Marvin Bell

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences. The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination. Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other—and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future—which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

The Dead Man, Marvin Bell's brilliant poetic invention, is an overarching consciousness, alive and dead at once, defeating time. Mystical and anonymous, The Dead Man offers searing insight into the joys, as well as the catastrophes, of fluctuating cultural and political moments. Incarnate draws from all of Bell's previous collections where The Dead Man appeared, and adds an abundant cache of new poems that resonate with "the dark matter and sticky stuff" of life. As David St. John writes in his introduction, "No voice in our poetry has spoken with more eloquence and wisdom of the daily spiritual, political and psychological erosion in our lives; no poet has gathered our American experience with a more capacious tenderness--all the while naming and celebrating our persistent hopes and enduring human desires.... Remarkable for its eclectic and culturally diverse vision, Incarnate embodies a vivid world of poetic reflection unlike anything else in American poetry."

The Dead Man, Marvin Bell's brilliant poetic invention, is an overarching consciousness, alive and dead at once, defeating time. Mystical and anonymous, The Dead Man offers searing insight into the joys, as well as the catastrophes, of fluctuating cultural and political moments. Incarnate draws from all of Bell's previous collections where The Dead Man appeared, and adds an abundant cache of new poems that resonate with "the dark matter and sticky stuff" of life. As David St. John writes in his introduction, "No voice in our poetry has spoken with more eloquence and wisdom of the daily spiritual, political and psychological erosion in our lives; no poet has gathered our American experience with a more capacious tenderness--all the while naming and celebrating our persistent hopes and enduring human desires.... Remarkable for its eclectic and culturally diverse vision, Incarnate embodies a vivid world of poetic reflection unlike anything else in American poetry."

"Prose was always meant for colloquy, risk, and intimacy. With these rich and conversant prose poems, Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill return spoken language to sport--sometimes competitive, but often cooperative, exploratory, even humanely probative. What is a friend? Bell and Merrill demonstrate friendship is drawn from imagination."--Stephen Kuusisto, author of Letters to Borges "The best conversationalists intuit and respond to unspoken questions and interstitial meanings, sidelong concerns and secret subjects. They also know how to listen to another's story and hear the line or inflection that calls forth their own tale in a way that enlarges, well, everything. Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill's stunning epistolary paragraphs illustrate the inner workings of just such an intimate, agile, and sustained conversation. This collaborative, high wire act offers up profound truths in exactly the way the most exciting poems take shape--by leaps of imagination and complete trust in the power of association to bring up riches, songs, and wisdom from the depths."--Lia Purpura After the Fact is a lively and imaginative conversation between two legendary poets. Marvin Bell, writing from Iowa City and Port Townsend, and Christopher Merrill, writing from around the world, give us an intimate look into collaboration at its best. Christopher Merrill's recent books include Boat and Necessities. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Marvin Bell's works include collaborations with poet William Stafford and volumes of an original poetic form, most recently collected in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems.

Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman.--Harvard ReviewOne of our finest and most acclaimed poets.--BooklistCharged with making the darkness visible, Bell's 'Dead Man' sometimes glows with an eerily illuminating light.--Publishers WeeklyMarvin Bell is one of America's great poets, and his legacy includes the invention of a startling poetic form called the Dead Man poems. The Dead Man is alive and dead at once: not a persona, but an overarching consciousness, embedded in poetics and philosophy. Vertigo is the latest from the Dead Man--a brilliant, enigmatic, wise, and wild book. The dead man stands still, waiting for the boomerang to--you know. He hears the words of philosophers ricochet among chasms and disappear in the far away. His scent goes forth, his old skin, hair and nails, and he spits, too. He leans forward to look backward, and the ancient world reappears. It is the beginning, when mountains, canyons and seas were new, before the moon had eyes, before paper, before belief. Anything he says now are souvenirs of the future... Marvin Bell has published seventeen books of poetry and has received numerous honors, including the Lamont Award and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He taught for forty years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and was the first State Poet of Iowa. He lives in Iowa and Washington.

"Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman."--Harvard ReviewIn a recent interview Marvin Bell said, "I've been trying for thirty years to figure out how best to put the news into poems--what other people would call politics. But there are some hairy aesthetic questions connected to overtly political poems." Mars Being Red is the most political book of Bell's storied career--and one of his most beautiful. Infuriated by our country's military aggression and destructive politics, Bell asks, What shall we do, we who are at war but are asked / to pretend we are not? What Bell has done is craft a book of urgency and insight, anger and action: . . . I am, like you, a witness to the coffins that were Viet Nam and Iraq, to a political machine that came up three lemons . . . I am the big ears and the wide eyes to whom time happened. I lived in stormy weather writing songs of love because, tell me if you know, who can help it? Marvin Bell served on the faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for over thirty years. He is the first and current poet laureate of Iowa.

Marvin Bell, one of America's most influential, visible, and inventive poets, likes "ideas to have a little dirt on their shoes." His wildly original and often gritty curiosity finds inspiration in wide-ranging locales, and even wider topics. He will take on any subject in his poetry, and the conclusion of Rampant is a ten-part suite, "Journal of the Posthumous Present," which was commissioned by the Getty Research Insititute and published as a cover feature in American Poetry Review. The poem is remarkable for its original methods and socio-philosophic investigation, and points to the signature of Bell's career: his ability to radically examine the world through poetry. From "The Bones Repeat Themselves from the Bottom Upward"Later there will be a wedding in the leavesby the white church where the Boy Scouts boxin the basement, trying to be brave. The owner of the fishing station watches the seathrough binoculars, fixing on the darker waterwhere the boats clustered to thin a school. The days have been growing raw, and he is willing to give the last ones five minutesbefore he rips the tide apart with an inboardand drags to the beach those who didn'tsee the end coming." Marvin Bell enlarges our understanding of what poetry can do."--Georgia Review"Bell's passion is] for exploring the traces of paradox in language, culture and nature."--Virginia Quarterly ReviewMarvin Bell's writing has been part of the conversation for 40 years. One of the country's most visible poets, he is Iowa's first and current Poet Laureate, a long-time teacher at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and has toured with the author-based band Rock Bottom Remainders. He also reads and lectures widely; collaborates with composers, musicians and dancers; and teaches in the Urban Teachers Workshop. He lives in Iowa City.

Marvin Bell is at the peak of his formidable powers. Long recognized as one of America's liveliest poetic in-novators, he has said in a recent interview, I want to do something beyond convention, beyond accepted levels of skill, beyond the expected, beyond the predictable, beyond the wholly welcome. Nightworks is truly beyond the usual fare, and critics have praised it as a major event, long overdue, and essential. As the definitive collection of Bell's 40-year career, it combines new poems with choice selections from all of his previous books, including the now-infamous voice of the Dead Man: I am the poet of skulls without why or wherefore. I didn't ask to be this or that, one way or another, just a young man of words. Words that grew in sandy soil, words that fit scrub trees and beach grass. Sentenced to work alone where there is often no one to talk to. The poetry of skulls demands complicity of the reader, that the reader put words in the skull's mouth. The reader must put water and beer in the mouth, and music in the ears, and fan the air for aromas to enter the nostrils. The reader must take these lost heads to heart... --from SkullsMarvin Bell's career has been substantial and] Nightworks reminds us just how distinctive his voice has been all along--how prophetic, how candid, how rigorously philosophical. He enlarges our understanding of what poetry can do.--The Georgia ReviewMarvin Bell has taught for nearly 40 years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the first and current Poet Laureate of Iowa.