You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, or you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and this is Bookworm.

We are very honored today to have with us two special guests.

James Merrill, poet, translator, novelist, essayist, is here on a visit, fortunately, not all that unusual to the West Coast, where he

performed a theater version of his great three-volume work with Changing Light at Sandover,

called Voices from Sandover. With him is Stephen Jenser, who teaches in the English department at

UCLA, and who has written a book on Merrill, which came out last year from the Harvard University

Press. I had met Mr. Jenser before the book came out, but a review in the village voice made me think,

well, yes, this really is one of the works of criticism I should read, primarily because the

review praised the book for the beauty of its diction. I had looked for the book in stores, finally got it directly from Harvard

University Press, and found that it belonged with the very best written criticism of the century.

It seemed to me to belong on my shelf with Hugh Kenner's book,

the Pound Era, just talking about the way in which the book had been written. Now, Stephen,

it's, Kenner used to talk about, as he wrote on Joyce and then Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, God

knows who else, that he had to learn everyone's style that there was a ventriloqual shift in his rhetorical

voice when writing criticism about different figures. This book certainly seems representative of the intelligence, wit, elusiveness of

James Merrill's work. Was it a task to achieve that voice? Was a specifically my medic job that you

were doing when working out of prose to write about Marilyn?

No, not a bit of the criticism that I've written.

This is easily the most enjoyable to write.

And it came very naturally, really.

There are ways in which James Merrill taught me to write, and I have known him for 20 years and more now.

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