Marvin Bell – författare

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 "Skulls"

"Marvin 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 Review

Marvin Bell has taught for nearly 40 years at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the first and current Poet Laureate of Iowa.

“Marvin Bell has the largest heart since Walt Whitman.”—Harvard Review

In 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 has the largest heart since Walt Whitman."—Harvard Review

"One of our finest and most acclaimed poets."—Booklist

"Charged with making the darkness visible, Bell''s ''Dead Man'' sometimes glows with an eerily illuminating light."—Publishers Weekly

Marvin 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 Review

In 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's American reputation rests on fourteen distinguished books of poetry and essays, noted by reviewers for their originality, lucidity, variety, and eloquence. His writing has been called "ambitious without pretension", and he himself has been referred to as "an insider who thinks like an outsider". Wednesday is the first book by Marvin Bell to be published outside the United States."Marvin Bell may have the most refined ear of his free verse contemporaries. He is that rare poet who can hear speech as it was meant to be written."Stanley Plumly"...one of the very few to claim our enduring respect and attention."J.D. McClatchyMarvin Bell was born in New York City, grew up on rural Long Island, and now lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. He is a longtime faculty member of the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he is Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. Literary honours include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.