I remember picking up a paperback copy of The Changing Light at Sandover from a bookstore late one lonely summer evening when I was still a college student here in New York. I used to spend my weekends wandering through the city with no particular destination in mind, looking at the sky, watching the people, staring at the buildings of this city that I have grown to love and feel is my one true home. Often I would walk for hours on end, pausing only occasionally to light a cigarette or write down a stray line ofverse that came into my head. The onlyintentional stops I would make were for bookstores. I must have entered every bookstore in New York City that summer - small, independent, out of the way, dusty, new, large. I would enter the same bookstore over and over for weekends in a row, browsing the same shelves, hoping that something might catch my eye, that I might find some book I had wanted for some time, but hadn't noticed the previous weekend.

I'd heard of Merrill, of course, everyone who knew anything about modern poetry had; I'd read some of his poems in the journals, had read others' comments on his work, read the reviews, the Times. But at that period I was reading Neruda and Vallejo, Rilke and Trakl, James Wright and W.S. Merwin, and in my young head, there was no room for a "formalist." How silly. Something told me to pick up The Changing Light at Sandover - I think the main attraction was the Ouija aspect of the poem (I hadread how Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath would often glean subjects for poems from their Ouija board) - so I did. What a book! It kept me up for three nights running as I read through those strange and glorious pages over and over and over again. And I have returned to it numerous times since then. Thank you, James Merrill.

- Richard Hutzler

As an English teacher committed to the (sometimes in vain) quest of helping students appreciate--even love--poetry, I several years ago purchased copies of the "poetry in motion" posters that adorn subways and buses in the New York City transit system. One poster contains eight lines from Merrill's "A Renewal," and though I aided my class in committing random acts of poetry by posting various of these excerpts around the school, I kept the Merrill lines for myself. Something about the notion of love "bur[ying] itself in me, up to the hilt," seemed so entirely right, so perfect in its capturing both the fullness, the secrecy, and the pain of love, that I've left the poster there. It's helped me through several difficult moments, and just last week, when I left my Modern Poetry class to return to my office for a book, I found a student there, reading the Merrill lines. At first startled, she confessed that she walked in sometimes to read it, that the last line repeatedly surprised her, and we reread the lines together, silently. When I pass her in the halls now, we smile with our secret.

It's not many words that continue to affect so deeply. Merrill's do, and this young student and I share gratitude for his giving words to a feeling so human and seemingly inexpressible.

--D. Phipps

I reread the letter and card I received from James Merrill in 1978 and '79, and then put them away to let the matter cook awhile. Many times I've tried to honor his memory in a piece of writing and failed, because even contemplating his regard underscores my own inadequacy.

I had the good fortune to have a poem published in Poetry in 1978, in what turned out to be a valedictory gesture of then-editor Daryl Hine. Now published, I had the temerity to write James expressing my profound appreciation of his work, both artistically and personally, and calling attention to my effort. He remembered liking my poem and wrote back.

In 1975 I discovered James Merrill during a poetry-survey class in grad school, after reading "The Mad Scene" and, particularly, "Days of 1964" in an anthology. I was struck by the gorgeous, magisterial orchestration of sound and story, but also by the subject matter. No one in my reading (even Auden, even Crane) had more accurately described the pangs of love from the inside; he spoke out of a transparent same-sex experience for everyone.

Uncanny, I recall writing him after devouring his previously published books, how in certain poems phrases of mine (I thought) found utterance. My hollow self-confidence led to a series of poor choices and, though James was a generous mentor, the burnish of his own prose card (let alone his poetry) found me wandering in the wilderness of Nebraska: "I shiver a bit for you--for the poet in you (or me) whom ideas all too easily sicken & craze like a castaway reduced to drinking seawater." (6.v.79)

--Paul Backhurst

Sick myself, and out of sorts with things, I was working rather lackadaisically on a translation of Baudelaire's Le Cygne. Paris was bleak, and I felt as though I knew niether language well: the streets eluded me, and my glands throbbed. Every corner, every question condescended to me, and seemed to smirk that it knew that I was lost. My ears were filled with their own barometric pressure: even the simple act of speaking seemed to decay into muddled vowels and percussive taps. Why on earth had I come here? Where on earth was the bank? The nearest bathroom? The metro stop? If I were to venture out I would only have to face these questions. Staying in meant wandering the equally perilous terrain of my French/ French dictionary, in which foriegn words led only to other foriegn words.

I checked my email. This is a luxury in Paris, as the whole poorly wired city charges exorbitant amounts (or at least used to) for such web connections. Oddly enough my mother, who sometimes has an uncanny sense of things, had chosen that day to email me "Urban Convalescence." I don't have it in front of me now, and have not committed enough of it to heart to quote it exactly, but I stared at it transfixed.

Merrill's tone, and his description of the sloughing changes of the urban body, and the wierd feverish convolutions of the physical one seemed uncannily prophetic . In that odd space where my New York was distant, and my native English seemed equally, if not more foriegn, than the language I was already grappling with, the words hovered before me on the screen, endowed with an almost flourescent luster.

I determined to make Merrill's better aquaintance.

I set out for Shakespeare and Company that afternoon.

--Tess Taylor

The first time I read James Merrill, I had no idea he was a formalist. I was simply enchanted by the beauty of his language and his lovely evocation of a childhood experience. This was the poem "Matinees," which is a sonnet sequence--the form totally got by me on the first reading, which to me is a sign of mastery. One is so compelled and spellbound by what one is reading--the speaker's first afternoon at the opera-- that one doesn't notice the task the poet set himself to work within. When I finally figured it out, I was even more stunned by the virtuosity, and that set me on a James Merrill reading spree that lasted in a concentrated fashion for a few years. I especially fell in love with Divine Comedies, the first section of his ambitious ouija-board epic. Merrill still sets a touchstone for what poetry can recover of the high style--in a contemporary idiom.

-- Martin Scott

I first encountered James Merrill's poetry in an anthology called Contemporary American Poets, edited by Mark Strand, published in 1969 by New American Library. I was in high school, and Merrill's poetry, along with the other poems, turned my world upside-down. What I particularly notice looking back at those poems is the conversational quality. Merrill is talking to, inspecting the world around him, but he's doing it the purely personal terms that would characterize his later poetry, such as the books based on the ouija board seances. "The Mirror" is striking for its many levels of conversational complexity. The speaker has words he is trying to say, then there are those he does say. At the same time, he is trying to hear the world around him, which is present both in the moment and in memory.The poem also deals with the idea that our memories change over time, becoming merely an echo of the past event, but an acceptable echo.

--Eric Weil

For my first creative writing class in college, we had a textbook that exhorted its readers in search of models to imitate to find those poets who "blow you away." The first authentic experience I had with a poet was when I discovered James Merrill through his Selected Poems. Of course, page after page of that book, which is now severly creased and spotted, held jewels unreplicated by nearly anyone else I'd read. But I remember savoring in particular "The Kimono" (among the shorter poems) and (of the many longer joys) "Lost in Translation," "The Thousand and Second Night" (with its wit and playfulness), and "The Broken Home." Peoms like "The Broken Home" and "Yannina" amazed me in their ability to create unique, glittery, rather unfamiliar worlds containing familiar emotions poignantly expressed. I've heard some people call Merrill "repressed" and unable to connect emotionally with the reader, but that's never been my experience reading him. Part of the emotional impact of his poems for me is the way he can express seemingly everything in the most elegant way. This is highly satisfying, and I honestly don't sense anything lacking when I confront the poetry.

--David Lehr

One of my closest friends of almost thirty years is the nephew of James Merrill. We met in a salon-type readers group in the early seventies and during monthly discussions on Goethe, Rilke, Thomas Mann or Shakespeare, he would often ask, "Have I ever told you about Uncle Jimmy?" His queries continued over the years, even up to a letter received last month in which he wrote, "Have I ever given you a copy of any of Uncle James' work?"

As a writer this friend has a special place reserved in his heart for the works of James Merrill that years of study has taken beyond any genetic kinship. His introductions to the work of Uncle Jimmy always came from a personally treasured understanding of the wordsmith's art; because of this understanding the writings of James Merrill began to catch my attention courtesy of The New Yorker, Atlantic or other publications.

No, the friend has never given me a copy of his uncle's works, but, endearingly, he continues to ask. I mark as special good fortune that even though I never heard James Merrill read before his death, I was able to hear him read his poetry courtesy of this site [KNOPF POETRY NEWS] when he was a featured writer a few months back. I was able to e-mail this friend and ask, "Do you know if you go to this site you can hear James Merrill read these poems?"

Oh, the whirled-wide webs we weave,

--John Tyler

I heard James Merrill read about fifteen years ago, on the University of Iowa campus. It was in a large lecture hall in the physics building. I was seated some ten rows up, just right of center. He was standing behind a lectern on the floor of the hall. He was reading from The Changing Light at Sandover, that "Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent With David Jackson at the Ouija Board In Touch with Ephraim Our Familiar Spirit," whose speakers include Auden, archangels, and God itself. He changed his voice only a little to convey changes in speaker, but it was enough, along with the setting of the poem, and the semi-darkness of the hall, to create a kind of anticipatory atmosphere. Often during readings I close my eyes or look away at the side wall, in order to focus on the words of the poem. But at this moment I was looking at Merrill. He kept his hands in his jacket as he read, bringing one out only to turn the page. He was reading along when, without pausing, his head slowly rose from looking down at the page until he was looking out at the audience, so that he was no longer reading but reciting, and not even reciting but being spoken through like a medium. For the only time in my life, I felt the hair rise on the back of my head. I've never forgotten it.

--John Mulvihill

I once visited James Merrill at his apartment on East 72nd Street. I had written and asked if I could ask his thoughts about the presence of "the operatic" in a variety of literary works, his own among them -- this was the subject of my wayward and grandiose doctoral dissertation, a project I was soon, wisely, to abandon. I would introduce myself, I'd written, after a reading he was scheduled to give on Washington Square in a few weeks time. I can't quite remember why I decided not to introduce myself the night of that reading. I remember him holding court afterwards, seated in an overstuffed armchair that was tucked into an alcove of a lounge that bore resemblance to the lobby of the Hotel Jefferson circa 1974. I had him sign my copy of Braving the Elements -- the first book of his that I had read, with wonder and astonishment, when I was eighteen -- but I went no further.

A few days later I received a postcard from him, made from a photograph of his own -- "Birdcage, Mallorca 1953" -- and bearing instructions to call him at home along with regrets at my failure to appear at the reading. When I did call, with some nervousness, he invited me to come by soon, comparing himself at home, in a phrase I don't exactly remember, to Hoffmannsthal's Marschalin. He was in the midst of a prolonged bout of dentistry, which complicated our attempts to schedule a meeting. When I expressed sympathy for his dental sufferings, he said, "Don't worry about that. My pain threshold reaches to the stars." A suitably celestial metaphor, I somewhat obviously thought.

To make an invidious comparison, the meeting -- in the apartment, described in A Different Person, where his mother had moved after her divorce from his father --reminded me of Merrill's description of his own first meeting with Auden, when the great man had served him, after some consideration of the propriety of the matter, a thimbleful of sherry. Mr. Merrill served me tea. The supporting cast included his boyfriend Peter Hooten, a figure of great personal height and theatricality familiar from the recent poetry, and a puppy -- a Jack Russell terrier, I think -- later to be immortalized in A Scattering of Salts. The puppy was clawing the upholstered furniture to shreds. Mr. Merrill wore a midnight blue velour shirt, jeans, and moccasins. I was too polite to ask him any question of substance and he was too polite to ask me why, after all, I had come to visit him. We agreed on the preeminence of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde; we talked about the liberating capacity, for fledgling writers, of slavish imitation. I stayed too long but did eventually manage to leave. For some time afterwards, this not quite successful encounter shadowed my reading of Merrill's poetry. In the end, though, I forgot about this slight acquaintanceship with the poet and resumed my love affair with the poetry. I hadn't thought about that meeting for a few years when I received the e-mail notice of this contest today.

--Christopher Cahill

I heard James Merrill read a little bit from Sandover and some other poems in the reading room of the Columbia English Department. There was a large dead or dying tree in the room, with the quote pinned to it, "what ails my fern?" Merrill, wearing a green jacket and turquoise tie, recited the poem context, then read his poems and talked a bit about growing up in Manhattan.

This was all followed by some particularly wretched smoked Mozzarella and crackers, but Mr. Merrill stayed, and was quite open to idle chatter and questions, friendly and direct.

--Catherine Daly

I resigned my job from a posh Williamsburg restaurant in the summer of 1984. I managed the bar and dining room, before leaving the showy confines of the Trellis and Marcel Desaulnier's new American cooking for a return home to North Carolina. My favorite waitress gave me a copy of The Changing Light at Sandover as a going away gift. I missed Southern barbeque. Ifelt a peculiar love for poetry suggesting liminalconversations from realms beyond death and life. And I was fond of sortilege, disembodied voices, Ouigi talk, perverse love given elegant form. James Merrill read on the East campus of Duke University that fall. The old theatre, built about the time Teddy Roosevelt was President, swallowed his small and frail body. His voice was a slow, deliberate, resigned. Querlous faces twisted to listen. My sweet, blond partner and I stayed for wine afterwards.

I wanted to ask him about the way voices come from the other side: if he thought synaptic connections to disembodied realms were possible, if he thought the imagination was itself frought with figures and curses we no longer take seriously enough, if our fates are really spun by someone or something outside the routines of thought and action. I wanted to know where the darkness comes from, who's in it, what one may expect of it, or if he was only playing. I didn't have the courage to ask. I was afraid of making a fool of myself.

I left my partner six years later, and with her, our son.

Five years after that, I was driving to work on my 42nd birthday, listening to the radio, which spoke of James Merrils death. A flood of memories accompanied me to work that morning. Throughout the day, phone calls to oddly remembered friends and a letter to my former partner followed. Waiting for me at home that evening was a single volume version of the OED, the one with the magnifying glass, the one that makes one read closely the tiny script that carries the official whole ofthe language in which I write, long, dream, remember and wish for magic and beauty with The same language that was, and is, James Merrill's source of playfulness, magic and strange unrepentant beauty.

-- Levi Gardner

I have two stories of James Merrill. The first time I saw him was when he read from his memoir A Different Person. The reading was in NYC's Three Lives Bookstore in GreenwichVillage, a small, library-like space that was filled. We sat on everything. The excitement of his reading was only intensified by the presence of other gay writers, from Dale Peck, the twenty something author of Dale and Martin(FSG) to John Ashbery in the corner. All listening intensely. It felt like a brotherhood.

Later during a celebration of the Library of America's publication of Nineteenth Century American Poetry Merrill read several poems. I remember almost twenty poets reading in groups throughout the afternoon from John Hollander to Mark Strand, but Merrill's reading of Poe's The Raven was so clear, dramatic and moving. I still remember it.

--David Interrante

I first read James Merrill's Divine Comedies (1977) in the summer of 1977 when I was a NEH Summer Seminar student studying with John Hollander at the City University of New York. Hollander had highly recommended Merrill as one of the contemporary poets we might be studying that summer. I managed to buy and read a copy of Divine Comedies early in the summer, being both puzzled and pleased by the beautiful and intriguing voice I encountered in the first volume of what was to become The Changing Light at Sandover. Eventually, of course, I read all the volumes as they appeared, Mirabell: Books of Number (1978) and Scripts for the Pageant (1980).

Ever since that summer, I was always sure to teach Merrill in my poetry courses at Quincy University. A couple of years later, I rushed down from Quincy Illinois, where I taught, to St. Louis University, in St Louis to attend a reading by Merrill, after which I was honored to have him autograph my copy of The Changing Light at Sandover. Of course, I enjoyed listening to him read his own lyrics, but I also remember him at the time reading Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art."

I admire all of his Sandover poetry, but I especially like his earlier lyrics, too, such as "The Broken Home" and those about his Grecian island experiences. What I admire most in his poetry is his wonderful craftsmanship with all the traditional forms of poetry, as well as his soaring leaps of metaphor.

-- Donald N. Schweda

My first encounters with James Merrill's poetry resulted from my work on other poets. I recall a seminar on Yeats in 1978, when someone reported the news, straight from Ephraim's mouth, that the late great was "still simplifying." A deeper appreciation began a few years later when dissertation-work on Auden lured me into the depths of The Changing Light, which itself changed everything— and not only because it launched our own Ouija sessions, as memorable for the amounts of wine consumed as for the fun they made of the theories (intention, "reading," writing itself) dutifully slogged through by day.

I eventually met Mr. Merrill after a reading that was more a recitation, delivered in a voice that seemed cultivated expressly for the purpose I'd heard about his talent for making his fellow conversationalist feel like the center of his attention, and it was true. But I wonder . . . when he told that anecdote that hinged on an undergraduate's mispronunciation of Italian, did he discern my own linguistic ignorance while graciously letting me in on the joke? And when I expressed pleasure at having found a first edition of The Seraglio, his wry admission of the novel's limited success -- "That's all there was" -- gently let the wind out of my sails while refusing to puff up his own.

Those who knew him well have written of how James Merrill made an art of life—and it was an art he generously made accessible to all.

--Kevin J. McManus

These anecdotes were sent in via email from members of the Knopf Poetry E-mail List, and each received a prize -- a book or signed book and broadside for their efforts -- sign up to receive notice of such offers and more at our Knopf poetry center.