After Merrill died in 1995, the Alfred Knopf publishing company made efforts to bind all of his poetry into a volume of collected works; in March of this year, such a collection was published. It was this publication that motivated Visiting Writer Daniel Hall to organize last Thursday's celebration of Merrill, held in Johnson Chapel.
Hall prepared the event-which saw the assembly of several acclaimed poets-with the aid of several colleagues, especially Joe Thoron '93, the creative writing secretary. "If I had to organize it myself," said Hall, "the event never would have taken place." He had preliminary ideas about the event last fall, when J.D. McClatchy (the editor of The Yale Review and a speaker on Thursday) visited the school to read in the creative writing series. He told Hall that Merrill's collected works were due out in the spring, and Hall "began thinking on a larger scale" about a commemoration of Merrill's life.
In the months that followed, plans for the event took shape. In an effort to create a sense of familial remembrance, Hall contacted a list of local poets whom he wanted to speak. "[The poets] were all wonderfully gracious and cooperative-not a diva in the lot," said Hall. "I gave almost nothing by way of guidance, and was pleased that each poet approached the work from a different angle." Eventually, all the elements of the plan came together, and the celebration of James Merrill was ready to proceed.
Acting as the host on Thursday, Hall gave a brief introduction of each poet before he or she spoke; he also said some words about the event and about Merrill himself. Prefacing his speech with Merrill's emblematic phrase, "The point was always to be of two minds," Hall went on to talk about the poet's vitality. "Merrill praised [Elizabeth] Bishop for her 'lifelong imitation of an ordinary woman,'" said Hall. "He admired her talent for life." Hall sought to emphasize this "talent" that Merrill shared with Bishop by reading the poem "Pledge" from Merrill's 1995 collection "A Scattering of Salts."
"The poem manages to blend the elegiac with the celebratory, which struck me as the perfect tone for the occasion," said Hall.
The second speaker was Agha Shahid Ali, a respected poet from Kashmir. Ali read Merrill's poem "A Renewal" and recounted his relationship with Merrill. "In 1987, I met Merrill in Tucson, where he died eight years later," said Ali. On one occasion, he sent Merrill a draft of a political poem in rhyming stanzas about the situation in the Balkans, asking him to be "brutally frank" in his critique. Feeling that Ali had used too many off rhymes, Merrill told him, "While there isn't much you can do about Bosnia, you can improve this poem."
Next to speak was Joseph Langland, who taught at UMass for 20 years and recently published a volume of poetry. He read Merrill's "The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace," which was dedicated to Hanz Lodeizen, Merrill's friend who died in Switzerland in 1950. "Merrill wrote this poem at an early age," said Langland. "It was a forerunner of his late, great poems." Langland also made an interesting connection, pointing out that W.B. Yeats (who visited Amherst in 1914) used the image of swans as a theme in many of his poems, and his "The Wild Swans at Coole" was an inspiration for Merrill's early poem "The Black Swan."
McClatchy then read "Days of 1964," which he called "one of [Merrill's] best poems on the subject of love and loss." He pointed out that, "Throughout the poem, he asks forgiveness if it should ever be translated into Greek," because he felt that his words would be unable to do justice to the language. However, McClatchy added, "One translation exists, and it is his own." Peggy O'Brien, the Director of Irish Studies at UMass, read "Farewell Performance," which was dedicated to Merrill's friend David Kelstone; she discussed Merrill's "damnable" cleverness and "daunting" technical prowess. Mary Jo Salter, a professor at Mount Holyoke and a respected poet, read his three-sectioned poem "Fort Lauderdale," which was based on Japanese forms which inspired Merrill during his visit to the Okie Islands.
The final three readers shared Merrill's affiliation with Amherst, two as employees and one as a former student. The first of these was Susan Snively, associate dean of students and director of the writing center. She chose to read Merrill's "Days of 1941 and '44," a poem about "his miserable days in prep school and then the war." She later added, "There is a huge range of feelings in the poem: shame, rage, fear, self-consciousness, unforgiveness and the desire to forgive." Snively met Merrill on five separate occasions and found him "kind, mischievous, and thoughtful."
Professor of English David Sofield, who has taught at Amherst for 36 years, spoke next, reading "Up and Down"-a two-part poem about an incident on a ski lift and a dedication to Merrill's mother. "Merrill's wit is the most brilliant in the late 20th century," said Sofield. "His surface is so glitteringly bright and surprising that one is dazzled by it." Sofield told The Student that Merrill has left a legacy for members of Amherst's community. "He got all the right kind of encouragement from really, really superb English teacher-readers," he said.
The final speaker was Richard Wilbur '42, one of the greatest contemporary poets. "I miss the gaiety of Jimmy Merrill," said Wilbur, "a gaiety which could lead him into a Key West party, saying, 'Good evening, fellow celebs.'" Wilbur read Merrill's early poem "Mirror," on which he commented, "I may not understand every bit of it, but I'm fond of it."