'Even the spirits get a say': A Look Into James Merrill's Ouija Poems

At the New York Times, there's more high praise for Langdon Hammer’s 2015 biography of James Merrill, which Dwight Garner deems "among the best literary biographies of the decade." But Garner's interest now isn't so much in the literary merits of the biography, but rather in Merrill's 40-year relationship with the Ouija board that helped him generate poetry, particularly his National Book Award-winning long poem "The Changing Light at Sandover." To help navigate the Ouija's importance to Merrill's oeuvre, Garner partners up with Hammer to investigate. The two converse about Hammer's own experiments using a Ouija board in Merrill's Connecticut apartment, about how to properly set the mood for a séance, and most importantly they discuss how Merrill's Ouija experiments rendered fine verse. More:

How did Merrill use the Ouija board to produce effective poems?

For 20 years, Merrill made next to no use of the board in his poetry. Then, in the 1970s, he wrote a long, confessedly kooky poem based on his and Jackson’s séances.

Now, whether “The Changing Light at Sandover” is an “effective” poem or an extravagant folly is open for debate. Both cases have been made. Which wouldn’t have surprised Merrill. In the poem he remarks, “anything worth having’s had both ways.”

In the biography I look carefully at the process by which Merrill turned Ouija transcripts into poetry. The point that struck me was this, however: There was no raw revelation, no oracular text, to which he later applied his poetic skills and sensibility. When he was transcribing letters from the board, making sense of them, he was doing just what he did when he wrote poetry: turning signs and sounds — the building blocks of language — into voice, presence, meaning.

Garner goes on to wonder if Hammer would compare the Ouija's ability to commune with spirits to his own biography writing that may conjure the spirit of James Merrill. Hammer responds:

But biography is like Ouija not only because it involves summoning the dead. Like Ouija, biography — and especially literary biography — does that summoning specifically through words. Here what I said about the soul returns: The reanimation that biography involves is deeply and necessarily collaborative. I wrote “James Merrill: Life and Art,” but the book is made out of not only my words but his — and many other people’s. For that matter, I sometimes quote Ouija transcripts. Even the spirits get a say.

Find out more at the New York Times. And to look at a few of Merrill's Ouija transcripts, please revisit this post here.