UPDATE: the day I posted this, my dad was admitted into the ICU with covid. So I failed my resolution utterly …

Okay so it’s National Poetry Month, and also national stay-at-home month, so I’ve decided to read a book of poetry that I bought last summer but set aside.

The Changing Light at Sandover. James Merrill. Also, it’s over 600 pages. So 20 pages a day and it’s already April 2 and I have some catching up to do.

If you haven’t heard of this poem, here’s a NYT article from 2008, which notes that the poem is based on Merrill and his longtime partners’

adventures with the Ouija board, with which they summoned from the dead, among others, W. H. Auden, Plato and a peacock named Mirabell.

And from The New Yorker:

And Ouija boards: Merrill made the most ambitious American poem of the past fifty years, seventeen thousand lines long, in consultation with one. The result, “The Changing Light at Sandover,” was a homemade cosmology as dense as Blake’s, which Merrill shared with the “summer people”—retired naval officers and frisky elderly Brahmin ladies—who lived near him in Stonington. He knew that posterity alone would decide on his greatness; he would not be around to enjoy the proceeds. He hedged his bets by driving a small Ford with a license plate that read “POET.”

Will I finish the book? I don’t know. But being locked up and I can write my own stuff for only so many hours a day, and it feels like this April may be not only the cruelest month but also the longest …

The cup twitched in its sleep. “Is someone there?”

We whispered, fingers light on Willowware,

When the thing moved. Our breathing stopped …