James Merrill. Influence.

He was the first living poet I knew of who wove his queerness into the poem instead of making it the subject. The world was larger than who he loved, and he showed it by writing about a world we could not see. His masterpiece, “The Changing Light at Sandover,” showed me what life was like on the other side of so called reality. He lived in a sphere I was familiar with–the spirit world–but I had never known it effected others as it effected the obeah woman, dream book writers, numbers runners, of my youth. And if he could do that, then it was our job–the young writer’s job–to “persevere,” a word he uses in this poem. Also, how could one limit one’s writing to flat facts? The soul was not a fact. It moved, changed shape, became something else. Once, sitting in Indochine with the photographer Darryl Turner many many years ago or just a moment ago, I saw James Merrill, dressed as one would imagine a poet would–in something lavender, or blue. Darryl encouraged me to tell JM how much I loved him, and to get his autograph, you never knew. I didn’t. I was crippled by my humility, and writerly insecurity, too, which can be a kind of arrogance: Why was I not him? How could one achieve that on one’s own? He had done it all. Months later James Merrill died of AIDS, and, with him, the fantasy that I would thank him after I had become more myself. I have since become–I hope–more myself, but I have yet to finish thanking him, and, so, here we are.