew James Merrill when he began "The Book of Ephraim", indeed before it was in verse. It was in prose, and the manuscript was lost. But the ouija communications had gone in those days from what was clearly a parlor game in the beginning, just a pass-time, and a way of entertaining people and so on, to another stage altogether. And when he would talk about the experiences with the board, it seemed to me that he was frightened. And so there was a strong sense in those days of the Other. He didn't know what was going on. Something was going on. He wasn't about to say it didn't have anything to do with his subconscious, but he was really shaken, and I'm not sure if thats the kind of thing that William James would point us to. James seems to have in mind more of a self-conscious process. So I think James Merrill was -- I think he was bitten. And he hadn't known that he was going to be. But -- that's not a very good answer to your question, which is very thoughtful.

Helen Vendler: You know, I heard an interesting talk by Roy Foster, who is the biographer of Yeats and author of a history of modern Ireland. He took this on, and was giving a talk on the question of occultism in Yeats, which Merrill's biographer will have to confront as well, and he wondered why occultism had such a vogue at that time among the Anglo-Irish. This was simply a historian's question: Why were they doing it more than others, as far as he could see? I mean, upper-class Protestants in France were not doing occultism to the same degree that upper-class Protestants in Ireland were. He himself thought it was fallout from an envy by imaginative persons of the saints, the devotions, the novenas, the mysteries, the graphic art all around in the churches -- that it seemed to an imaginative person that Protestantism, with its iconoclastic tradition, was deprived of imaginative stimuli, and that, especially in a country like Ireland, where there is such festooning of imaginative stimuli, that the Anglo-Irish Protestants felt particularly deprived and were repopulating their imaginative world, you might say, with spirits. I don't know how much water to put in this hypothesis, but still the felt deprivation of an imaginative mind is very different from the felt deprivation of an intellectual mind. Thats partly the question of the different responses to The Changing Light at Sandover -- I mean, what form your metaphysical deprivation takes. For some, it takes the form of wanting to repopulate the imaginative world with spirits; Yeats certainly wanted fairies, and then later he wanted spirits, mysterious instructors and whatnot. It's very upsetting to one's own sense of propriety, I think when a poet does this. The first time I saw what are known as the spirit photographs of Yeats, studio portraits with ectoplasm coming out of his head, I was appalled. Yeats had kept these studio portraits of himself, and they were in his son's possession, and the ectoplasm, curiously always female, is coming out of the side of his head. One shows a rather cloudy, beautiful young woman, the other shows a sort of twenties marcelled flapper, a much more updated form of ectoplasm. I mean, this was truly a stumbling-block for me with Yeats, as when I saw all the occult notebooks of Yeats, in George Mills Harpers study, where you see And then the black dog said....And then I asked the black dog.... And you think: Why are you asking the black dog anything? For me, this is a very hard thing to take in Merrill as well as in Yeats. I've seen some of the transcripts that Merrill was kind enough to show me, and I do believe that its a way of doing an end-run around the conscious and cognitive censors of a highly intellectual mind. The stream of consciousness produces letters and they add up to something that you wouldn't have written down if you sat down to write with your conscious and cognitive mind. I'm as sympathetic to end-runs around the censor as anybody else, so I take it as that. For Yeats, the cognitive censor had become extremely oppressive by the time he took up the automatic writing, and perhaps for Merrill, too. Insofar as its a parlor game, it clearly mobilizes the unconscious. I remember one of the most honest and truthful men I ever knew saying that when he was a boy of fifteen, he and a friend began to play with the mother's Ouija board, and the thing began to go so fast that he couldn't track it at all and, he being a very well-brought-up Protestant boy, ran into the next room, frightened of what was happening, and then found his hand continued to move as if on an invisible board, pointing out the letters. So clearly this is something that can happen in a verbal mind; once you've got the picture of the arc in your mind, your hand will go on doing it, with some quick synapses working that have been mobilized, and wonderful things will happen. It happens outside of the conscious direction. I don't think its a fraud at all. But I don't think its spirituality in the highest sense, either.

Richard Kenney: It might be that the distinction Steven offered us -- as between spiritualism and spirituality -- might be a good one to hold. Even as the New Age collapses this distinction, it seems to me any poet would still wish to skim his paper airplanes between, safely under the high holy radars of the second, while maintaining safe altitude above the kitsch and stick incense of the first. I recall James Merrill, early on, expressing humored indignation that critics or reviewers would suggest he'd made it up -- that the Ouija board was an artistic strategy. It offended him that anyone might imagine he'd choose such a tacky apparatus! Or better say, he'd choose such an apparatus. He wouldn; it did. Steven's question interests me, because William James -- specifically in "The Will to Believe" -- James did help me think this problem through. How in the world are we supposed to take these poems? As James wrote, were all of us powerfully anxious not to be taken in. I lived then in a world where Ouija boards didn't work. They weren't live hypotheses (to use James's term), or the source or vehicle of live hypotheses. They belonged to the world of the credulous or fraudulent occult -- or, if necessary, as in James Merrills' case, or Helen Vendler's trustworthy friend's case, to that immense class of second or third-hand objects and events permanently warehoused under some category like Hmmmm, or temporarily unexplained. Anyway, subsequently I met James Merrill, and visited him in Stonington. The Ouija board was set up, willoware cup and all -- incidentally, Stephen, you spoke wonderfully of Whitman in your lecture this morning, and I thought of Whitman then, the Song of the Exposition: the muse, installed amidst the kitchenware! At any rate, we put our hands on the cup, and the thing kind of drifted a little bit, and James wrote down the letters. You could say I was game -- eager, even, but skeptical. Mr. Descartes: here would be a proof. The little cup was perfectly welcome to try to arm-wrestle me into one. How naive, how silly! Well, there were letters all over the board, and we brought some to paper, but it didn't spell anything. The single positive move followed a desultory drift to the Q: zip, the cup found the U, James muttering well, of course it goes this way. I wondered if maybe he hadn't encouraged it; I couldn't be sure. We were only a couple of minutes at this; it was a failed experiment. James declared it such, and threw away the paper. I didn't think too much more about it -- one doesn't, engineering scenes confirmatory of ones prejudices. Not too long after, my dog taught me the lesson, or rather, pointed me to William James, who made words of it. This dog was the most athletic creature I've ever known, shocking grace and indifference to gravity, a whole physical nature like the U following the Q. Excepting the case of stairs: she was cowardly, and couldn't climb stairs for trembling. A stair or two, then shed shy and skid down in a miserable heap. Thats a version of what happens when certain nimble but skeptical intelligences try to climb a poem. Unbelief, formalized as in a Scientific Method, falsification its principal tool -- such a method is tremendously important and generative and powerful and necessary to the order and defense of culture and abeyance of folly and the nurturance of truth and justice. But for all of that it can't make stair over stair, it can't make letters constellate into words. It prevents these operations, all operations based on the opposite method. It cancels attraction, it breaks metaphor. Another way to put it: fission and fusion both liberate energy, but by different means, and they're mutually exclusive. Put another way, as Frost did: the figure for poetry is the same as the figure for love. The Show Me Method is as unpromising for the kindling of new poems as of new passion, or, later, the cultivation of in-laws, say. One temporarily abandons the safety of skepticism, falling forward, hand outstretched, with a will to believe. How many poems persuade us against our will? A very few. This is one of the fine things about your way with criticism and analysis, Professor Vendler, or so it seems to me: that you approach poems with an open heart, prepared to try, at least, to take a poem at its own words, on its own terms. Thats the way one should read poems, for altogether practical reasons: its the method that works. This is the U follows the Q Method, in retrospect. But this is principally a method in prospect: as from poiein, a method of making, of teasing form into existence.

I remember a long evening listening to the chaos mathematician Mitchell Feigenbaum speak about analagous processes in his line of invention. He spoke of an undifferentiated field of possibility, a tray of numbers, a tray of letters, which, seeded with an idea, would begin to take on formal features. Number calls to number across mathematics -- all of it metaphorical, no matter how consonant with reality (the universe of appearances, that is), none of it in any original or objective sense necessary, but necessary by means of chaining consequence. Initial conditions are crucial. It must have been so for the first replicating molecules in the first seas. It was certainly the same with this vie work. A universe literally spelled out of nothing. So, when people speak of the spiritualism of the thing, when they squint skeptically into this complex heaven Merrill conjured, that the alphabet and the numbers conjured through or with or by way of James Merrill and David Jackson, and try to measure the truth of the thing, as against some truth of Christs passion or the truth of Maxwells equations or some other very damn true thing, well, thats crazy, isn't it? This is the point where its revealed -- that's the word -- revealed that the apparatus isn't tacky at all: its not a parlor game, its the tray of alphanumerical symbols. This seems to me the crux of the trilogy, that paradigm of the verb poein, where number and letter are posited, and attract meaning to themselves, these accreting by sequential acts of willed belief, U following Q, stair on stair, and then there's heaven! -- a whole cosmogony, a grammatical universe, an instrument with which to think and please and be pleased.

Steven Meyer: And is no accident.

Richard Kenney: No accident!

Rachel Hadas: Stephen spoke of the fear that James seems to have felt early on. But evidently that fear did not prevent him from continuing, unlike the boy in Helen's story. And I was thinking of the oppositions we've been hearing about, the contradictory impulses. At the end of one of the poems Helen spoke about yesterday, "164 East 72nd Street", we read of his being somehow again "ten years old,/ Trustful, inventive, once more good as gold." Trustful; inventive. On the one side you have to trust where the powers will lead you, not to be fearful or cynical; on the other hand, you may also have to invent as you go along. In the trilogy, of course, DJ often exemplifies lack of trust via fear, JM lack of trust via disbelief; but somehow they do persevere, they do invent. The risk and the fear and the resistance are a very big part of the story of the trilogy as it unfolds. So that our own disbelief, our own resistance, are incorporated into a dialectic which thus becomes more entertaining and dramatically paced, as well as more believable, than it would be if all were smooth sailing.

Helen Vendler: Well, I might say just one other thing about the peopling of the poem with living and dead poets. I think of those lines in "The Prelude" where Wordsworth says "There is one great society on earth/ The noble living and the noble dead." If you're inventing your own picture of the universe, it would have to include the noble dead as well as the noble living. The trilogy to me is a failed experiment; I don't regard it as a successful epic. I think Merrill's greatest successes come in the lyric, myself; since I'm also wedded to the lyric as a form, I may be prejudiced in that respect. Nonetheless, I understand the wish to see what the furthest reaches of your own imagination would be. I think of Keats, going down deliberately to stay in the Isle of Wight until he had finished a four thousand line poem, the length determined in advance; he would just see, if he gave himself four thousand lines, what would be the limits of his imagination. He deliberately took the four elements as a structuring principle. He would write about the air, he would write about under the sea, he would write about the earth -- he didn't, in the end, write about fire. And if you want to probe the utmost limits of where your imagination would take you if you gave it free rein, I think that's a very worthwhile thing for a poet to do, whether it fails or not. And Keats himself thought that Endymion had failed. Nonetheless, he learned how far his imagination went, and in Endymion there are the seeds of everything else he ever wrote. And so it was a very useful exercise for him. I mean, every one of the odes is there; Lamia is there; Hyperion is there. I see this as something that an ambitious poet at some point wants to do. If I thought up a whole world, what would it be, and what would it turn out to have in it? It would have to have the dead in it as well as the living, the gods as well as human beings, and thats what Merrill did. Whether it's an imagination that you find congenial or not, whether its a poem you find successful or not, at least you know what the map of the Merrill imagination looks like what its degrees of grandeur are, what its degrees of fancifulness are, where its mythology tends to go. And theres a notable absence of erotic myth, for instance, in The Changing Light at Sandover. Almost all the great myths are erotic myths, and Merrill has successfully used Cupid and Psyche, but theres no -- theres a Mother Earth and theres a God B, but they never, so to speak, get together in The Changing Light at Sandover. Nor is there a comparable homosexual myth. Theres the myth of friendship, but its very much de-eroticized. The poets are dead -- Auden and so forthand the DJ-JM relationship is consummated only on the Ouija board. So that theres a kind of compared to classical myth there's a profound desexualization of myth, as I see it. And its one of the things that makes me not entirely happy with the poem as a cosmogony. Its missing, as I see it, a way of interpolating human erotic experience into the myth. The myth of friendship is what animates the book as I see it.

Steven Meyer: Does anybody want to respond to that? That seems a question which wants an answer.

Stephen Yenser:: Well, in answer, my first question would be, what are the criteria for the successful epic? And then my second question would be: Do we really want to judge something this long as a whole thing. I mean, is that the way to get at it, to say it either sinks or swims? I mean, maybe parts of it sink and parts of it swim. And maybe the Canterbury Tales are sometimes good and sometimes not quite so good, and in any case not complete. So too with Pound's Cantos. The Prelude could hardly be called altogether successful. And so on. I think I'd be unhappy with judging the whole of the Aeneid, too. Much easier to judge the whole of an ode by Keats, or one of Marvell's mower poems.

Rachel Hadas: It has frankly never occurred to me to condemn the trilogy on the grounds of the lack of eroticism, though, yes, I'd agree its uneven. But I've always thought of Sandover as activated by the double spirit of friendship and of elegy -- as among other things an enormous response to the aging and death, as one goes through middle age, of an increasing number of ones cronies. The trilogy may not be exactly erotic, but it repopulates the world. I think of a wonderful phrase from Iris Origo's memoir, that we are not alone, are not living in a bare and chilly now. This might be an epigraph (one of many) for the trilogy, which is definitely not bare and chilly, even if its not fleshly either. I don't know where I'd put a love scene, but I don't miss them. Maybe that says something about me.

Steven Meyer: I'd like to extend this question in a slightly different direction, namely the relation between The Changing Light at Sandover as an epic and Merrill's lyric gift. This is, after all, an epic that contains a large number of remarkably finished lyrics. Now, is the fact that these finished lyrics show up in this open-ended poem merely incidental to the writing of the lyrics? That is, does their being embedded -- if thats what they are in -- a poem of this length and complexity -- make something more of them than if, like so much of Merrill's verse, they were free-floating lyrics, pure and simple and unattached?

Rachel Hadas: Or something less.

Steven Meyer: Or does it make them something less? Exactly. I don't want to presuppose the answer by how I ask the question.

Stephen Yenser: I would think that the big structure permitted many of those lyrics. They wouldn't have existed without the vocabulary given to them by the big structure. So it seems to me that it was a way of freeing him up to write lyrics. I would think of the larger structure as a kind of matrix, rather than something into which these other things are embedded, as in a conglomerate or something like that.

Steven Meyer: Would you object strongly to somebody saying: Well, why don't we just now -- now that they've been written -- why don't we remove them from it, and look at them as discrete poems? As will inevitably happen forty or fifty years from now. Somebody's going to do that.

Stephen Yenser: Oh, well, we've already begun to do it. See Helen's own Harvard anthology of contemporary verse. Sure. Well, I don't know. It seems to me that this is very much the way the world is, that there are little structures that are part of bigger structures, and lots of those structures don't get finished and are rough at the edges. So the state of the lyrics in regard to the grand scheme of Sandover doesn't trouble me. It looks to me like the way things are, basically.

Rachel Hadas: I think that the lyrics are of a quality that permits them to be extracted. They may not all be among his very greatest lyrics, because there are so many, but some certainly are -- Samos, for instance. Also, its interesting that the occasions for some of the various lyrics provide a peek into the workshop, as where, mulling over some material that seems special, JM muses "It might draw well/ In the glass chimney of a villanelle, and then of course we get to read the villanelle."

Helen Vendler: Well, Keats puts the Ode to Bacchus and the Ode to Sorrow in Endymion, for I think many of the same reasons. And Yeats, when his own lyric gift dried up, said he wrote plays in order to find situations to make lyrics from that were not situations in his own life. But then when Richard Finneran took the lyrics from the plays and stuck them into his edition of The Collected Poems and detached them from their matrix, I just hated it. They belong in the plays, where they were put, and not detached, so I don't know how I'd feel if somebody published a little chapbook of the lyrics from The Changing Light at Sandover.

Rachel Hadas: I guess Shakespeare's songs would not be a good analogy.

Helen Vendler: Yes, why not?

Rachel Hadas: They're detached already. Their subject matter is often unrelated to the dramatic action from which they arise.

Steven Meyer: One of the greatest pleasures that one experiences as a reader of Merrill's poem is in actually finding the lyrics. That is, going along and half retrospectively, half prospectively figuring out, "Oh my God, I'm in the middle of a lyric that hasn't been announced to me beforehand by all this white space around it." The question for me than becomes: What is Merrill doing with this experience, in obliging and also encouraging the reader to have the experience?

Helen Vendler: Well, it reminds me of what Ashbery does in The Flow Chart. I mean, Ashbery is somebody who does discrete lyrics, and then he writes Flow Chart, which is in some ways a maddening book, in which all the static of life and all the noise, you might say, is there. Every so often the noise coheres and you get something that approximates an Ashbery lyric, which then falls back again into the static and the noise; and then eventually another crystallization takes place. To the extent that this is a postmodern world, people want to show that the lyric is not immune from the ordinary processes of cognition, that cognition is going on all the time as the stream of consciousness, and every so often the stream of consciousness makes a ripple around a ripplestone, as Ammons says, and then you have a lyric. It may be more truthful to show the lyric process as something occurring in the stream of cognition rather than something separate from it. And it does happen in Sandover just the way it does in Flow Chart.

Rachel Hadas: What was that passage you were reading from in your lecture where current is both the current of a flow and an electric current?

Stephen Yenser: In The Changing Light, you mean. Yes. Section X of Ephraim.

Steven Meyer: In effect, its the issue of the disembodied lyric, and this is a way of embodying it. But that would return to the question of how much what Merrill is doing with the language of biology is meant to be merely analogy and what kind of claims he is making for something more than analogy between the poetry and his science. Thats probably an unanswerable question, but its at least

Stephen Yenser: Would you do that again?

Rachel Hadas: That's not the same question, is it? Its about lyric? The one you just asked?

Steven Meyer: Actually, it was a question bringing together the question about lyric and the first question about science and poetry.

Stephen Yenser: Run it by us again.

Steven Meyer: All right. Given that in The Changing Light at Sandover lyrics are embodied in a way that they may or may not be when they are no longer embedded in the poem that is, when they are separated out -- is Merrill merely drawing an analogy when he suggests a relation between biology, God B, etc. and the poetry that he writes, or can he be viewed as making a stronger argument, proposing that there may be some intrinsic relation between biological embodiment and embodiment understood in poetic terms. That's the question. I don't know if there are any answers. Or takers.

Stephen Yenser: Is the question: How do we understand the relationship between the texture of the poem and the texture of the world at large?

Steven Meyer: That would be a way of putting it, but it removes the language of biology from the question.

Helen Vendler: Could I say one more thing about the matrix? There is a whole form of art that resembles the late Michelangelo Pietas, where the things are only half out of the stone, and some of the Rodin's where the form is just emerging from the stone. Modern music often has a kind of cacophonic stream and then a melody will arise and then be reabsorbed into the cacophony. Theres a generalized feeling these days that the obligation to show the matrix and the emergence of form from the matrix, and the reabsorption of form in the matrix, which is very much an evolutionary perspective, too. In biology, there exists the gene-stream from which a form will evolve, and become perfect and then perhaps be extinguished or degenerate. Crystallization and decrystallization are part of the mineral world, but this same process also happens in the biological world. So that perhaps our continual sense of the flux of the inorganic and the organic world is behind the artistic manifestation of it as well. To be truthful, you know, about the world.

Stephen Yenser: The yearning for gems from Sandover seems to me a throwback to an aesthetics that is at least not popular right now, and that presumes that experience really can be extracted from the welter that it takes place in. I was struck by the relationship between Helens description of how a poem might work and Rick's description of how his chaos theorist friends experiment works, and they're pretty interchangeable. Coleridge says someplace that genius operates under very strict laws that it improvises very quickly.

Rachel Hadas: There's another analogy, too. In Foreword to Recitative, Merrill writes:

"With prose, as I saw it [in contrast to poetry], the aria never came. All was recitative which, however threatened by resolution, continued self-importantly to advance the plot, explaining, describing, discriminating, while at least this listener, in the grip of his untenable prejudice, held out for song, for opera, for opera works no longer made of set pieces but durchkomponiert according to the best post-Wagnerian models. (xiii)"

Stephen Yenser: There is one thing I like about the Coda to Sandover, which at first I didn't like at all. I didn't think the Coda belonged -- but I think what was troubling me was that my sense of proportion had been violated. I wanted this to be a trilogy. I mean, I had been told it was a trilogy, I'd been counting on its being a trilogy, I'd been decided about a trilogy, and then along comes this lump at the end, which kind of disbalances everything. But then, of course, the poem has leaked out beyond these boundaries, too, and we get other poems from the Ouija board, and lots of overlapping. So I began to see that he's not absolutely devoted to the unitary anymore, which is quite a different place from where he began, I think. He was the writer of the crystalline lyric. But the work is opened up now. And I think the Coda was a good step, a grand step, and I'm glad he took it, though it maddened me at the time.

Richard Kenney: That's so interesting. I know I felt the same way. Here he'd closed up with Admittedly I err, and it was such a click of the heels and a final bow, and then these other things stage hands carting out more poetry, so to speak, and here with the lights coming on and all. So irritating and wonderful.

Rachel Hadas: And then From the Cutting Room Floor. And he's referred to the poem as endlessly self-revising.

Helen Vendler: Well, that's a steal from Wallace Stevens's endlessly elaborating poem, you know.

Stephen Yenser: Where is that?

Helen Vendler: An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.

Richard Kenney: Bringing this back around to the issue of excerpting lyrics or cutting the roses off the trellis or picking the diamonds out of the matrix or whatever metaphor were going to use for these little particularly lucid moments in a particularly lucid matrix I guess I just want to hear Stephen say again lets not settle for a final judgement on these, a sum opinion. Lets not require of ourselves any more closure on this point than the trilogy, in the end, allowed itself. Lets not opine in any summary sense that these lyrics are finally diminished by their reliance on a strange, idiosyncratic context, say. That would be equally true of, say, a giraffe or a hummingbird. Rather, these ought to be terms in a conversation. Now, we appreciate Greek pottery. Quite plausibly, we love the urn or the krater for itself; we don't necessarily need the whole place setting. We speak about it without reference to the knife and fork and napkin which may once have flanked it. We speak about Exekias painting of Dionysos in the dish without reference to the dish, right? And someone else will say that's all wrong. You can crack the gargoyle off the soffit of the cathedral and put him in your parlor, and a scholar will come in and remark, Well, you know, really, unless you understand the relation between St. Somebodys vision of Hell and the recursive hegemonic commodification of the iconography of reified X, this gargoyle makes no sense. And you can reply, But I like this gargoyle. Its a practical matter. Absolutely a practical matter: are we inclined to take a cutting? Is the cutting viable? African violets, yes; human eyes or noses, no. Giraffes and hummingbirds (whole) -- yes. We take these little poems out and say, Look at these, will you! And someone else will say, Oh, but really, these are inseparable from the matrix which made them possible. And then you have a conversation: that's civilization. Are the poems less? -- sure. Heres a whole forking, branching empyrean structure, itself like a conversation, which began in the flatness of the tray of letters -- a conversation which -- I'm finished with. Steven Meyer: Well, I'm not finished with you. I think we have a little more time. Let me ask one more question, then Ill open the discussion to the audience. I just want to follow through on something that Stephen Yenser said namely that The Changing Light at Sandover began as prose. Recently it has returned to prose, insofar as A Different Person serves as a kind of prelude, carrying Merrill up to the outset of his experiences with the Ouija board, and so providing a portrait of the author pre-Ouija. What, then, does Merrill have to tell us about the relation between prose and poetry? No doubt any poem, however long, rises from this very flat surface which is prose. But prose isn't all flat surface. The question, again, is how with Merrill as guide or medium are we to understand the relation between the writing of prose and the writing of verse?

Stephen Yenser: I only have obvious things to say, so they can't be right.

Helen Vendler: Say them, Stephen. Say them anyway.

Stephen Yenser: If you look at the worksheets, you will see that, as always, its a very messy process, and sometimes prose gets turned into poetry in just a minute or two and sometimes whole paragraphs that were originally in prose are then versified. You can see what a messy process it is in The (Diblos) Notebook, where occasionally the poem will begin to form itself, begin to crystallize, precipitate out of the prose context, and then it'll trail back into the prose again, or vice versa, as I was saying today, in Prose of Departure. I don't know, there comes a point at which there's no difference between prose and poetry, right? I mean, the one difference is the line. That's the only difference. The single difference between prose and poetry. Theres nothing else. Theres nothing prose can do that poetry cant, or vice versa. The only difference is measure.

Steven Meyer: But that's a difference measure

Stephen Yenser: At some time you come to that point at which you say, Yeah, this has to be measured out. I cant let the printer justify these lines. I'm going to control my own right-hand margin. And when you do that, why you've decided to write poems.

Helen Vendler: What about prose poems, then, Stephen?

Stephen Yenser: Well -- is that a question?

Helen Vendler: Yes.

Steven Meyer: It was a line.

Rachel Hadas: Or maybe you don't believe in blocks.

Stephen Yenser: Well, we know that there are things that are called that call themselves prose poems. But to me they're prose.

Helen Vendler: Right. To you they are prose.

Stephen Yenser: Yes.

Helen Vendler: They're not poems?

Stephen Yenser: No. The term prose poem, however useful on occasion, is self-contradictory.

Rachel Hadas: I would agree with that. Its a maddening genre. A sort of in-your-face impossibility. Students are always asking me about prose poems, and I never know what to tell them, other than Don't believe it. Again, I would refer people to the Foreword to Recitative, where James writes that despite the usefulness of prose, he "persist[s] in seeing it as a mildly nightmarish medium, to which there is no end: coterminous with one's very life, and only at rare and irregular intervals affording that least pause in flight whereby a given line of poetry creates the desire for another, and renews through all-but-subliminal closure the musical attack." (xiii) He's referring precisely to whats unique in poetry, the line.

Stephen Yenser: Yes. The line has an end.

Rachel Hadas: He has also written "Given the least technical facility, poetry is much easier to write." So I wondered if any of the worksheets began with poetry. You're not suggesting that he always takes prose

Stephen Yenser: Oh, no.

Rachel Hadas: And versifies it.

Stephen Yenser: No, I was just saying its a very messy thing. No, no. I have no idea what the proportion is. My guess is, on the contrary, that he mostly begins in verse.

Rachel Hadas: I would think lists and numbers

Stephen Yenser: Yes. I'd say that is right, too.

Helen Vendler: I would want to make a distinction. Steven just leaned over and asked me if I believe in the prose poem, and its not a form I'm fond of at all. But I would not -- I would distinguish between prose and poetry, as I'm sure you would, too, at a level underneath the level of measure. That is to say what prose likes to do versus what measured lines like to do. The narrative momentum of expository prose as well as fictional prose is far more linear than the momentum of poetry, which is systolic and diastolic. In poetry, you stay in the same place, but sometimes you think of it as going deeper, sometimes you think of it as going in and out and thinking different thoughts about the same thing. But if you ask, where did you get to? What was the end of the story? unless you're really in a quite narrative form of lyric, there isn't any answer. You get deeper into the same concept, deeper into the same emotion, deeper into the same problem, but you don't get anywhere in a linear way. The linear momentum of prose is what distinguishes it from the centripetal and centrifugal, alternately centripetal and centrifugal, directions that poetry takes. The reason you want to do a measured line when you're doing poetry, and the very reason you don't want to do a measured line when you're doing prose, is that it would be obstructive to the linear momentum of prose to keep interrupting your line with a pause, a line break, a line ending. But in poetry, the reason you need a break is because, if you're going to sort of go cenrifugally outaway from your topic and then come back in, it would be very confusing to go and come back in the same linear motion. The line-break allows for that loop, as Coleridge says about verse that it keeps going like a snake, that it loops back and it goes forward a little then it loops back and goes forward a little, and loops back. And the looping the back loop, the back measure is what is carried by the line break.

Stephen Yenser: But that is precisely the line.

Helen Vendler: Yes.

Stephen Yenser: That is again the difference between prose and poetry. Prose you could write around the entire earth, your writing would never have to stop; but you can't do that in a poem.

Helen Vendler: No.

Steven Meyer: You could, but you don't.

Stephen Yenser: Given the line break -- How could you?

Steven Meyer: You said you could. You could have prose written around the globe, in a single line.

Stephen Yenser: Can't do it with poetry.

Steven Meyer: Yet we don't do it with prose either.

Stephen Yenser: Well, but its hypothetically possible. You just need a ticker tape thats long enough. It is not possible with poetry, because you have to have the line break. I mean, verse comes from the root meaning to turn, as you know. And Thats what it does. Verse is always turning. Its always turning one thing into another. Its always turning from one line into another. Its always troping.

Rachel Hadas: Of course, when classical scholars, epigraphers, archaeologists find a few letters scratched on a potsherd or carved on a pedestal, they can tell if its poetry or prose, if they have enough letters, by the meter.

Helen Vendler: The meter, yes.

Audience member #1: I've been waiting for you to talk about the end of the line. There's meter in the middle too.

Stephen Yenser: Well, the line is determined by something that has to do with meter.

Helen Vendler: It's rhythmic, yes.

Rachel Hadas: But I think the question of getting somewhere in verse, the systolic and diastolic that Helen was talking about so beautifully, is a useful way of thinking about Sandover, too. I mean, I've heard it described as a page-turner, where theres actually narrative momentum. And thats an interesting thought. Perhaps he intended to write a best-selling novel.

Helen Vendler: And it got lost. In translation.

Audience member #1: I was wanting you to speak to that transformation between prose and poetry that happens in Merrill, in terms of less about the end of the line and more about the meter in the line itself.

Stephen Yenser: I can't distinguish. Meter is one way of marking the end of a line. There are other ways. You can mark a line by counting the letters in it, as James Laughlin has done. You can mark a line by counting the syllables in it. There are all kinds of things you can count. (And there are other ways to determine divisions.) But one thing you can count is feet. And when you've counted five feet, then you have a pentameter line.

Audience member #1: I still think we're not talking about the way you get to the end of the line.

Stephen Yenser: Maybe I'm not

Audience member #1: Substitutions. I mean, other sorts of feet that happen in a line thats normatively iambic. Were not only marching through to the end of the line, but were doing something in between.

Stephen Yenser: Oh, absolutely. Yes. One thing

Rachel Hadas: Sure, there's lots of variations allowed, but you're still moving in one direction, surely.

Stephen Yenser: Oh, yes. James has got a wonderful ear, I think. And his handling of pentameter is terrific because of the substitutions that you are talking about. And because he is willing to do things that some other poets well, I remember talking to a poet, a friend, who said he really couldn't get with some of James's meditative poems from the middle years because he would so often write a trochaic line in the middle of an iambic context. You know, he's writing along in iambic pentameter and suddenly switches to trochaic, and my friend said, I just don't see how he can do that. For my friend, that was a real violation of the prosodic contract, but for many poets today that would hardly be a mar.

Helen Vendler: This is something that hasn't been codified, and that's why its so hard to talk about it. Theres no way known, as far as I can see, to codify in language what makes a pleasing and interesting rhythmic arrangement in a line versus what makes a non-pleasing rhythmic arrangement. If you read Shakespeare's pentameter, and you read some other of his contemporaries pentameter, as I've been trying to do, theres absolutely no way to codify what Shakespeare's pentameter is readable and the others is not readable. It's maddening.

Rachel Hadas: And its been tried. The linguists and the psychologists

Helen Vendler: Yes, they've all tried. Yes.

Rachel Hadas: They've hooked people up to electrodes, to see.

Stephen Yenser: Punish them for being wrong.

Rachel Hadas: The naked current again.

Steven Meyer: Was there anything you wanted to say, Richard?

Richard Kenney: Well, OK, maybe. We were talking about how these lyrics suddenly appear. We know the metrical conventions in Sandover, lets say: this is telegraphy, not video: its helpful that the various classes of beings are identified by signature meters -- blank verse for humans, fourteeners for bats, and so forth. Then, of my, heres the glass chimney of a villanelle suddenly drawing, heres a perfect canzone, and we exclaim delightedly and point a finger and identify it. But this mixing is more complex, it isn't just a matter of tightening,of spectacular lapidary moments, embedded gems, and so forth. These moments are marvellous, and quite obvious: when you have a sestina, say, some kind of round form set in a blank verse matrix, say, well, it stands right out. But James Merrill does this at a more delicate level. Particularly in the new poems, it seems to me, he's perfectly prepared to go in and out of rhyme, in and out of meter. No advertising of it, just a slipping in and slipping out. And I find it disturbing. Not as a reader -- I love it, as a reader -- but as a poet. I want to know how to do that, because

Rachel Hadas: I think Shakespeare has that fluidity.

Richard Kenney: I guess, maybe -- well, you can teach me that, because I need to know how this works. I hear how Shakespeare metrically tags his own classes of beings, lower orders speaking prose, for example. But I don't hear him slipping in and out of measure in mid-stride in quite this way. I don't know, I don't know Shakespeare's prosody well enough; but I can talk about the experience of writing, of using these conventions. One uses these instruments -- bridled echo, which is rhyme, and bridled rhythm, which is meter -- not so much because one loves the rattle and clatter of it, after the fact, but because its a powerful method of thinking forward, before the fact. Its a method for thinking prospectively. Its easier to see in the case of rhyme. Here, the logical, rational intelligence is crippled on a regular basis. Heres the rule: you have to make a rhyme pretty soon. Now, you really don't crawl out to the end of the line and then try to think up a rhyme to hang out there like an ornament. What really happens is that the old hide-bound reason-ridden associative faculties, whose job it is to go fetch, are instructed to open the territory of the search, to bring back words that sound right, no matter what they mean. A kind of echoic rolodex constantly spinning, spin and click. Look, the rational, discursive intelligence is so powerful and necessary, the tyranny is almost inescapable. If you're writing a poem about a panel discussion, there will always be microphones and glass pitchers and lecterns and so forth, and you're stuck, predictable, boring. How to get to some surprise?

Stephen Yenser: Yes, make a new narrative. If you have a poem that has an orange in it, and you've got to rhyme orange, you have to get a syringe. Now, what are you going to do with an orange and a syringe? I mean, a whole plot begins to unfold something comes out that otherwise was Richard Kenney: Exactly. So here we have a syringe, and have to make something of it. The poem has taken an unexpected turn. If you think of the poem as a biological organism, then this represents a mutation. Nearly all mutations are deterimental or fatal to the organism. The one that isn't is undiscoverable by other means, you see. Its fitting, in a Darwinian sense, absolutely, spectacularly fitting. Now, as a poet, one becomes dependent upon these tricks and instruments. I know I am. I'm most comfortable when I'm using them. I know what it is not to use them. But the cases are discrete. The cases seem discrete to me, too, when certain techniques are being used to flag a character or class of characters, Elizabethan peasantry, deceased informants, bats, peacocks, or what have you. Thats a formal constraint I could understand. But what I would find so difficult, myself, what I try to say I so admire in James Merrill's practice, is the mixture of technical methods within the same lyric or narrative frame. He goes in and out of form so gracefully and easily.

Stephen Yenser: Do you have particular poems in mind? Not that this is the place for us to talk about particular poems. Certainly in general, yes, I see what you're talking about.

Helen Vendler: Well, its the pentameter poems that he does it in the new book. He doesn't do it as much in the smaller stanzad poems, as I recall the new book.

Richard Kenney: No. No.

Helen Vendler: Its the pentameter, and its very Shakespearean to throw in a couplet to close off an episode.

Stephen Yenser: This goes back to Days of 1964. When I first read it, I was very struck by this, to think that you could write what looked to be blank verse and then suddenly there would be a sonnet, and -- in later works a sonnet inside a sonnet, somehow. I'm thinking of The Will. But, yes, I think it is wonderful. Such a simple, but basic thing.

Richard Kenney: But he gives up measure altogether. Its not just a closing couplet here or there, its not just the laces in the blank verse tightening for a moment into a complex knot. That's great, but not (I think) so unusual. I'm speaking of a loosening, rather. Sounds easy enough, of course; but from a practitioners point of view, I think the second trick would be much the more difficult. Relaxing out of measure altogether, more or less seamlessly, without a pressure drop for the reader, and associated inner-ear problems for the writer.

Stephen Yenser: So you're talking about free verse now.

Richard Kenney: Yes, yes.

Rachel Hadas: And theres a place in Ephraim where he says Oh, but my foot has gone asleep, and the meter has been disintegrating for the past ten lines.

Stephen Yenser: Or has become an eleven-syllable line instead of pentameter.

Rachel Hadas: Right. Early in Ephraim [Section D, p. 12], referring to the fact that JM's patron, Kinton Ford, was an editor of Pope, he comments ruefully that now we know/ Whence come the couplets that bedevil so/ (Ephraim, no spell for exorcising them?)/ His faithful representative JM. These Popean couplets, he's acknowledging, have an addictive, a hypnotic power. Perhaps they are to be reckoned among the Powers -- capital P.

Audience member #2: This is a prosaic question, in both senses of the word, and its to Stephen, but its also to the rest of the panel. Stephen, you hadn't read A Different Person, the recent memoir, when you wrote The Consuming Myth, is that right?

Stephen Yenser: Thats true.

Audience member #2: How much of the book would you rethink on the basis of what you learned in the memoir? I guess I'm asking how central is the memoir to the canon of Merrill's work?

Stephen Yenser: Thats a real hard question. I would hardly know, I think, without putting pen to paper and thinking. I think I don't know if its central to the canon, but I think its very important to an understanding of James Merrill. And so I think its a significant biographical contribution. And I think at that level it fills in a lot of gaps, gives us a lot of information that we need. Which is not to say that it sits not as if I'm describing some confessional outpouring. Of course, its a very closely written piece of work, extremely closely written, but also extremely personal in certain ways. Helen Vendler: Were all practically contemporaries of Merrill, and two hundred years from now a lot of context that we take for granted for these poems will have vanished, and something like A Different Person will then be an evocation of a moment, a historical moment in which a life was being lived that is taken for granted by all of us, but wouldn't be able to be taken for granted in two hundred years. In that sense, I think it will accrete value for the poetry and for the canon that we scarcely recognize that it needs at the moment, but that it will need later.

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