To a Green Thought Tristan und Isolde Zoom discussion. On Saturday, March 21 (with Encore screenings on Wednesday, March 25), cinemas across the world will be screening the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Tristan und Isolde. (You can find a cinema near you here.) On Saturday, March 28, join us on Zoom to talk about it. This is free and open to everyone; you don’t need any special knowledge or expertise; you don’t even have to particularly love opera. (I’m taking a big group of students to an encore screening; for several of them it will be their first time seeing an opera.) Just fill out this Google form to register.
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I’ve been thinking about this poem for a long time, over twenty years. The encounter that mattered came in spring 2005, when I took a workshop with Jorie Graham. Jorie was a great teacher, in a peculiar way: when she talked about poetry you felt yourself in the presence of the source of poetry, somehow; it seemed sometimes like the room filled up with lightning. I’m not sure I’ve felt that so intensely with anyone else. One of the best things about that class was that Jorie made us pick a major poet to apprentice ourselves to: we were expected not just to read their entire body of work (the poetry, anyway) over the semester, but also to memorize a poem every week. I don’t remember why I chose James Merrill—it might have been that Jorie suggested him (if so it was an inspired intervention); but I do remember that a terrifyingly brilliant undergraduate, Moira Weigel (now a professor at Harvard), also wanted to claim him. I’m not sure why it was a problem for two of us to work on the same poet, but Jorie did the kind of triage more appropriate to an emergency room than a poetry seminar, and decided that mine was the more grievous case. This was very lucky for me.
It was late in the semester when I recited Merrill’s “Rescue.” It’s from his last book, A Scattering of Salts, which was published after his death from AIDS in 1995. (He was 68.) Some of the poems from this book have become famous, but not “Rescue,” which doesn’t appear in the Selected Poems and is mentioned only once, and glancingly, in Langdon Hammer’s magisterial biography. I don’t know of any scholarship on the poem, which is not to say (though I’ve looked for it) such scholarship doesn’t exist; please put any links put in the chat. Most of the poems I recited that semester have faded since, but not “Rescue.” I don’t mean that I still have it by heart, exactly, but I never go long without thinking about it. It left a permanent mark on my reading life.
That was because of the poem, which I really do think is extraordinary, as moving and as formally supple as any poem I know, something I’ll try to give an account of below. But it’s also because of what happened when I recited it. I remember I did this with my eyes shut, mostly because I needed to concentrate, but also because I found the poem so moving I didn’t entirely trust myself to meet anybody’s gaze. I remember feeling that something in the room changed as I spoke the poem, that the poem changed the atmosphere, the weather, as great poems do. And then I finished, and opened my eyes, and of course looked to the head of the table, where Jorie sat. She had her face in her hands, and when she lifted it, it was covered in tears. Bathed in tears—I remember thinking that it was almost the first time I had seen someone whose face met that description.
It was shocking to see her like that, a shockingly private thing. I knew she wasn’t crying because of my dumb grad-student recitation; she was crying because of the poem itself—and more than that, I realized, because she had known Merrill, had been part of his world. The poem made her grief for him fresh. She talked about him with us; I remember she called him Jimmy, which along with her tears made him feel almost unbearably present. It had only been ten years since his death. I remember how visceral her connection with him felt in the little seminar room, where we sat crammed in around a big conference table; it felt like we had a direct line to him. Why did that hit me so hard in that moment, that sense of poetic lineage as a living thing, as something pulsing and real? Poetry not just as what happens on the page, but also manifesting in living connections between poets: in friendship, in grief, in the entirety of a life.
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I’m trying something new this month: audio. Here’s a dumb iPhone voice memo of me reading the poem (the text is also copied out, in pieces, below):
