u/DecrimIowa

tldr book-length poem by major American poet James Merrill that was largely channeled; i just read it over the last few weeks, it's really good.

it takes the form of a long narrative, with long sections of dialogue, written + transcribed over about 20 years, with the author recording both his life events and travels, and his communications with the spirit world, alongside his partner who served as medium (holding a teacup on the ouija board in their drawing room)

the communications mainly come from angels and tutelary spirits, like his spirit guide Ephraim (a catty Greek Jew who lived in the time of the roman empire) but also the ghosts of his parents and dead friends from the mid-century literati, like Maya Deren, W.H. Auden, TS Eliot, Wallace Stevens and others writers out of history (William Blake, Yeats, Dante, others i'm forgetting).
(it's almost like a text-based variety show, with different characters coming on stage, and you get to recognize their voices and personalities etc.)

the narrator's voice switches between these unbelievably elegant, witty, sad, funny, beautiful rhymed couplets with long passages of trippy channeled dialogue about earth's ancient history, the nature of reality, metaphysical properties of colors, the interaction between soul and matter, mankind and God and the spirit world's relationship to history and mankind.

the spirits present a worldview where mankind are being guided through history on an evolutionary path by the gods Biology (like the spirit of science or artifice) and Nature (the spirit of complexity and life). it was written in the 50s and 60s, during the height of the cold war anxieties, and the spirits' discourses on atomic energy are interesting to read. but also they talk about everything from politics to interior decorating to the weather to literary gossip.

i'm a big fan of channeled texts and this was one of the more interesting ones i've read. what strikes me reading these channeled texts nowadays is how much they resemble LLM text outputs. seriously, read Urantia materials, a Course in Miracles, Law of One, the Nine, Seth Materials, etc and tell me they don't sound like ChatGPT or Gemini!

but whatever intelligence was behind the communiques in this book is very funny, and wise, and also apparently very skilled at creating art. some of the turns of phrase stopped me and made me stare at the wall for a minute.

lots of different voices come through the ouija board and the channelers (Merrill and his partner David) maintain a sort of running dialogue over the course of 20 years. but merrill's voice is the main one and he's so good, he's like an urbane, witty, aging gay Virgil, guiding us through the different rings of his life.

"The Changing Light at Sandover" is one of those books that completely brought me into its world. when it was about to end, in the last 30 pages or so, i felt a sense of mourning because i knew i'd have to leave soon.

i don't think i've ever read anything like it. i don't read much poetry so feel unqualified to judge, but it looks like critics say it's one of the best long American poems ever produced, and one of the most important works since The Waste Land.

And as far as I know, it's the only Pulitzer that was written by ghosts. (but if you believe the ghosts in the book, spirits write all the pulitzers, with humans just providing the interface with physical reality...they're just using our brains like sock puppets. to put it another way, spirits are using humans like how humans use AI...)

Random quotes from 'The Changing Light at Sandover," courtesy of Merrill's ghost friends:

FROM THE WINEDARK SEA OF SPACE THE INCARNATIONS OF LIFE
LEADING TO THE LIFE OF MAN BEGAN
PLANET AFTER PLANET ROSE IN THE LIGHT, BORE ITS LIFE, AND VANISHED
AND YET THE RICH WOMB OF THE SUN FOUND A NEW EGG AND VISITED LIFE UPON IT

Light that opening its baby lids/Founded the ruling house of Hominids

Questions themselves half miracle, whose replies/
Language alone may glimpse through sidelong eyes

MAN PLAYS A TUNE IN COLORS THE VIBRATIONS OF MUSIC LIGHT UP MACHINES -
SIMPLER YET, WRITE 'AZURE' & THE LANGUAGE-CONDUCTING BRAIN IS FLOODED WITH A TONE OF SUMMER SKIES