Top Ten New Yorker & Me: #5 “James Merrill’s ‘Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker’ ”

James Merrill (Photo by Jill Krementz)

This is the sixth post in my monthly archival series “Top Ten New Yorker & Me,” in which I look back and choose what I consider to be some of this blog’s best writings. Today’s pick is “James Merrill’s ‘Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker’ ” (December 6, 2016):

Great poets make poetry out of the damnedest things. Prime example: James Merrill’s “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker.” I first read it when it appeared in the February 24, 1992, New Yorker. I remember it for the white windbreaker imprinted with a world map delightfully described in the first stanza:

The windbreaker is white with a world map.

DuPont contributed the seeming-frail,
Unrippable stuff first used for Priority Mail.
Weightless as shores reflected in deep water,
The countries are violet, orange, yellow, green;
Names of the principal towns and rivers, black.
A zipper’s hiss, and the Atlantic Ocean closes
Over my blood-red T-shirt from the Gap.

But, as Stephen Burt points out in his marvelous new book The Poem Is You, Merrill’s poem contains two windbreakers – a white one and a black one. The black one briefly materializes in the second-last stanza (“It’s my windbreaker / In black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat”). Burt comments,

Merrill learned in 1986 that he had HIV, for which in the early 1990s there were no effective treatments; “Self-Portrait” has also been read as his plan for his funeral, a self-elegy complete with choice of coffin. As Helen Vendler explains, by the penultimate stanzas Merrill has decided that the original windbreaker, “white with a world map,” cannot be his shroud: the “black celestial twin of his jacket,” however, strikes him as a “garment for death not only appropriate but beautiful.”

The reference is to Helen Vendler’s “Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts” (Last Looks, Last Books, 2010), a brilliant study of Merrill’s dying self-portraits, in which “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” is described as an “organic living portrait, the poet’s last walk wearing his absurd and surreal Tyvek shroud.”

Merrill’s world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker may be absurd and surreal, but I like it. I suspect Merrill secretly did, too. After all, as Burt points out, he wore it. And wearing it is what inspired this beautifully flowing, chiming poem. 

James Merrill: Sublime Poet of the Everyday

James Merrill (Photo by Rollie McKenna)

Edward Mendelson, in his “The Genius and Generosity of Jimmy Merrill” (The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016), says of Merrill, “Poetic artifice was his natural voice.” I’m not sure he’s right. He makes Merrill sound as if he’s anti-realist. What I cherish in Merrill’s poems is his deep engagement with quotidian reality. For example, the description of the New Age shop where he bought his world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker, in “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” (The New Yorker, February 24, 1992):

I found it in one of those vaguely imbecile 


Emporia catering to the collective unconscious 


Of our time and place. This one featured crystals, 


Cassettes of whalesong and rain-forest whistles, 


Barometers, herbal cosmetics, pillows like puffins, 


Recycled notebooks, mechanized lucite coffins 

For sapphire waves that crest, break, and recede, 

As they presumably do in nature still.

Dan Chiasson, in his brilliant “Out of this World” (The New Yorker, April 13, 2015), a review of Langdon Hammer’s James Merrill: Life and Art, says of Merrill:

His work is replete with the transfigured commonplace, bits of the world reclaimed in his daily imaginative raids: an “Atari dragonfly” on the Connecticut River, a joint smoked on a courthouse lawn, a trip to the gym, a Tyvek windbreaker.

This, for me, is a more accurate description of Merrill’s work than Mendelson’s “poetic artifice.”  

James Merrill's “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker”

James Merrill (Photo by Jill Krementz)

Great poets make poetry out of the damnedest things. Prime example: James Merrill’s “Self-Portrait inTyvek™ Windbreaker.” I first read it when it appeared in the February 24, 1992, New Yorker. I remember it for the white windbreaker imprinted with a world map delightfully described in the first stanza:

The windbreaker is white with a world map.

DuPont contributed the seeming-frail,

Unrippable stuff first used for Priority Mail.

Weightless as shores reflected in deep water,

The countries are violet, orange, yellow, green;

Names of the principal towns and rivers, black.

A zipper’s hiss, and the Atlantic Ocean closes

Over my blood-red T-shirt from the Gap.

But, as Stephen Burt points out in his marvelous new book, The Poem Is You, Merrill’s poem contains two windbreakers – a white one and a black one. The black one briefly materializes in the second-last stanza (“It’s my windbreaker / In black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat”). Burt comments,

Merrill learned in 1986 that he had HIV, for which in the early 1990s there were no effective treatments; “Self-Portrait” has also been read as his plan for his funeral, a self-elegy complete with choice of coffin. As Helen Vendler explains, by the penultimate stanzas Merrill has decided that the original windbreaker, “white with a world map,” cannot be his shroud: the “black celestial twin of his jacket,” however, strikes him as a “garment for death not only appropriate but beautiful.”

The reference is to Helen Vendler’s “Self-Portraits While Dying: James Merrill and A Scattering of Salts” (Last Looks, Last Books, 2010), a brilliant study of Merrill’s dying self-portraits, in which “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” is described as an “organic living portrait, the poet’s last walk wearing his absurd and surreal Tyvek shroud.”

Merrill’s world-map-imprinted white Tyvek windbreaker may be absurd and surreal, but I like it. I suspect Merrill secretly did, too. After all, as Burt points out, he wore it. And wearing it is what inspired this beautifully flowing, chiming poem. 

The Pleasure of Description (Contra Kirsch)

Elizabeth Bishop, 1956 (Bettmann/Corbis)

Adam Kirsch, in his absorbing "Full Fathom Five" (The New Yorker, February 3, 2014), a review of The Poetry of Derek Walcott, says,

The visual and the literary make uneasy partners, since they operate according to different temporal regimes: everything at once versus one thing after another. As a result, when a poet takes to describing what he sees, the result can be boring and static. Visual descriptions are usually the most skippable parts of any poem.

I strongly disagree. I devour visual descriptions. Far from being the most “skippable parts of any poem,” they are, for me, an immense source of reading pleasure. Take for example the exquisite description of the beach in James Merrill’s “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War”:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs.

And Elizabeth Bishop’s depiction of fog in her great “The Moose”:

shifting, salty, thin,

comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals

form and slide and settle

in the white hens’ feathers,

in gray glazed cabbages,

on the cabbage roses

and lupins like apostles.

And Seamus Heaney’s unforgettable description of the Grauballe Man:

As if he had been poured

in tar, he lies

on a pillow of turf

and seems to weep

the black river of himself.

The grain of his wrists

is like bog oak,

the ball of his heel

like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk

cold as a swan’s foot

or a wet swamp root.

His hips are the ridge

and purse of a mussel,

his spine an eel arrested

under a glisten of mud.

The head lifts,

the chin is a visor

raised above the vent

Of his slashed throat

that has tanned and toughened.

The cured wound

opens inward to a dark

elderberry place.

I could multiply examples endlessly. The point is there’s a blind spot in Kirsch’s criticism. The pleasure principle is lacking.

Interesting Emendations: James Merrill's "Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War"

Loving a poem only for its opening lines is a bit like loving a woman only for her gorgeous eyes. The focus is narrow but very intense. This describes my relationship with James Merrill’s extraordinary “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-Of-War,” which I first encountered in the January 17, 1977 issue of The New Yorker. Its opening stanza is, for me, narcotic:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs

No more vivid word picture of a beach has ever been written, at least not in such concentrated, evocative form. The image of the beach as a “vertebrate picked clean” is inspired, and the description of the palms’ “tall seableached incurving ribs” is ravishing.

Interestingly, when Merrill included this poem in his 1985 collection Late Settings, he changed it. The opening lines read:

A mile-long vertebrate picked clean

To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs

The second line has been revised - “lofty-plumed” replaces “the palms’ tall.” Is the change an improvement? I’m not certain. “Lofty-plumed” strikes me as a shade decorative. What comes to mind when I read it are hats, not palms. I like the simpler “the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs” – its plainness is consistent with the “picked clean” beach of the first line. And the rhythm of “ To the palms’ tall seableached incurving ribs” is smoother than “To lofty-plumed seableached incurving ribs.” The hyphenated “lofty-plumed” introduces a couple of extra beats that jars the line’s music – to my ear, anyway.

I’m not sure what “Palm Beach with Portuguese Man-of-War” is about. Helen Vendler, in her review of Late Settings, calls it “an elegy of sorts for Merrill’s wealthy thrice-married father” (“James Merrill,” The Music of What Happens, 1988). She refers to its “anatomy of tycoons, their female hangers-on, their sexual forays, their eventual toombs.” This interpretation seems reasonable. It certainly helps make sense of words such as “razor labia of hangers-on” and “tiny hideous tycoon.” It’s not a joyful poem. Vendler says, “Hatred and pity coexist in this impersonal elegy.” But its description – particularly those concise, consummate opening lines in the New Yorker version - is exquisite.

Credit: The above photograph of James Merrill is by Rollie McKenna.