'It's like living inside a poem'

Stonington - Given the experiences of some who have spent a season there, it's entirely possible the poet James Merrill was present at their gathering at his house Saturday night.

Even though Merrill has been dead for 16 years.

But Merrill was a man who communed with spirits, and whose greatest work, "The Changing Light at Sandover," was the product of his conversations with them via Ouija board.

And his apartment, at the top floor of 107 Water St., with its hidden room, and strange clutters of artifacts, is nothing less than the interior man externalized.

So it comes as no surprise that some who have had the privilege of being Merrill Fellows, giving them six months to a year to live and write in Merrill's house, remember feeling his presence when they lived there.

Nine of the 27 poets and writers who have done residencies in the house gathered there for a reunion Saturday before giving readings from their works at La Grua Center a block away on Water Street.

As they sat at the white marble table in the high-domed dining room, the table on which Merrill and his partner, David Jackson, conducted their excursions into the spirit world, Jedediah Berry, 34, a fiction writer, and Cate Marvin, 41, a poet, both denied they were superstitious.

And yet...

"I've never seen a ghost. I'll bet you if there were a ghost, I wouldn't even notice it, because I'm kind of oblivious," Marvin said. "But there was one time I was on the phone with someone I had a romantic interest in, and it seemed like the conversation was going in that direction...

"And this enormous vase of flowers just fell over ... and then the conversation ended catastrophically. And I felt like it was like this signal. It just seemed really strange."

This was followed, the next day, by her discovery of the eyelash carved into the living room floor.

"It's in one of Merrill's poems," Berry said, but no one had ever found it before.

Others had more direct experiences.

Michael Snediker, 34, a poet, said he felt such an intimate connection with Merrill that he has come to refer to Merrill as "Jimmy."

He became "fast, fast friends" with Merrill's friend, Ray Izbicki, the artist who lived downstairs.

"And Ray used to ask me, 'When Jimmy visits, does he knock? Because when he visits me, he knocks on the door.' And I said, 'Ray, of course he doesn't knock. This is his apartment.'

"But sometimes, for instance, I would wake in night sweats, which isn't something I usually did, and I wrote a poem about the night sweats insofar as it felt like Jimmy's HIV-positive night sweats. I felt like, of course, he's sleeping in his own bed next to me," Snediker said.

"And other times it just felt like elation. It wasn't about a warm spot or a cold spot in a given corner, and it took a kind of wooing of the spirit," he said. "So I'd wait for Jimmy to show up and then there would be a kind of joy to be here with my poetry and Jimmy and the space, these things that made me and my poetry possible. So yes, I felt him. And I do, whenever I return."

Often, even those not given to superstition said the house had a way of worming its way into their work.

Marvin said she had planned to write a certain kind of book, but "it's like the book I intended to write wasn't there; it was another book that had kind of written itself, you know, sort of creeped in. They're weird, they're really weird poems."

Beyond the house itself, there is the borough, which the writers say was amazing in itself, so much of it written about in Merrill's books, and so welcoming.

"You know, he writes about this place in his work," said Bruce Snider, 40, a poet. "It's like you have this chance to almost live in the work."

"The other thing that is amazing is the community," Snider said. "Everybody treats you so well. and they treat what you do ... a poet ... I mean, I grew up in Indiana, a very small town in Indiana. If you tell people where I'm from that you're a poet, it's like a conversation stopper. It's like saying you're a giraffe. And here they make you feel so special with what you do, that you're doing something that's important."

For his part, Michael Tyrell, 37, who writes both fiction and poetry, said he had no paranormal experiences, but friends who visited, and knew nothing of the house's history, often did.

When he first moved in, Tyrell said, "The priest who lived downstairs performed a sort of blessing. He said that the apartment was haunted, so he came up in full regalia and he blessed the apartment with frankincense and myrrh. I'm not exaggerating."

The house, for Tyrell, was a place in which he felt enveloped by lives that had been lived there.

"You have a whole history here," he said, "and after being surrounded by this, your own life feels like a drop."

"It was like you were in conversation with him because you were living in his space," Marvin said. "He has all this stuff that you look at and respond to, and it's him.

"It's like living inside a poem, basically. This is a poem."

k.robinson@theday.com