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Langdon Hammer on James Merrill ("Christmas Tree")
2k Plays2 years ago
Our own Very Special Christmas Episode: Langdon Hammer joins the podcast to talk about James Merrill's "Christmas Tree."
Langdon Hammer is the Niel Gray, Jr. Professor of English at Yale University and the author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015). With Stephen Yenser, he edited A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021). He is also the author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton, 1993) and the editor of Library of America editions of Crane and May Swenson. He is poetry editor at The American Scholar and a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. You can find a free, online version of "Modern Poetry," one of his Yale University undergraduate lecture courses, here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Close Readings Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Close Readings podcast. I'm your host, Cameron Gevadizadeh, and today I have, well, what I'm doing here is really giving a Christmas gift to myself by staging a conversation that I've been wanting to have now for a little while, and I hope it'll feel like a gift to everyone listening as well.
00:00:25
Speaker
Our guest today is Langdon Hammer, who's an old friend of mine and a teacher of mine. Lanny is the Neil Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale University, where he works on the history of poetry and its place in the culture.
Langdon Hammer's Interests and Expertise
00:00:47
Speaker
Langdon Hammer works on poets' lives. He works in archives. He does close readings of poems.
00:00:54
Speaker
He's interested in critical biography and literary theory and questions of poetics of all kinds.
Focus on James Merrill's 'Christmas Tree'
00:01:02
Speaker
The poem that Lanny has agreed to talk with us about today is James Merrill's poem, Christmas Tree.
00:01:12
Speaker
And I suppose this is a slight departure from my usual method in which I asked someone on that I want to talk to, and I let them choose the poem. In this case, I suggested the poem. I asked Lanny if he would talk about this poem with us for this occasion, and he very generously agreed. You can find Lanny's Modern Poetry lecture series online at
00:01:36
Speaker
the Open Yale courses. It was a course I once was a teaching fellow for years ago. And the lectures are free and wonderful and stimulating. And I hope people will go listen to those.
Langdon Hammer's Academic Contributions
00:01:50
Speaker
Lenny is the author of the biography of James Merrill, a book called James Merrill, Life and Art, which came out from Knopf in 2015. And it's just a marvelous and staggering accomplishment
00:02:05
Speaker
a beautiful book. He's also the author of an earlier academic monograph called Heart Crane and Alan Tate, Janice-Faced Modernism, which is published by Princeton University Press. But in addition to writing those books, Lanny's edited several other books. He's one of
00:02:22
Speaker
two editors of a book that's near and dear to me called The Whole World Letters from James Merrill, which Lanny edited with Steven Yenser and which was published by Knopf. Also, that book came out in 2021. Lanny also has edited two Library of America editions, one of the poet Hart Crane and one of the poet Mae Swenson.
00:02:51
Speaker
And then you can find Lanny's essays and reviews in places like the New York Times Book Review and the New York Review of Books and the Yale Review, the LA Review of Books.
Langdon's Current Work and Influence
00:03:01
Speaker
Lanny's also the Poetry Editor at the American Scholar. And I'm very happy to say is working on a biography, critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop, which is under contract with FSG.
00:03:17
Speaker
which is maybe the book that I most want to read in the world. So please go on writing, Atlantic. I was trying to think about what I could say that would give some quick indication of my appreciation of the person that I'm going to be having this conversation with. And I have too many stories. It's hard to choose just one.
00:03:45
Speaker
Lanny and I have known each other now for, I don't know, 25 years, probably. And one story came to mind. It was a kind of offhand moment. I'll bet Lanny doesn't remember it himself. But when I was in graduate school, we were both part of something called a, I think the name of the group was the Biography Working Group, something like that. So we would have
00:04:08
Speaker
guest speakers come in who are working on biographies or who were writing a kind of biographically inflected literary criticism and they would present new work and there would be a discussion group made up of faculty members and graduate students to talk about that work. And I can't remember who the speaker was on this occasion and I can't remember what the topic of the
00:04:30
Speaker
presentation was exactly, but a moment in the Q&A lodged in my mind and has been a kind of guiding light for me ever since.
Challenges in Biographical Reading of Poetry
00:04:39
Speaker
The topic in the Q&A was the question of the great danger or the fear of doing a biographically reductive reading of a poem. So, you know, the kind of bad reductive reading that one gets when
00:04:58
Speaker
someone tells you that, well, the secret to this poem that you love is actually that event X happened in the poet's life at some point. And that once you have that bit of biographical data, now you know what the poem is really about. And of course, what's distressing about a reading like that is that it just totally takes all of the interest and complexity and nuance and ambiguity out of
00:05:24
Speaker
a text that you love and reduces it to its being a mere sort of symptom of a usually traumatic event in a poet's life. That was the topic at hand. And Lanny, who is in the audience with me,
00:05:43
Speaker
raised his hand and said, you know, the problem with biographically reductive readings is not just that they take too crude a view of poems, which they do. We all know they do, but also that they take too crude a view of lives. And by that, I took Lanny to mean that lives are, after all, just as complex and various, as ambivalent and creative as poems can be.
00:06:12
Speaker
and that the ways we've developed to read poems might be reoriented onto the reading of lives and onto the evidence that lives leave behind. And that when the right kind of critic does that work, does that work with imagination and sensitivity and generosity, but also with what Keats, subject of an earlier episode, called negative capability, the result is that poems and lives now illuminate each other
00:06:43
Speaker
and that the criticism that results from that kind of work can take its place alongside them. I think, I trust that in the conversation that Lanny and I have today about James Merrill's Christmas tree, you'll hear that kind of generosity and creativity and imagination at work. So Lanny Hammer, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for coming here. How are you doing today?
00:07:12
Speaker
Fine. Thank you, Calrun. I certainly don't remember that story. I'm glad you do. And I'm glad you could make sense of it the way you did. Well, it's helped me make sense of a lot of things, of a lot of, it's given me a sense of what it is I want to do as a critic myself. Lately, I've had, as a kind of inspiring Co-Ann,
00:07:42
Speaker
two sentences from Susan Sontag in her essay about Walter Benjamin. She says, one cannot use the life to interpret the work, but one can use the work to interpret the life. She doesn't really explain what that means.
00:08:07
Speaker
But I like that reversal. And I think it's something along the lines of what you're talking about. Yeah, I think so. Well, what I'm talking about is really just what I heard you say. And I think it's, yes, I think the kind of work you do and one of the reasons why I so admire it is because it seems in the spirit of that line from Sontag.
Reading and Understanding 'Christmas Tree'
00:08:29
Speaker
So Lanny, we're here today to talk about James Merrill, but in particular to talk about a poem that he wrote very near the end of his life. And I wonder if we could begin our conversation by my asking you to read the poem aloud to us. That would be my pleasure.
00:08:55
Speaker
Great. And then we'll go on from there. Mm-hmm. Christmas tree. I'm going to interrupt myself before I begin. That's fine. Preface it with a couple of thoughts.
00:09:16
Speaker
If you haven't read this poem or heard this poem before, you need to know in advance that this is a dramatic monologue. A Christmas tree is speaking to you. It is also, as will not be apparent on the podcast, a shape poem, which is to say it's in the shape of a Christmas tree. There's much to be said about that, and I'll talk about that in a moment. But let's just have these two thoughts in mind as I read it.
00:09:46
Speaker
Christmas Tree. To be brought down at last from the cold, sighing mountain where I and the others had been fed, looked after, kept still, meant, I knew, of course I knew, that it would be only a matter of weeks, that there was nothing more to do. Warmly, they took me in.
00:10:17
Speaker
made much of me. The point from the start was to keep my spirits up. I could have sent to that, for honestly it did help to be wound in jewels, to send their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep fragrant sables that cloaked me head to foot. Over me then they wove a spell of shining
00:10:43
Speaker
purple and silver chains, eaves dripping tinsel, amulets, melagros, software of silver, a hark, a little girl, a model T, two staring eyes, the angels, trumpets, bud and bee, the children's names, in clown-like capitals,
00:11:12
Speaker
Somewhere a music box whose tiny song played and replayed, I ended before long by loving. And in shadow behind me, a primitive IV to keep the show going. Yes, yes, what lay ahead was clear. The stripping, the cold street, my chemicals plowed back into the earth for lives to come.
00:11:42
Speaker
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn't bear nor ever dwelling upon. Two have grown so thin, needles and bone, the little boy's hands meeting about my spine, the mother's voice holding up wonderfully. No dread, no bitterness, the end beginning.
00:12:13
Speaker
Today's dusk room aglow for the last time, the candlelight, faces love lit, gifts underfoot, still to be so poised, so receptive, still to recall, to praise. Well, thank you very much, Lanny. It's such a beautiful poem.
00:12:43
Speaker
And yes, both things that you had the good sense to mention before reading it are things that we'll want to talk about today. So both the fact that this is a poem, that it's a dramatic monologue, a poem in the voice of the thing named by the title, The Christmas Tree, and that it's a shape poem, that the poem takes a particular shape. So one thing I should mention is that listeners to the podcast
00:13:12
Speaker
can find the text of the poem in a link that I'll put in the show notes. The poem was, I think, first published, but Lanny can correct me if I'm wrong about this, in a memorial issue of Poetry Magazine that appeared shortly after James Merrill died and then appeared again
00:13:32
Speaker
looking slightly differently. And that's maybe something that we can talk about today as well in the collected poems and I think probably in selected editions of Meryl's poetry that have come out since then as well. But I'll put a link to the poetry magazine version of the poem in the show notes so people will be able to see it there. And I encourage you to take a look at it because yes, it's quite striking and
00:13:58
Speaker
brings a kind of smile to the face to see the poem laid out in that way.
James Merrill's Life Context
00:14:06
Speaker
But Lanny, before we get to those things, I don't want to presume that our listeners know much at all about who James Merrill was.
00:14:16
Speaker
it strikes me that to fully appreciate what's going on in this poem, one needs to know certain things about, or one might be helped by knowing certain things about who its poet was. So what can you tell us there? I know you more than anyone else in the world just have a wealth of information to provide, but what would be the most useful way to set up a kind of context for this poem?
00:14:43
Speaker
Well, it's interesting that you led into our conversation with this whole issue of biography and reading and whether it limits a poem or expands it to contextualize it biographically. In this particular case,
00:15:05
Speaker
This is a poem that Merrill completed in the last weeks of his life. And it's not hard to hear Merrill speaking through the tree in very direct ways about his sense of his vulnerability and indeed the fact that
00:15:32
Speaker
He would, like the Christmas tree, have only a matter of weeks ahead of him. He was at the time, let's see, approaching 68,
00:15:48
Speaker
He had been sick with AIDS for almost a decade. He had been diagnosed in 1986.
00:16:04
Speaker
was in 1994 when the poem was begun in December 1994. He was weakened. He describes himself as going in the wrong direction.
00:16:22
Speaker
his treatments are failing and he's aware of it. So this is all part of the consciousness of
00:16:34
Speaker
the poet creating this poem. The poem refers in a pretty specific way to a Christmas tree, a specific Christmas tree that Merrill and his partner put up in just after Thanksgiving 1994 in Merrill's apartment on East 72nd Street
00:17:03
Speaker
And it's a tree that they enjoyed for about a month and then had to strip and put out on the sidewalk because Merrill and Hooton were going to Arizona where they intended to spend the winter and where, in fact, Merrill would die and where he completed his work on the poem.
00:17:34
Speaker
Meryl's letters are full at that time of comments about
00:17:47
Speaker
the help that Peter is to him and the kind of care that he is giving him. And I think this is a poem in part about caregiving and it's resonant in all those ways. I think
00:18:11
Speaker
And now maybe it's appropriate to start talking about and thinking about the shape of the poem. Meryl's poem
00:18:27
Speaker
as I say, read in this biographical context, if we treat the Christmas tree as a charmingly simple mask for the poet, the poem becomes a very direct declaration of his
00:18:52
Speaker
impending death and his consciousness of it and his desire to meet it in an appropriate way. And it's a poem very much about keeping your shape.
00:19:18
Speaker
keeping your poise, to use a word that the poem ends on in those last sentences. But when you say keeping your shape, I mean, we know, well, I have a Christmas tree downstairs right now. It's already, you know, the moment you get at home, it's starting to lose its needles and that kind of thing.
00:19:38
Speaker
And I know from reading your book and from reading Merrill's letters that on a kind of parallel track or something, he was someone who was always sort of conscious of the shape he was in. I mean, even before he was sick. Isn't that right? That sort of aware of his weight and aware of things like this.
00:19:58
Speaker
That's true. And someone who put great store in manners, in keeping up appearances, in maintaining a certain kind of lightness as a poet, as a person, as a friend. And we can see all those impulses, I think, in the poem. The shape.
00:20:28
Speaker
You're going to provide a link to the poetry version. That's right. The poetry version, I'm not sure exactly how that came about. The poetry version is significant because it is centered. Right. And has a star at the top.
00:20:46
Speaker
And it has a star at the top. That's right. I haven't examined the drafts of the poem. Stephen Yancer could tell us more about this. But significantly, the version that Stephen and Sandy McClatchy settled on as authoritative was not centered. And there was no star at the top either. It was rather
00:21:16
Speaker
a strange shape, a kind of cropped shape. Right. I guess what I can do is I'll tweet out an image.
Unique Shape and Inspiration of the Poem
00:21:28
Speaker
It's not linkable, but I'll tweet out an image of the poem as it appears in the collected poems for people who are curious. But right, it's as though if you were facing the tree, the left hand side of it is sort of lopped off.
00:21:43
Speaker
That's right. And Lanny, can you explain to us why that might have been the image, the shape that Merrill had in mind, or what the significance of that particular shape is? Yeah. Yes, I think there's a number of things to say about it. One is it imitates the view of a Christmas tree from another room. It is as if you were looking at the tree
00:22:15
Speaker
In this case, where Merrill actually had his desk, which would have been in a room apart, and the view of the tree would be slightly cut off by the doorframe. The idea for that may have come to Merrill from
00:22:37
Speaker
a lithograph by Fairfield Porter that represents a Christmas tree in a living room. But the view is from another room, again, cropped by the doorframe. So I think Meryl probably had this in mind. And that's an image that's easy to Google and find. The idea of a shape poem.
00:23:15
Speaker
willful naivete, a kind of, or let's say, almost a kind of willed innocence, a poem that's shaped is meant to charm a child, and a poem that at the same time is evoking some of the charms of childhood, of childhood experience.
00:23:30
Speaker
I think it evokes a kind of
00:23:41
Speaker
It's like Meryl to, I suppose, play with a form
00:23:53
Speaker
in this kind of way, and yet to complicate it further. He doesn't, as it were, give us a straight version of the Christmas journey. It's a bleak one. And it's a poem that's partly concerned with a
00:24:26
Speaker
a dying man's view of a kind of normative childhood ideal.
Family Dynamics in Merrill's Work
00:24:35
Speaker
The Christmas tree is in the living room. It's in the center of the home. There are two children mentioned in the poem.
00:24:51
Speaker
Their names are on one of the ornaments or two of the ornaments. They're in capital letters in the poem, Bud and B, that is short for probably Beatrice, B-E-A. They suggest the gender binary, a male and female child.
00:25:17
Speaker
Their names suggest budding and being, the organic and the natural. There's a mother whose voice we hear at one point holding up wonderfully, she says about the tree.
00:25:39
Speaker
So you've got there at least three members of the normative nuclear family. Right. Where's the father? Interesting question. I was thinking about that. I looked at the poem last night thinking about our conversations today and I said, where's the father?
00:26:09
Speaker
Well, I mean, and there are different ways we could think about that question in relation to Merrill's life. I would say that this is a model of a family that he was perhaps supposed to have and didn't. So in that case, perhaps he would be the father. Exactly.
00:26:39
Speaker
And there's a certain amount of nostalgia or longing, I suppose, invested in that image of this actually rather ghostly family. And yet the family
00:27:04
Speaker
has no reality either. The family, well, I mean, the names of the children are puns. Then they're no more real than names, I suppose. Right. And the evidence of their lives is literally ornamental, right? Exactly.
00:27:35
Speaker
Right. So, uh, I suppose this has been implied by a lot of what we've said and most listeners will, will, will no
Merrill's Personal Choices vs. Family Expectations
00:27:41
Speaker
doubt know this. So forgive me, but maybe it's important just to say explicitly that Merrill was a gay man who, um, who was also in some sense an only child, um, the only child of his father and his mother, though he had half siblings. Um, and that, um,
00:28:05
Speaker
the question of whether he would have children himself is not just something that perhaps his parents or people around him wondered about or thought about, but it shows up sometimes as a kind of worry or preoccupation or
00:28:28
Speaker
provocation in his own writing, in his own poems over the course of his life, the question of whether he would reproduce. Absolutely. In fact, it's a running theme. And those two half-siblings,
00:28:52
Speaker
Doris, his older sister, and Charles, his older brother, both had large families. And you have to feel that in the context of his family, and now maybe we should bring in a little bit more biography, in the context of a family that
00:29:17
Speaker
has as its head of the family, Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch, one of America's most ambitious and adventurous financiers in the 1920s and 1930s. Merrill had a
00:29:39
Speaker
I grew up in a family that had certain dynastic ambitions.
00:29:51
Speaker
the culture probably applied enough normative pressure to feel as though he was supposed to marry and have children. But if it hadn't, he certainly would have been getting it from his family as well.
00:30:13
Speaker
He jokes in the 1950s about how a certain kind of crisis with his partner, David Jackson, resulted in questions about what his life would be like, how he would
00:30:36
Speaker
how he would live without children. And he jokes about how he and David became involved with the spirit world using the Ouija board as a kind of replacement for an earthly family. And Marilyn Jackson then for the next
00:31:05
Speaker
almost 40 years, conduct seances and have a kind of lively commerce with the spirits that they contact using the board.
00:31:24
Speaker
These kind of questions about Merrill's relation to normativity, let's just call it that, are very present in this poem.
Shape Poem as a Unique Form in Merrill's Work
00:31:38
Speaker
It is, as far as I know, the only shape poem. He liked to play with how a poem looked on the page, and he could do various things with that.
00:31:52
Speaker
This is the only poem that I can think of that is in a kind of memetic shape that represents an object. Right. He seemed like someone who was quite happy to play with things like stanzaic forms where the poem would have a shape, but the shape would be the shape of a poem or this kind of poem or that kind of poem. Right. But there is something that seems kind of
00:32:20
Speaker
you know, if you set a child the task of writing a poem about a Christmas tree, you might get a poem in this shape. I mean, certainly its content would be different. But there's something childlike about this approach to form. And I want to come back to, Chris, I love what you said about, you know, the shape of the
00:32:45
Speaker
poem in the book version is a tree seen from another room. And that fact suggests a kind of a bleak relationship to the normativity, to go back to that word, that the icon that the Christmas tree is represents.
00:33:15
Speaker
It also occurs to me that if you have the poem that's centered, that's in the shape that it was in that poetry magazine issue, it looks like an icon. In other words, it looks like the platonic idea of what a Christmas tree shape might be. Whereas the book version looks like it might be a particular tree.
00:33:44
Speaker
you know, the tree that was in the room, you know, that was in the apartment while the poet wrote, or a particular tree from memory, rather than, you know, capital C, capital T, Christmas tree. And that swerving away from,
00:34:08
Speaker
a generalizable ideal to the kind of particularity of memory or the particularity of one's observation at the moment.
00:34:23
Speaker
does seem like a move that's recognizably Marillion. Is that the right adjective? Yeah, sure. We'll call it Marillion. And what else is Marillion? It's just that he can't help himself. He can't stop complicating things, even precisely at this moment where he's
00:34:47
Speaker
where he is emulating innocence and simplicity.
Complexity in Merrill's Poetry
00:34:52
Speaker
So where do you see that complication happening? Well, I mean, in this case, you know, he can't he can't give you the tree straight. He's got to give it he's got to give it slant. Right. To use Emily Dickinson's word. And well, the poem itself is full of
00:35:11
Speaker
complications. And I would emphasize kind of arbitrary complications. For example, that word eaves dripping. Give us the context for that word. He says, okay, he says in the middle of the poem,
00:35:36
Speaker
Basically, okay, they've cut me down. I know I don't have much life left. But as compensation, they're making me beautiful. They are keeping my spirits up, and they're winding me in jewels. What kind of jewels? Purple and silver chains. Ease-stripping tinsel. Ease-stripping, that's a hard word to say.
00:36:02
Speaker
And this is a neologism. This is something Merrill came up with at the moment, or at any rate, or maybe he kind of just...
00:36:12
Speaker
created it in his notebook or something and liked it and kept it, eaves dripping. It's obviously a play on eaves dropping, which is our familiar word. But in this case, he says eaves dripping as if the tinsel imitated icicles or snow dripping or at any rate falling from
00:36:40
Speaker
the eaves of a house. He's just produced this new word, a kind of turn on eavesdropping. What does it mean? Nothing. It's just cute. It's a playful gesture. Well, you say that, but I do wonder, I mean, the eavesdropping caught my eye
00:37:10
Speaker
eye or ear or whatever. And this idea that the tree is seen from the next room, I mean, it does suggest, I'm thinking of poems that Merrill had written much earlier, the poem like the world and the child or something, where the position from which the poem is spoken is of someone a room away from the action or in a different part of the house who can hear a bit of what's coming on.
00:37:38
Speaker
but is hearing it sort of imperfectly and is filling in with his own imagination. And maybe that setup, which is sort of generative for Merrill evidently in some way, is still at work here in this poem. So I don't know, maybe that...
00:37:55
Speaker
maybe eavesdropping is a relevant sort of ghostly presence behind the word that's there. He was very interested in houses and architecture and so on. So there's any thought of poems as architectural constructions. So it's not surprising that
00:38:22
Speaker
you know, his imagination would go there. In fact, what you're describing right now seems to me at the starting place of one of his most famous poems, the autobiographical poem called The Broken Home, which begins crossing the street. I saw the parents and the child at their window gleaming like fruit with evening's mild gold leaf.
00:38:51
Speaker
So he sees a kind of nuclear family unit in a window in this kind of static tableau. And then he says, in a room on the floor below, sunless, that word,
00:39:12
Speaker
suggesting shadow, but also punning on the lack of a sun. Cooler, Merrill's temperament was cool, I suppose. A brimming saucer of wax, marbly and dim, I've lit what's left of my life. At any rate, there he is again, positioned in a room in an alternate space in relation to this normative family ideal.
00:39:40
Speaker
But to go back to ease-dipping for a minute, it seems to me like a kind of gratuitous moment of wordplay that will flourish, that is less about, I don't know, making some kind of statement than it is about having fun and playing with the decorative and the ornamental.
00:40:09
Speaker
Right, here literally, right? Exactly, yeah, literally, in the sense that he's talking about the ornaments on the tree, which are amulets, melagros, which are objects invested with spiritual significance. But here, in the kind of secularized camp mode, where the tree is
00:40:38
Speaker
Well, made beautiful and made beautiful by objects that are kitschy and knowingly kitschy. There's a sense of these decorations being all the more valuable and rich because
00:41:04
Speaker
they in fact have no particular value, except as they are invested with feeling by the poet
00:41:36
Speaker
Here it seems important that the decorative is also imbued with kind of personal or local familial meaning or something, which isn't really what the art for art, I mean, it isn't all the art for art's sake idea suggests. But that's right. I mean, this is a kind of very late aestheticism.
00:41:44
Speaker
by the tree itself, by the family.
00:42:03
Speaker
But it's also an aestheticism that, as you're suggesting, isn't high. Isn't high culture. It's located in something very particular, something, certainly in this case, a kind of mass custom, the family's Christmas tree. There is another kind of odd detail
00:42:33
Speaker
Sure. Take us there. I have questions about some other odd details, but I want to hear yours. Yeah.
Health Struggles Reflected in 'Christmas Tree'
00:42:41
Speaker
This in shadow behind me, a primitive IV to keep the show going. Oh, that was mine. Yeah. Thinking what?
00:42:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's like he gives the game away there, right? Because if the way that sort of, you know, one has to read them, as soon as one knows about the circumstances of Merrill's life, one gets it, as it were, right? Ah, he's the Christmas tree. He's being cared for and decorated. But it's as though they're the sort of mask slips or something and he stops figuring it and just says it or something.
00:43:19
Speaker
very literal. Yeah. Well, it's funny that way because he had not in fact spent very much time in the hospital, but he would very soon be in the hospital. This primitive IV actually has a particular referent, which is a machine for
00:43:41
Speaker
refreshing the water in the tree. Maybe these were being sold in the mid-90s, I don't know, I've never seen such a thing. But he and Peter had one in the apartment and significantly he sees it here as a primitive IV, as if the tree were in a hospital room.
00:44:11
Speaker
uh where he would you know find himself in less than two months so he is like the tree but the tree is like a body in a hospital room so in other words the you know
00:44:27
Speaker
there is a kind of mirrored or doubling of the kind of figuration that's going on within the poem. Right, right, right. Playfully, and of course he's playing with self-disclosure. I mean, the other thing you can say about it
00:44:49
Speaker
that seems important is that Merrill has to, he has to write a dramatic monologue. He has to put it in the shape of a Christmas tree. He can't just have it in the shape of a Christmas tree. He's got to make it in the shape of an oblique view of a Christmas tree. And then he can say something directly about his fragility and his mortality with these levels of complication.
00:45:19
Speaker
which can be understood as themselves a kind of commitment to decoration, to a certain kind of lightness and play, as not in any way as trivializing, but rather as the kind of conditions under which the seriousness of
00:45:50
Speaker
his fate could be represented and addressed.
Merrill's Poetic Style and Entertainment Value
00:45:56
Speaker
I spoke earlier about a kind of commitment as a person as well as an artist to keeping up appearances, to entertaining a reader rather than making a reader feel bad or playing on a reader's heartstrings.
00:46:20
Speaker
or telling a reader what to think or how to vote, et cetera, all of which Merrill was adverse to. Here he seems to find a way through this elaborate artifice to actually express
00:46:48
Speaker
very moving sentiments and to find words for facing death in short.
00:47:02
Speaker
the line that you cite in the biography that I'm worried I'm going to only be able to paraphrase it here, not get it quite right, but that Meryl's phrase from an interview is that the poet is a man who chooses the word he lives by, right? And here maybe we get the poet as the man who chooses the word he dies by. And, you know,
00:47:35
Speaker
in that light, the closing words are extremely moving. Yeah, let's read them again so they're fresh in mind. I'm happy to do it this time since I've asked you to read before. So here it
00:47:51
Speaker
For people who aren't looking at it, we've gotten almost to the very bottom to the kind of base of the branches of the tree. And we're about to enter. So when I hit the word dusk, we're now at the trunk of the tree. That's right. You can picture it. No dread, no bitterness, the end beginning. Today's dusk room aglow for the last time with candlelight.
00:48:21
Speaker
faces love lit, gifts underfoot, still to be so poised, so receptive, still to recall, to praise. Yeah, Lanny, talk to us about those lines. Yeah, well, I mean, I think they show Merrill's commitment as a poet to a poetry that would be poised
00:48:52
Speaker
receptive, full of recall, and ultimately dedicated to praise, which is the opposite, of course, from the maudlin or the self-pitying. And that's where he ends.
00:49:17
Speaker
that's the, as it were, the base of the tree. And I think it's a very moving credo. Yeah. Can you say more about what the word, I mean, you said that it was the opposite of maudlin, which I think I understand the word praise, but as the final word of the poem here, can you say more about what
00:49:47
Speaker
what that word might have meant in Merrill's sort of poetic imagination or what it would have to do with, this is even the right kind of question to ask about it with what a poem is meant to do. Does he think that poems are meant to praise the world or something like that? And why that word in particular? Yeah, well, what would the alternative be? To complain.
00:50:16
Speaker
to protest, to resist, maybe. And he's choosing against those alternatives, and he's affirming, we sort of understanding poetry's function, but he's also, you know, in a very literal way here, suggesting that a Christmas tree's function is to praise. And what does that mean? I mean, I think-
00:50:45
Speaker
Well, why do we put up Christmas trees? We put them up to celebrate the renewal of the world in darkness, to bring living things into our home, to gather
00:51:14
Speaker
families or at any rate, loved ones around that particular symbol.
00:51:32
Speaker
In that way, and the simplest level, Christmas tree is life-affirming. And in that way, we can understand it as a kind of praise, praise of things. Yeah, that all makes sense, right? So we're sitting here recording this a couple of days before Christmas, having just had the solstice and the darkest or the longest night of the year.
00:52:03
Speaker
And right, one understands what it might mean to bring a bit of green into the house at a time like this.
00:52:11
Speaker
Of course, and this is woven throughout the poem too, there's a kind of poignant irony to that because in order to do so, you're of course killing the tree, right? The tree is the sort of sacrificial victim here in the rite or ritual that we all perform or many of us perform this time of year.
00:52:40
Speaker
And there is a sense in which, I suppose, given what you just said a moment ago, that it gives up its life, but in doing so, its function is to renew the lives of the people who gather around it. And also to be a kind of
00:53:06
Speaker
center or a flagpole or something as it were around which generosity is performed, gifts are given. And in all of those ways, you know, I was thinking as we were talking about this poem, and clearly we're going to want to wind up this conversation soon, but I was thinking as we were talking about this poem,
00:53:32
Speaker
that, you know, on the one hand, it seems like the idea here is that Merrill is speaking as the Christmas tree, but also as a reader, we're meant to understand that in some sense, Merrill really sort of was looking at the Christmas tree and imagining himself in its place. And you said earlier that, you know, part of what this poem is about as you read it is about being cared for and about the giving of care.
00:54:02
Speaker
But Merrill is also decorating the tree that the poem is, you know, here for us. That is, he is the tree, but he's also decorating it somehow, sort of for his reader. And I think there must be, maybe this is a question we could end on, there must be something there to do with not just care, but
00:54:29
Speaker
what generosity as a principle or value meant to Merrill, both in his life, of course, where he was generous, but also, what sense would it make to think of Merrill's poetry as generous in some sense? Is that a word that is resonant for you?
00:54:56
Speaker
It is. And I want to connect it back to praise, one of the most ancient functions of poetry, one of the most primary genres, the praise poem of poetry as a form. I think praise is
00:55:22
Speaker
in liturgical contexts related to gratitude and in this way related to generosity as you're describing it, a kind of giving back, let's say. And yeah, I think it's a,
00:55:50
Speaker
powerful note for this poet to end on. It's not precisely his last poem. There are a couple of others that he's working on at the very end of his life.
00:56:05
Speaker
But it was, I think it's clear in fact from certain comments that he made that when he was in fact on an IV in the hospital room in Tucson in February 1995, he was still working on this poem thinking about it. And yeah, I think it's a poetry that
00:56:33
Speaker
ultimately affirms praise as one of poetry's essential functions. Well, that's a beautiful place to end, Lanny. I want to thank you very much for your generosity in coming on, talking to me today. It's a real pleasure to me to get to talk with you.
00:56:57
Speaker
about this poem and this poet. I hope we'll talk again on this podcast. I know we'll talk again off of it.
00:57:06
Speaker
Thank you, everyone, for listening. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate happy holidays in general. And I hope everybody finds a bit of green in this dark time of year. I want to remind people to subscribe to the podcast or follow it on whatever app you're using to get your podcasts. And if you like what you hear, leave a review or rating. It helps others find it as well.
00:57:32
Speaker
We'll be back with some exciting new episodes in the new year. Thank you very much, everyone. Take care.