Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Net Surfing: Poetry with the Quija Board?

Who’d have thunk!

This morning, to clear my head, I surfed the net (I think that rhymed).

Anyway, first I read an article in Writers Digest about the new book by Robert Haas WRITING 21ST CENTURY FICTION, about to be published.

http://www.writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/there-are-no-rules/writing-21st-centur...

In it, the author says what I have firmly believed (for myself) for a long time. That is, to stay away from the popular that sells, the flavor of the times, just to get published, but to concentrate what comes from the inside and reflects human truths, “moving beyond what is easy and comfortable to write what is hard and even painful to face.” Then he says to get over the trends and write 21st century fiction by “becoming highly personal.” I believe it, but it is so difficult to do. My question is how would I or any other writer know that we are not lying to ourselves when we are writing of our "highly personal truths"? Maybe the answer is somewhere inside the book, but I won’t know it until it is published.

Then I followed a Twitter link to an interview in Paris Review of summer 1982, with James Merrill (1926-1995).

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3154/the-art-of-poetry-no-31-james-merr...

I had no idea that this poet used a Quija Board to “channel” his poetry, the board made by him on a cardboard. Because during those years when James Merrill was tinkering with his board I was very busy in my life doing unrelated things, I didn’t get a wind of this trend, and we didn't have the internet then.

Poets have always done strange things, and I’d fear to irritate a dead poet, but this Quija Board thing made me chuckle.

From The Changing Light at Sandover by James Merrill, published in 1982. In this book, he talks all about his ventures on the Quija Board.

“Correct but cautious, that first night, we asked
Our visitor's name, era, habitat.
Ephraim came the answer. A Greek Jew
Born AD8 at Xanthos. Where was that?
In Greece WHEN WOLVES & RAVENS WERE IN ROME...”

Now that I have written this, I hope and pray the spirits don’t break my already idiosyncratic laptop.