“HV [Helen Vendler]: In your new book [Mirabell: Books of Number], you say there will be one more volume in this vein; after that you will be permitted to return to your “chronicles of love and loss.” These three books have all been based on Ouija-board material. Is there anything else that unites them, in general, and that separates them from your earlier poetry?

JM [James Merrill]: Chiefly, I think, the—to me—unprecedented way in which the material came. Not through flashes of insight, wordplay, trains of thought. More like what a friend, or stranger, might say over a telephone. DJ and I never knew until it had been spelled out letter by letter. What I felt about the material became a natural part of the poem, corresponding to those earlier poems written “all by myself.” [...]

HV: How did the poem get transcribed and composed? The work of transcription alone must have been enormous.

JM: The board goes along at a smart clip, perhaps 600 words an hour. Sometimes it was hard to reconstruct our words—”What was the question?” as Miss Stein put it. Then what to cut? What to paraphrase? What to add? Plus the danger of flatness when putting into verse a passage already coherent in prose. I could have left it in prose, but it would have been too sensational—like Castaneda, or Gwendolyn’s diary [in The Importance of Being Earnest].

HV: Couldn’t you have written without the help of the Ouija board, since it all comes out of your “word bank”? If not, why do you suppose the Ouija board is indispensable, in terms of the workings of your imagination?

JM: (a) It would seem not. (b) You could think of the board as a delaying mechanism. It spaces out, into time and language, what might have come to a saint or a lunatic in one blinding ZAP. Considering the amount of detail and my own limitations, it must have been the most workable method. And, as I have said, it’s made me think twice about the imagination. If the spirits aren’t external, how astonishing the mediums become! Victor Hugo said of his voices that they were like his own mental powers multiplied by five.”

–From “James Merrill’s Myth: An Interview” by James Merrill and Helen Vendler in The New York Review of Books, Vol. 26, Number 7. May 3, 1979.