Merle Hoyleman

Years ago Black Mountain College poet and publisher Jonathan Williams was working on my book The Book of Frank.  Jonathan passed away before the book could be published, and then Wave Books picked it up, but my time with Jonathan in his massive house on top of Scaly Mountain in North Carolina was one of the most extraordinary times of my life.

He would tire of my questions about what it was like working with Charles Olson and Buckminster Fuller, so I started asking about his tens of thousands of books in his house.  I asked him to show me a book on all those shelves that I had to read.  He handed me this book with a magnifying glass.

Merle Hoyleman's ASP OF THE AGE is something we can have our local libraries order through interlibrary loan for us.  The reason for the magnifying glass is because she insisted that the publisher publish her poems as facsimiles of her handwriting with yellow ink on white paper.  Difficult reading until you get used to her script, but once you get it, WOW, it is such a spectacularly strange and beautiful book of poems.

At dinner that night I started asking about Merle.  Jonathan said that she was the only author he was unable to work with once they got started.  She would call and scream.  He was confused and took a flight to Pittsburgh to visit her in her home to work on the book with her in person.  He said she was like anyone's grandmother with a tidy hair doo and apron, baking and cooking and laughing with Jonathan in the kitchen.  THEN she abruptly put her knife down and said, "They have returned."  He asked, "Who has returned?"  It was as if she had not heard him and walked into the living room.

In one corner of the living room, the walls were completely bare of any art and sitting in the corner was a chair and small table with paper and writing tools.  She stood facing the corner of the ceiling above the chair and table while SCREAMING at what she called The Scum, which was a group of spirits who would visit through this ceiling portal in her house.  Jonathan said her screams terrified him like someone was being murdered.  Then she calmly said to The Scum, "Okay, okay, I hear you, I am sitting down now."  And then she sat at the table and began writing for the next two hours without stop.  All of her poems were messages from The Scum.

The book Jonathan tried to publish is titled LETTERS TO CHRISTOPHER.  They are poems, and when he could no longer work with her James Laughlin of New Directions gave it a try because he was also enamored with her poems, but Laughlin also had to eventually stop working with her because she would call and scream.  The only copy of the book that exists is the one that Jonathan typed from her handwritten pages, and it exists at the SUNY Buffalo Special Collection.  If you ever find yourself in Buffalo, New York, take the time to read LETTERS TO CHRISTOPHER.  You will have to do so in the library as it is never allowed to leave the room.