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  • The Paris Review

    Breaking the Rules: An Interview with the Astro Poets

    by Julia Berick Nov 21, 2019 8 minutes

    A writer I know, being a little flip, once said that you need to know only three things about James Merrill: he was gay, he was rich, and he was serious about Ouija. The subtext is that it’s already hard enough to be taken seriously as an artist, a writer, a poet in this country—so hush up about the damn board, James. Yet we treasure Hilma af Klint’s vibrant swathes of color and William James’s somber meditations, both influenced by spiritualism and the occult, as were scores of others, from Yeats and Dickens to Kandinsky, Rilke, and T.S. Eliot. In J.D. McClatchy’s interview with Merrill in this magazine, Merrill walks right up to this perplexing point with refreshing candor:

    Well, don’t you think there comes a time when everyone, not just a poet, wants to get beyond the Self? To reach, if you like, the “god” within you? The board, in however clumsy or absurd a way, allows for precisely that. Or if it’s still yourself that you’re drawing upon, then that self is much stranger and freer and more farseeing than the one you thought you knew. Of course there are disciplines with grander pedigrees and similar goals.

    It is worth considering that Merrill must have been aware that whispers of “fairy” were following

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