Marvin Bell, retired from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches for the low-residency M.F.A. program based at Pacific University in Oregon. He and his wife, Dorothy, live in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems appeared in 2011 and After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts (a collaboration with Christopher Merrill) will be released in 2016.
Poetry
Summer 2007
Art Shoes
Let's turn a blind shoe to war. Let's point our shiny shoes ahead and behind, to earth and sky, to time and no-time. Let us kick up a rumpus to […]
Poetry
Summer 2007
Bus Stop Essay on Rampant Capitalism
Property means money will own our dust, the rinds of squeezed lemons, soap film, and the reeds whistling in the swamp, and they want the swans for themselves, and the […]
Poetry
Summer 2007
An Apology to the Vietnamese and Iraqis
Fog and lamplight and a sleepless night suggest a past to sit up with, in an armchair with a book and a snack. A small boat putt-putts somewhere under the […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Epithalamium
If you twist a rope twist it and twist it no matter how long a rope it is after awhile you cannot make one more turn without skinning your palms […]
Poetry
Spring 2004
Bright Lights of January
An oak branch chewed down to the meat and the window of a car grumbling over gravel toward groceries and the news are midmorning’sbright lights of January. The brittle leaves […]
Poetry
Summer/Fall 1999
Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps #24
A common goal—to defy gravity. Mortality an ogre, entropy a disaster, hubris the proximate poison. The string section therefore sawing time. Tympani whacking concavities into the air waves. Oboes to […]
Poetry
Summer/Fall 1999
Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps #19
The growth underfoot, the amputated remains. Heraclitus watches the change from earth to air by way of fire. He observes from a distance called “time.” The merely molecular dispersion of […]
Poetry
Autumn 1990
Initial Conditions
The way the sun will slant, breaking through the window of the Uptown Café to light a page from Dickinson or Moore, may pick up the names of America's heroes […]
Weekend Reads
Initial Conditions
From the Kenyon Review, New Series, Fall 1990, Vol. XII, No. 2 The way the sun will slant, breaking through the window of the Uptown Café to light a page […]