"He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline"
About this Quote
A poet bragging about throughput like a factory foreman is the joke, and Merrill knows it. The line comes from his accounts of the Ouija-board sessions that produced The Changing Light at Sandover, where “composition” is staged as dictation: two hands on a planchette, one hand kept “free to transcribe.” It’s a domestic, almost clerical setup - cups, hands, hours, word counts - that turns the spooky into the procedural. The supernatural arrives not with thunder but with workflow.
The specific intent is to normalize an un-normalizable method without deflating its strangeness. Merrill gives you the mechanics (right hand, left hand, transcription) because mechanics confer legitimacy. If it can be described like stenography, it can be taken as a practice rather than a parlor trick. The wry metric - “500 to 600 words an hour” - carries a double subtext: an artist’s self-mockery about productivity culture, and a sly defense against suspicion. He anticipates the reader’s raised eyebrow by preemptively quantifying the results, as if to say: whatever you think is happening, it produces.
“Better than gasoline” is the kicker because it yokes inspiration to fuel and to an era’s anxieties. Gasoline is modern power: expensive, volatile, politically freighted. Merrill’s alternative energy is language summoned from the beyond, a renewable resource as long as the hands keep moving. The sentence flirts with cynicism about authorship - who’s really “writing”? - while also revealing Merrill’s real fascination: not belief as doctrine, but belief as a machine for making poems.
The specific intent is to normalize an un-normalizable method without deflating its strangeness. Merrill gives you the mechanics (right hand, left hand, transcription) because mechanics confer legitimacy. If it can be described like stenography, it can be taken as a practice rather than a parlor trick. The wry metric - “500 to 600 words an hour” - carries a double subtext: an artist’s self-mockery about productivity culture, and a sly defense against suspicion. He anticipates the reader’s raised eyebrow by preemptively quantifying the results, as if to say: whatever you think is happening, it produces.
“Better than gasoline” is the kicker because it yokes inspiration to fuel and to an era’s anxieties. Gasoline is modern power: expensive, volatile, politically freighted. Merrill’s alternative energy is language summoned from the beyond, a renewable resource as long as the hands keep moving. The sentence flirts with cynicism about authorship - who’s really “writing”? - while also revealing Merrill’s real fascination: not belief as doctrine, but belief as a machine for making poems.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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