Episode 12

James Merrill, Christmas Tree

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December 2nd, 2020

21 mins 37 secs

Season 1

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grief and loss intimacy love science and medicine aging friendship body in pain visual poetry advent/christmas lgbtqia month 20th century guest on the show elegy

About this Episode

In this episode, Spencer Reece guides us through a reading of "Christmas Tree," one of the last poems that James Merrill wrote before his death. We learned so much through this conversation--about the friendship between James Merrill and Spencer Reece, the rhetorical force of visual poems, and the emotional power of elegy during the AIDS pandemic as well as in our own moment.

For the full text of "Christmas Tree," please see this page from the September 1995 issue of Poetry magazine.

For more on James Merrill, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.

For more on Spencer Reece, please see this page from the Poetry Foundation website.