|
Voices From The Other World
"Voices from the Other World" is a celebrated early poem by James Merrill (1926-1995). it marks the poet's first use of transcripts from a ouija board, a trope later explored at great length in the poet's apocalyptic epic "The Changing Light at Sandover" (1982). The poem, written in the first person plural, consists of nine irregularly-rhymed five-line stanzas. The (unnamed) narrators of the poem are Merrill and his partner David Jackson, who together — after a Ouija board had been given to Merrill as a present by his friend Frederick Buechner in the early 1950s — would conduct hundreds of private séance A séance or seance (; ) is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word ''séance'' comes from the French word for "session", from the Old French ''seoir'', "to sit". In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, spea ... sessions over the course of nearly four decades, an undertaking Merrill would come to mine extensively for "ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poem
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the Sanskrit ' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill (March 3, 1926 – February 6, 1995) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1977 for ''Divine Comedies.'' His poetry falls into two distinct bodies of work: the polished and formalist lyric poetry of his early career, and the epic narrative of occult communication with spirits and angels, titled ''The Changing Light at Sandover'' (published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980), which dominated his later career. Although most of his published work was poetry, he also wrote essays, fiction, and plays. Early life James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City, to Charles E. Merrill (1885–1956), the founding partner of the Merrill Lynch investment firm, and Hellen Ingram Merrill (1898–2000), a society reporter and publisher from Jacksonville, Florida. He was born at a residence which would become the site of the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, which Merrill would lament in the poem " 18 West 11th Street" (19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ouija Board
The ouija ( , ), also known as a spirit board or talking board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words "yes", "no", occasionally "hello" and "goodbye", along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance. Participants place their fingers on the planchette, and it is moved about the board to spell out words. "Ouija" is a trademark of Hasbro, but is often used generically to refer to any talking board. Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living and reportedly used a talking board very similar to a modern Ouija board at their camps in the U.S. state of Ohio in 1886 to ostensibly enable faster communication with spirits. Following its commercial introduction by businessman Elijah Bond on 1 July 1890, the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apocalypse
Apocalypse () is a literary genre in which a supernatural being reveals cosmic mysteries or the future to a human intermediary. The means of mediation include dreams, visions and heavenly journeys, and they typically feature symbolic imagery drawn from the Hebrew Bible, cosmological and (pessimistic) historical surveys, the division of time into periods, esoteric numerology, and claims of ecstasy and inspiration. Almost all are written under pseudonyms (false names), claiming as author a venerated hero from previous centuries, as with Book of Daniel, composed during the 2nd century BCE but bearing the name of the legendary Daniel. Eschatology, from Greek ''eschatos'', last, concerns expectations of the end of the present age, and apocalyptic eschatology is the application of the apocalyptic world-view to the end of the world, when God will punish the wicked and reward the faithful. An apocalypse will often contain much eschatological material, but need not: the baptism of J ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Epic Poem
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants. Etymology The English word ''epic'' comes from Latin ''epicus'', which itself comes from the Ancient Greek adjective (''epikos''), from (''epos''), "word, story, poem." In ancient Greek, 'epic' could refer to all poetry in dactylic hexameter (''epea''), which included not only Homer but also the wisdom poetry of Hesiod, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, and the strange theological verses attributed to Orpheus. Later tradition, however, has restricted the term 'epic' to ''heroic epic'', as described in this article. Overview Originating before the invention of writing, primary epics, such as those of Homer, were composed by bards who used complex rhetorical and metrical schemes by which they could memorize the epic as received in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Changing Light At Sandover
''The Changing Light at Sandover'' is a 560-page epic poem by James Merrill (1926–1995). Sometimes described as a postmodern apocalyptic epic, the poem was published in three volumes from 1976 to 1980, and as one volume "with a new coda" by Atheneum (Charles Scribner's Sons) in 1982 (). Already established in the 1970s among the finest lyric poets of his generation, Merrill made a surprising detour by incorporating extensive occult messages into his work (although a poem from the 1950s, " Voices from the Other World", was the first of his works to quote such "otherworldly" voices). With his partner David Jackson, Merrill spent more than 20 years transcribing purportedly supernatural communications during séances using a ouija board. Merrill published his first ouija board narrative cycle in 1976, with a poem for each of the letters A through Z, calling it ''The Book of Ephraim''. It appeared in the collection '' Divine Comedies'' (Atheneum), which won the Pulitze ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First-person Narrative
A first-person narrative is a mode of storytelling in which a storyteller recounts events from their own point of view using the first person It may be narrated by a first-person protagonist (or other focal character), first-person re-teller, first-person witness, or first-person peripheral. A classic example of a first-person protagonist narrator is Charlotte Brontë's ''Jane Eyre'' (1847), in which the title character is also the narrator telling her own story, "I could not unlove him now, merely because I found that he had ceased to notice me". This device allows the audience to see the narrator's mind's eye view of the fictional universe, but it is limited to the narrator's experiences and awareness of the true state of affairs. In some stories, first-person narrators may relay dialogue with other characters or refer to information they heard from the other characters, in order to try to deliver a larger point of view. Other stories may switch the narrator to different c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Noyes Jackson
David Noyes Jackson (September 16, 1922 – July 13, 2001) was the life partner of poet James Merrill (1926–1995). Life A writer and artist, Jackson is remembered today primarily for his literary collaboration with Merrill. The two men met in May 1953 in New York City, after a performance of Merrill's play, "The Bait." They shared homes in Stonington, Connecticut, Key West, Florida, and Athens, Greece. "It was, I often thought, the happiest marriage I knew," wrote Alison Lurie, who got to know both men in the 1950s and thought enough of the relationship to write a memoir about it more than forty years later, ''Familiar Spirits'' (2001). Over the course of decades conducting séances with a Ouija board, Merrill and Jackson took down supernatural transcriptions and messages from otherworldly entities. Merrill's and Jackson's ouija transcriptions were first published in verse form in ''The Book of Ephraim'' (printed for the first time in '' Divine Comedies'', 1976, whic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Frederick Buechner
Carl Frederick Buechner ( ; July 11, 1926 – August 15, 2022) was an American author, Presbyterian minister, preacher, and theologian. The author of thirty-nine published books, his work encompassed different genres, including fiction, autobiography, essays and sermons, and his career spanned more than six decades. He was best known for his novels, including '' A Long Day's Dying'', ''The Book of Bebb'', '' Godric'' (1981 Pulitzer Prize finalist), and '' Brendan'', his memoirs, including ''The Sacred Journey'' and '' Telling Secrets,'' and his theological works, such as '' Secrets in the Dark'', '' The Magnificent Defeat'', and '' Telling the Truth''. Buechner was named "without question one of the truly great writers of the 20th century" by viaLibri, a "major talent" by ''The New York Times'', and "one of our most original storytellers" by ''USA Today''. Annie Dillard (Pulitzer Prize-winning author of '' Pilgrim at Tinker Creek'') called him "one of our finest writers." Bue ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Séance
A séance or seance (; ) is an attempt to communicate with spirits. The word ''séance'' comes from the French word for "session", from the Old French ''seoir'', "to sit". In French, the word's meaning is quite general: one may, for example, speak of "''une séance de cinéma''" ("a movie session"). In English, however, the word came to be used specifically for a meeting of people who are gathered to receive messages from ghosts or to listen to a spirit medium discourse with or relay messages from spirits. In modern English usage, participants need not be seated while engaged in a séance. Fictionalised conversations between the deceased appeared in ''Dialogues of the Dead'' by George, First Baron Lyttelton, published in England in 1760. Among the notable spirits quoted in this volume are Peter the Great, Pericles, a "North-American Savage", William Penn, and Christina, Queen of Sweden. The popularity of séances grew dramatically with the founding of the religion of Spirituali ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Poems
American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, people who self-identify their ancestry as "American" ** American English, the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States ** Native Americans in the United States, indigenous peoples of the United States * American, something of, from, or related to the Americas, also known as "America" ** Indigenous peoples of the Americas * American (word), for analysis and history of the meanings in various contexts Organizations * American Airlines, U.S.-based airline headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas * American Athletic Conference, an American college athletic conference * American Recordings (record label), a record label previously known as Def American * American University, in Washington, D.C. Sports teams Soccer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Poem")
