Session 4: James Merrill: Life and Archive

2:45 p.m. — Session 4: James Merrill: Life and Archive An introduction to James Merrill resources in Washington University Special Collections. See http://omeka.wustl.edu/omeka/exhibits/show/merrill-life-archiv

James Merrill Wallace

James Merrill Wallacehttps://scholarsjunction.msstate.edu/ua-photo-collection/3801/thumbnail.jp

Session 2: Remembering Jimmy

10:30 a.m. — Session 2: Remembering Jimmy Stephen Yenser, distinguished professor of English, UCLA — Reading an essay about his friendship with Merrill Randy Bean, board member, James Merrill House Committee — Presenting on the history and initiatives of the James Merrill House Judith Moffett, adjunct professor emerita of English, University of Pennsylvania — Mixed Messages, an excerpt from Unlikely Friends: A Memoir Rachel Hadas, professor of English, Rutgers University — (via prerecorded video) reading an excerpt from The Book of Ephraim, reading her poem, Threshold and Mirror: the Biography, and recollecting her friendship with Merril

Keynote Address: The Biographical Container

Keynote address: “The Biographical Container” by Langdon Hammer, author of James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf). Watch the video of the address here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BquCAmR6ANI

James Merrill

James Merrill (1926-1995). Poeta estadounidense. Recibió, entre otros, el Premio Pulitzer de Poesía 1977 por su libro Divine Comedies. Su estilo escritural puede dividirse en dos vías: la pulida y formal, profundamente lírica, correspondiente a la primera parte de su carrera, y la segunda, una escritura de tintes épicos. Aunque la mayor parte de su trabajo publicado corresponde a poesía, también abordó el ensayo y la narrativa

Vol. 56, No. 5, November 1, 2005

•A Half-Hour With Prof. Horwitz •Editorial: Move Your Lunch or Lose It •Question on the Quad •Fear No Evil in Campus of the Dead •Introducing the Poetry of James Merrill •Halloween Party Photos •BLSA Date Auction Photos •When Did I Become Grandpa? •Lonely Litigants Looking for Love, Liability •An Immodest Proposal: Or, Against Socratism •Letter to the Edito

Vol. 56, No. 5, November 1, 2005

•A Half-Hour With Prof. Horwitz •Editorial: Move Your Lunch or Lose It •Question on the Quad •Fear No Evil in Campus of the Dead •Introducing the Poetry of James Merrill •Halloween Party Photos •BLSA Date Auction Photos •When Did I Become Grandpa? •Lonely Litigants Looking for Love, Liability •An Immodest Proposal: Or, Against Socratism •Letter to the Edito

Session 3: Digital Merrill

1:15 p.m. — Session 3: Digital Merrill Shannon Davis, digital library services manager, WU: The James Merrill Digital Archive: Process and Product Annelise Duerden, PhD candidate in English, WU — “Admit It Arguably A priori Admittedly I have failed”: Re-vision in the Merrill Archive Heidi Lim, PhD candidate in English, WU — To Tag or Not to Tag: The Digital Markup Process as a Form of Reading Timothy Materer, professor emeritus, University of Missouri — The Poem as a Netscap

“The central hollowness”: James Merrill and the Annihilation of the Self

James merrill's strange—and at times inaccessible— trilogy The Changing Light at Sandover is very different in conception from his lyrical poetry. Merrill displays a distinct concern with appearances and aesthetics in his lyrical poetry, whereas the Sandover trilogy is much more political and spiritual in nature, focusing on content—largely transcribed from Ouija board sessions—over form. Merrill repeatedly expresses discomfort with his own predilection for form over content in poems that feature key themes of appearances, impressions, metaphor, and poetic form. This concern with the question of form versus content appears in “The Black Swan,” “Transfigured Bird,” “The Octopus,” and “To a Butterfly.” The conflict between form and content is only partly resolved in these poems, however, through an evocation of the sublime as a poetic gesture to that which cannot be expressed

Tribe

I met Larry Tribe in 1997 at a dinner party in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tointroduce me to her colleagues, Harvard Professor Martha Minow asked me which of the University\u27s scholars I would like to invite to my ideal dinner. As a newly minted professor, it took me a moment to realize this was not an interview question, but her characteristically generous attempt to construct a guest list. I asked for Larry Tribe and Helen Vendler. I had been lucky enough to take a seminar on modem poetry with Vendler as an undergraduate at Harvard. But neither Vendler nor I had met Tribe before.At one point in the evening, someone mentioned Vendler\u27s book on the odes ofJohn Keats.1 Tribe mused aloud about who John Keats might have grown up to be if he had lived past the age of twenty-six. (This off-hand reference to how old Keats was when he died was my first experience of Tribe\u27s intellectual range and photographic memory.) I think he would have grown up to be James Merrill, Vendler replied. I saw Tribe look up at her as she issued this extraordinary pronouncement. James Merrill, after all, was still alive. I thought each recognized a kindred spirit. She was forging the literary canon as he was forging the legal one. I felt I was in the presence of greatness