{"id":36101,"date":"2006-10-15T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2006-10-15T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=36101"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:58:33","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T19:58:33","slug":"issue-61-a-conversation-with-marvin-bell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/issue-61-a-conversation-with-marvin-bell\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 61: A Conversation with Marvin Bell"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Willow<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Interview in Willow Springs 61<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Works in Willow Springs 79<\/em><\/a> and 60<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

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October 15, 2006<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Brett Ortler and Zachary Vineyard<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH MARVIN BELL<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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\"Marvin<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: robertpeake.com<\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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Marvin Bell is the author of nineteen books <\/strong>of poetry and essays, the most recent of which, Mars Being Red<\/em>, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. \u201cWhat sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s,\u201d according to Publisher\u2019s Weekly<\/em>, \u201calso brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily and almost despairingly against the current administration and the war in Iraq. There are \u2018too many body bags to bury in the mind.\u2019 Unlike many poets of protest, though, Bell ties his antiwar sentiment to an awareness that, even in peacetime, we all must die: \u2018We need to think of what might grow in the \ufb01eld \/ from our ashes, from the rot of our remains.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Born in New York City in 1937, Marvin Bell grew up on rural Long Island. He holds a bachelor\u2019s degree from Alfred University, a master\u2019s degree from the University of Chicago, and a master of \ufb01ne arts degree from the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, and served two terms as the state of Iowa\u2019s \ufb01rst Poet Laureate. He has also taught at Goddard College, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington, Wichita State University, and Portland State University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPoetry doesn\u2019t easily reveal itself,\u201d Bell said during his opening remarks at the International Camou\ufb02age Conference at the University of Northern Iowa in 2006. \u201cAt \ufb01rst glance, it looks and sounds like the utilitarian language we use every day, but it isn\u2019t. It can be the lie that tells the truth. It can follow an indirect path that reveals more than a straight line would\u2026 In other words, to see it, one sometimes has to take a second look. And, indeed, one can be looking directly at it and not see it until it moves.\u201d Bell\u2019s many honors include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His books of poetry include Rampant<\/em> (2004); Nightworks: Poems<\/em>, 1962\u20132000; Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man<\/em>, Volume 2 (1997); A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose<\/em> (1994); The Book of the Dead Man<\/em> (1994); New and Selected Poems<\/em> (1987); Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See<\/em> (1977), which was a \ufb01nalist for the National Book Award; A Probable Volume of Dreams<\/em> (1969), which was a Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Things We Dreamt We Died For<\/em> (1966).
\u201cArt is a way of life, not a career,\u201d Marvin Bell wrote in \u201c32 Statements About Writing Poetry.\u201d We met with him at his home in Port Townsend, Washington, where he talked about teaching, poetry, the personal sublime, and political engagement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BRETT ORTLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think there\u2019s too much emphasis on writing perfect poems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MARVIN BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Depends who you are. I don\u2019t think Charles Bukowski worried about it. What is \u201cperfection\u201d? And how does one attain it? Some think it requires writing slowly, laboring through revision after revision. Yet some excellent poets have written fast in an improvisational manner. There\u2019s no one way to write. I believe that, I don\u2019t just say it. Don Justice is an example of someone who wrote very slowly, even though he believed poets should write a lot. I once took over an o\ufb03ce of his in Iowa City and in a drawer were a few sheets of paper on which he was working out three lines in a poem called \u201cFor the Suicides of Two Years Ago\u201d\u2014three lines about the black keys on a piano, and he\u2019d typed them over and over, making tiny changes. I think people make art in many di\ufb00erent ways, and genius in the arts consists of getting in touch with one\u2019s own wiring. It\u2019s not a question of good and bad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bill Sta\ufb00ord\u2019s attitude toward writing was something else. He used to say that writing is a natural human activity, and he would allow an audience to think whatever they wanted to about him. He was tough inside. I saw him, in a sense, diminish readings where the event seemed too important, where people seemed to be making a fuss. He would read fewer poems than usual and mainly small poems\u2014it\u2019d still be a wonderful reading\u2014but it\u2019d be short, as if he were taking a position against making it too important. When he went to a party after a reading, if there were important people in the room, and people in the corner who seemed to feel as if they weren\u2019t sure they belonged, he would head right for those people. I never saw a man who could pay better attention. When he was talking to you, he was right there talking to you<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were up at the Midnight Sun Writer\u2019s Conference in Alaska\u2014 both teaching\u2014and I said to him, \u201cLet\u2019s write some poems back and forth sometime.\u201d And he agreed. So I got home and I was thinking, Whoa, I\u2019ve got to write a poem and I\u2019ve got to send it to Bill Sta\ufb00ord. It\u2019s got to be a good poem. And while I\u2019m thinking that, here comes Bill\u2019s \ufb01rst poem. We didn\u2019t have e-mail in those days, so we\u2019d write back and forth, and we published a couple of books of that work, but we hadn\u2019t intended to publish\u2014it was just something we started to do. Sometimes Bill would send three or four poems, one of which would be the o\ufb03cial poem. It didn\u2019t matter whether the poetry was good\u2014whatever that means\u2014it mattered that anybody could do this, that there was a community about it and that it was fun. Someone told me that Merwin may have suggested the same thing to James Merrill years ago. I used to do it in classes. We\u2019d draw names out of a hat and people would pair up and write six pairs of poems, going back and forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZACHARY VINEYARD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a small press trying to recreate that in Idaho\u2014Blue Scarab Press. They print chapbooks with \ufb01ve poems each from two authors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Blessings on small presses. There was a fellow in Idaho who printed pamphlets of Sta\ufb00ord poems, Donnell Hunter\u2014he\u2019d do a pamphlet of Sta\ufb00ord\u2019s work every year. And he also did a pamphlet of poems Bill and I wrote during the Port Townsend Writers\u2019 Conference, where we decided to write poems back and forth each night about the conference. On the nights when it was my turn I couldn\u2019t sleep because I had to write my poem, while Bill was up at \ufb01ve in the morning writing, who knows, six poems. Bill knew that judgments were beside the point, and he wrote a lot, published thousands of poems. I asked him, decades ago, whether he\u2019d written hundreds of poems or thousands. He said, \u201cThousands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I said, \u201cIf you say thousands, that means you\u2019ve written at least two thousand poems.\u201d I hardly knew him yet. And he said, \u201cWell, last summer, someone lent us a cabin in Oregon, and I had a little desk and whenever I \ufb01nished a poem, I\u2019d put it over here on the right side with a stone on it. And at the end of the month I had about\u2026\u201d and he held up his hands to indicate a ream\u2019s worth of paper. I understand that for years he only wrote for about an hour and a half in the morning. He\u2019d start with a little something and just go with it. I\u2019ve written in his style, but I don\u2019t generally write that way. The line that I cherish by William Carlos Williams, that shows up in Paterson, applies to Bill: \u201cOnly one solution: to write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive.\u201d That\u2019s a very di\ufb00erent attitude than trying to write perfect poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VINEYARD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you end up focusing on sentences in poems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some years ago I wrote a poem that sounded like\u2014I don\u2019t want to be too fancy about this\u2014but it had the feeling of having been taken from a book lost to antiquity. So I called it, \u201cFrom the Book of the Dead Man.\u201d And there were some other unusual things about it. Every poetic line was a sentence. That is, the sentence was also the poetic line. And the sentence was elastic. You know, it\u2019s syntax that provides opportunities for an enjambment, or an end-stop, changes in pitch, pace, timbre\u2026 It\u2019s syntax that\u2019s the real secret to free verse. So I got away from the obsession with free verse lines in that poem. In e\ufb00ect, I did away with the ongoing arguments about the poetic line. And the poem had two parts with titles. It\u2019s one thing to have stanzas or sections, but two separate parts with titles\u2014what is that? But of course the implication is, Oh yeah, you thought the poem was over. But it doesn\u2019t have to be over. And the truth is, I don\u2019t believe any poem has to end where it ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People talk about terminal pleasure\u2014which sounds like something in a Greyhound station\u2014but a great ending doesn\u2019t have to be the only ending. You can keep going and make another great ending. That\u2019s how the brain works anyway\u2014things coming from di\ufb00erent directions all at one time. And everything connects, but it doesn\u2019t necessarily connect right now. So things in the second part of a dead man poem might connect to the \ufb01rst part or they might not. You know how in workshops, if you repeat something, you\u2019re told to get rid of it? But the goal of poems isn\u2019t to be as e\ufb03cient as possible. If it bears saying again, say it again. So I did that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jane Yolen, who\u2019s published and edited over a hundred children\u2019s books and writes poetry now and then, was doing an anthology\u2014\u201cabout adult fantasy,\u201d she said. I wasn\u2019t sure what she meant. She said, \u201cThat dead man poem of yours would \ufb01t, but they have to be unpublished poems, so send me some new work.\u201d I forgot about it and didn\u2019t do it. Next year I saw her again and she said, \u201cYou never sent me a poem, but I\u2019m doing a second volume.\u201d I sent her some unpublished poems that might be adult fantasy, and she sent them all back and said, \u201cWell, these are nice, but, you know, that dead man poem, that would\u2019ve worked.\u201d So I said to myself, Okay, she wants a dead man poem. I wrote a new one, imitating the \ufb01rst one, and after I wrote that one, I got even more interested in the form. I wrote another one and another and pretty soon I was o\ufb00 and running. I loved the form of the dead man poem because I found that I could put anything in it. Also, it \ufb01ts my philosophical leanings and the way my brain operates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I\u2019m teaching, I like to say it doesn\u2019t matter what you start with, it\u2019s the quality of attention you pay to it afterward. You can put anything in a poem so long as you make use of it later. You may not even have to make direct use of it. You might just make use of things that \ufb01t with it. You want to be alert to where it leads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kept writing dead man poems and published two books of them, but the truth is there are a lot more dead man poems than that. I\u2019m considering writing another book of them. There are \ufb01ve in the new book. Some reviewers are likely to say, \u201cWhat the hell? You have these poems and then these<\/em> poems? They don\u2019t look or read anything like each other.\u201d If so, they should look again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago, I was writing a friend and I said, \u201cI\u2019ve written the last dead man poem and goodbye to the man of my dreams.\u201d It turned out to be the next-to-last. I had to write one more to \ufb01nish that book. But I got an e-mail the next day and my friend said, \u201cI know other peoples\u2019 dreams are boring, but listen to this: You were seated at a table in Brussels. You had a red pen in your pocket. A red drink on the table. And a big pile of paper on the table. You looked like you didn\u2019t want to be bothered but I felt I had to greet you. When I did, you looked sad and perplexed and you handed me the pile of papers and you said to me, \u2018I\u2019ve written all these poems called Following the Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man\u2019s Footsteps<\/em> and I can\u2019t put them in my book because I wrote the last poem for it last week.\u2019\u201d So I started writing poems called Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man\u2019s Footsteps<\/em>, which look like dead man poems but have a di\ufb00erent point of view. And that was that. When workshop members want assignments at conferences, the last assignment I give is to write a dead man or a dead woman poem. Sometimes they\u2019re funny, sometimes not. It\u2019s a form anybody can use, as far as I\u2019m concerned. Poets and critics develop these ideas about what a poem should be, but it\u2019s limiting to do that if you\u2019re a poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VINEYARD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dead man poems remind me of the surrealist poets, the spontaneous association. Do you identify with that aesthetic?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think we have had real surrealism in American poetry, but that\u2019s what our quasi-surrealism was called because poets weren\u2019t known to be doing anything like it before that. Real surrealism\u2014pure surrealism\u2014wouldn\u2019t make any sense. We have certain episodes of surrealism in poetry. Bill Knott wrote a couple of books that were real tours de force<\/em>. Jim Tate has what people call a surreal element\u2014I don\u2019t really think it\u2019s surreal, I think it\u2019s dark comedy or something else. Russell Edson, people will apply it to him, but again, it\u2019s not really surrealism. He\u2019s a fabulist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I suppose the so-called Deep Image School thought of themselves, in a way, as surrealists but it seemed as if the images they were supposed to have brought up from the subconscious were too convenient. They weren\u2019t exactly Breton\u2014he brought up images from the subconscious that convinced you that you didn\u2019t want to know him. [Laughs]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are surrealist moments in the dead man poems, but the dead man poems are not surrealist. That\u2019s the thing about the dead man form, it accommodates everything\u2014the fantastic, sentimentality, abstract thinking, water, dirt and air. I think Ashbery\u2019s poems, which can themselves contain all sorts of things, are sentimental, actually, but he also has this, you know, raise-your-mind concept. It accommodates surrealism, socio-political poetry, the Absurd (with a big A), and I like that. The other thing is, most people think of the dead man as a persona, but I don\u2019t\u2014I think of it as an overarching sensibility. There are certain truths that you could say underlie such a project. One of them is mortality. But the dead man is alive and dead at the same time, which allows him to say and do things that another speaker wouldn\u2019t be able to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORTLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think it\u2019s harmful to have a distinct view of what poetry should be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s natural for young poets to have an idea of what poetry should be, to be creating aesthetics, because how do you start writing? It\u2019s hard at the start to just feel that anything goes. You naturally have feelings about what\u2019s good\u2014and there are many ways to try to say what\u2019s good and what\u2019s better. But many of our institutions de\ufb01ne poetry by dumbing it down. They\u2019re supposed to be spreading it, and they are, but it\u2019s often a watered-down version. Well, it\u2019s not up to me to say every chocolate manufacturer should make great chocolate, but I can choose which one I eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the other extreme, the poetry that gets the most attention from critics is poetry that needs unpacking, that has some di\ufb03culty about it that the professor has to explain to the class. I think that\u2019s one of the reasons Stevens is taught a di\ufb00erent way than Williams is, and probably more often, because he invites explanation, commentary on the work, and Williams often writes in a way that excludes commentary or makes it unnecessary. The work that gets promoted in literary circles is work that has stylistic eccentricities, imaginative eccentricities, needs to be unpacked, is di\ufb03cult or obscure. I don\u2019t have any position against that at all, but I think it\u2019s only part of the scene. A great deal can be seen in good poems that do not require classroom unpacking, but it takes a special kind of reader. There can be layers in what appears to be direct expression. To me, that is more interesting than beautiful words in the ether.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robert Lowell, many years ago, said in an interview something like, \u201cAmerican poets do a very di\ufb03cult thing very well.\u201d And it\u2019s true\u2014I think American poets attempt to create individual styles by making the language di\ufb03cult, by putting a pressure on the language that makes it, as Williams said about poetry, \u201ca less well-made or better-made machine.\u201d When Bly was publishing The Fifties<\/em> and then The Sixties<\/em>, he published an essay called, \u201cA Wrong Turning in American Poetry.\u201d He said American poetry is like a pinball machine, full of levers and buttons and lights and razzle-dazzle, while poetry in other countries is a di\ufb00erent thing, based more on the quality of imagination and the quality of emotion, and often with a socio-political stance to boot. That\u2019s neither good nor bad, it just is, even still. And I think Ashbery will be taught more than Neruda. I mean, Neruda will be taught as a socio-political, cultural \ufb01gure more than his poetry will be closely read because most of Neruda\u2019s poetry doesn\u2019t require unpacking. He\u2019s a little surreal in his second book, Residencia en la tierra<\/em>, but the poems don\u2019t require a critical unpacking, not really. To me, analysis is worth more than judgment\u2014by analysis, I mean description\u2014you know, what is the poem doing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORTLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How has the current political situation a\ufb00ected your work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new book, Mars Being Red<\/em>, is largely wartime. The New Yorker<\/em> just took four wartime poems. One of them is set in Bagram and concerns the torture of a taxicab driver who was arrested even though they knew he was innocent. For The New Yorker<\/em> to run something like that seems to me indicative. It\u2019s hard for me not to be engaged by the news, not to be concerned about socio-political matters, but I can\u2019t say that everybody should be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to teach some classes at Grinnell when I\u2019m back in Iowa City, and I\u2019m thinking of telling the students that all the poems have to be about the news. I don\u2019t care where they go with it. They can write about the shoes on a dictator, but I want the poems to come out of real events. The poems might be crap, but I feel as if it might be interesting to try it instead of everybody writing another love poem or another nature poem or another father poem or another there-wasn\u2019t-enough-beer-at- the-party poem. Maybe it\u2019s a stupid idea and won\u2019t work, but I just think my own generation has been a little de\ufb01cient in dealing with things that are not about the personal sublime\u2014and that topic is to be honored. There was a time when I thought that was the highest achievement in poetry, but I haven\u2019t for a long, long time. And I could be completely o\ufb00-track and maybe that\u2019s what poetry is and that\u2019s what it always has to be and always will and should be\u2014the personal sublime\u2014but I think you can write about the personal sublime, which is a term I just made up, and still be in the socio-political world. I would prefer to be able to do that myself. I\u2019d like American poets to be more involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When the Iron Curtain came down, the poets in Eastern Europe were beside themselves because their work had mattered so much. You could be put in jail for your poem, and people were, all the time. The poems were important. But America loves everything, co-opts everything\u2014even if there\u2019s a club against baseball and apple pie, there\u2019ll be a website up in a week, you know? And I used to joke that the general drift of governments in the last twenty years was to the right, so one day we might \ufb01nd our poems meaning more and we\u2019ll be put in jail. [Laughs]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In America, we don\u2019t have a recognizable force of political poets. I think my generation are stylists of the imagination, most of them, and they\u2019re good at it. But one could do something else if one wanted to. It\u2019s a truism\u2014but I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s true\u2014that most political poetry is bad. I\u2019m partial to philosophy, certain kinds of abstract thinking, but I think you can write that and still set it on the battle\ufb01eld or in governmental chambers or in alleyways with the homeless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t make a rule for anyone. It\u2019s hard enough to write anything worth rereading. Why should you have to do this or that? But I\u2019ve been a poet for a long time and, in a lot of ways, it\u2019s easier to be a poet at twenty than a poet at sixty, because, at sixty, you\u2019ve done a lot and you don\u2019t want to do it again, and you know some things too well. For it to be surprising or worthwhile to yourself, you have to take a new path through the woods, and get lost deliberately, to \ufb01nd a new approach. A new style leads to new content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORTLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think our country is going in a direction where poetry might matter more?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bly said, I think in a poem, that the country is breaking up into tribes of the saved. That was a long time ago, twenty years probably. I think that\u2019s what\u2019s happening. Critics try to come up with the top \ufb01ve or ten American poets but it\u2019s been nonsense for a long, long time. You can\u2019t have Milton without Anglican England. You can\u2019t have Shakespeare without Anglican England. You can\u2019t have Dante without Catholic Italy. You have to have a kind of agreed-upon myth and belief structure to have \u201cThe Great Writer.\u201d You can\u2019t have that in this country, because it\u2019s too diverse, too big, and there are too many tribes\u2014and it\u2019s becoming more so, not less.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VINEYARD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think that\u2019s why we haven\u2019t seen the American epic poem?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think that\u2019s probably one of the biggest reasons you don\u2019t get many poets trying to write the<\/em> great American poem. The other thing about long poems is that nobody will sit still for them. How many crawls and promos can CNN run at once? How many ads can pop up while you\u2019re trying to read the weather? It\u2019s insane. But we\u2019re very sophisticated. When I was a kid, when we\u2019d go to the movies, we weren\u2019t looking at what time it was. We\u2019d wait for the next show if there were only ten minutes left, but if there was an hour left, we\u2019d walk in. And you\u2019d turn to the guy behind you and say, \u201cWhat\u2019s going on?\u201d In about three sentences he\u2019d \ufb01ll you in. Because the \ufb01lms were so slow and there were no jump cuts. If the cowboys were out on the range, and all of a sudden there was a jump cut and they were in the kitchen, half the audience would turn to the person next to them and say, \u201cWhat happened?\u201d You don\u2019t realize how incredibly sophisticated you are. People won\u2019t sit still for a long poem. Poets do write longer poems at times. It would\u2019ve been the normal taste once, but now it\u2019s an acquired taste.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years ago, there was a group of younger poets who were making a big noise about being the new formalists. And they wrote long poems and poems that seemed long even when they were short. I thought they were rather dull, myself. One day, I asked Don Justice, who was a very good formalist, if they were any good, and he said, \u201cOh, no.\u201d [Laughs] There\u2019s a wonderful story of a young poet going to see Williams. He hands him a sonnet and Williams hands it back and says, \u201cIn this mode, perfection is basic.\u201d In other words, you have to be able to write a perfect sonnet before you can write a good one. You know who the young poet is? Ginsberg. Of course he goes out and writes Howl<\/em> and Williams writes the introduction to it. Williams also cracked later that, \u201cAll sonnets say the same thing.\u201d You know he\u2019s speaking metaphorically. But in this mode, perfection is<\/em> basic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VINEYARD<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is \u201cLine Disease\u201d? You\u2019ve mentioned it before\u2014writers focusing so much on line that they lose focus of the poem as a whole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hmm. I don\u2019t know what I meant. Sounds good. [Laughs] People did talk for so long about free verse\u2014actually people have stopped talking about free verse\u2014but what\u2019s happened is, line should make a di\ufb00erence. On the other hand, free verse is free, so you are free to have the lines not<\/em> make a di\ufb00erence, because something else is going on in the poem. That\u2019s what happens with prose poetry, you no longer have the lines, so maybe you have something else. Nobody knows. We think Keats is a great poet. A hundred years from now people might say, \u201cCan you believe they thought Keats was good?\u201d We\u2019re so tied up in our own subjectivity, we have no way of knowing what people will like a hundred, two hundred years from now. One thing I know for sure is that I don\u2019t know anything for sure and I tend to distrust critics and poets who think they do. Some work demands more of itself, it may not be obscure, it may not be allusive, but it demands imagination of itself, it demands socio-political engagement of itself, it demands pressure of language on itself, it pushes the envelope in some way\u2014imaginatively, intellectually, verbally. Is this progress? I don\u2019t know, but it\u2019s change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most poetry books end up under dormitory beds, and nobody reads them. The person who gets the most out of a poem is the poet. Same with a painter and his or her painting. The great thing about art is that it\u2019s the big yes, the one place in the world where you have permission to do anything and be anyone and go anywhere and transcend time and space, which you absolutely do not have in your daily life. One in the morning, you\u2019re writing a poem, next thing you know it\u2019s \ufb01ve in the morning and you have no idea where the four hours went. It just takes you over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On one hand it\u2019s Poetry with a big P, on the other hand it\u2019s just poetry and it\u2019s a symptom of other things. I know a lot of poets who have had great success, but have not been made happy by it. They wanted something from writing that writing wasn\u2019t going to give them. The writing was symptomatic. It was a manifestation of deeper things. And if you make it something else, if you make it the goal itself, then that\u2019s no di\ufb00erent than deciding that your life should be devoted to bowling. I think that philosophy and art as a survival skill are more important today because there\u2019s bad news in your face every day. I think for young people, philosophy and the arts are important survival skills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ORTLER<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an interview, you said that much harsh criticism of young writers and MFA programs is self-hatred or hatred-beyond-disguise\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BELL<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Arguments about MFA writing programs are truly academic. People who criticize MFA programs have a point, but the point isn\u2019t worth making. Do we really think MFA programs were designed to produce the greatest writers of the century? Did we ever believe that the teaching of creative writing is the same as the teaching of geometry? Writers tend to protect their turf. They want to say everything is lousy ever since them, and MFA programs make an easy target. If you want to put down a general group of people in the poetry world, that\u2019s how to do it. It\u2019s a version of the old argument that you can\u2019t learn anything in school\u2014you know, get out and see the real world. But people in MFA programs don\u2019t live in the classroom, and they\u2019re only in the program for two or three years. And some of the people who\u2019ve been putting down MFA programs were themselves part of writing classes at, say, Harvard or Yale. You should only criticize what you\u2019ve been part of, I think, because that\u2019s what you know, but even then you may not know much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most people who go through writing programs aren\u2019t going to be writers ten years later, but they\u2019ll carry something from that time, some sense of creativity, of what writing is, what poetry is. The only reason to go to an MFA program is to hang around with other writers for two or three years and write like crazy. The truth is, you learn to write by reading. There is no other way. You model your writing after what you\u2019ve read. If you read good poets, then your poetry will contain similar characteristics and maybe you\u2019ll write a good poem. If you read boring poets, your poetry will probably be boring. You don\u2019t learn how to hit a baseball by watching somebody strike out. You learn from watching someone hit a home run\u2014a single is better, actually\u2014and even then you can\u2019t learn just by watching, you have to have a lot of pitches thrown to you, and then maybe somebody can give some advice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s very little to say about writing poetry that isn\u2019t obvious. I thought about writing a book about writing poetry, but then I decided it\u2019d be pretty thin. You\u2019d think that after teaching workshops for over forty years, I\u2019d have a lot of ideas about it. And I do have a lot of ideas, but mostly about rules to break. When I started teaching in the \u201960s, I used to tell students that the publication of poetry by big houses in New York was going to turn out to be a blip on the literary map. The future was like the past: small editions, small presses. I didn\u2019t know I was going to be right, but that\u2019s what I thought. Because originally what you had was a bunch of editors in New York who were willing to publish a cookbook so they could publish literature. Now you have editors who only want to publish cookbooks or romance novels, and they publish a book of poetry or a good book of \ufb01ction every once in a while so people won\u2019t yell at them. It\u2019s just a business for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last few years before I stopped teaching, a certain kind of student in the Workshop had a di\ufb00erent notion of all this. They didn\u2019t want to be known by a lot of people. They believed that if a lot of people liked your work and you were getting published a lot, you were no good, that it was a specialized thing for a specialized audience and that\u2019s all the audience you wanted. They tended to be language-poetry-in\ufb02uenced or theory-in\ufb02uenced, and people like them founded magazines or presses and they just wanted to be part of their specialized group. Their work was often happily obscure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Language poetry started out like surrealism in that the poets said to themselves, What has the use of conventional language got us? War, poverty, hatred\u2014you know. Surrealists wanted to shake up expectations. So the new avant-garde got rid of lines and wrote in paragraphs, they broke the syntax of sentences, they wrote poetry that eschewed linear sense. They wanted to defy expectations so people could experience language and consciousness freshly. Much of the criticism supporting language poetry is elegant b.s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of the structuralist and post-structuralist theory in the academic scene seems to be based on two things: language is relative and language is subjective. So there\u2019s cultural slippage. That\u2019s basically what a baby knows\u2014from the \ufb01rst time Mom says No in a di\ufb00erent way. Language is impure. Nonetheless, what we say overlaps what other people understand it to mean. This is how language works: if you look up a word in the dictionary, the second de\ufb01nition doesn\u2019t mean exactly what the \ufb01rst one meant. Promote this to the phrase and it gets worse, promote it to the sentence, the line, the stanza, the poem, and it gets worse. Nothing is synonymous with anything else, but what one person says or writes and what another hears or reads overlaps. Writers are people who work in the overlaps. They accept the impurity of language. They just get on with it. Language is impure, so what.<\/p>\n\n

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Marvin Bell is the author of nineteen books of poetry and essays, the most recent of which, Mars Being Red, was released by Copper Canyon Press in 2007. \u201cWhat sets the new poems apart from those of the 1990s,\u201d according to Publisher\u2019s Weekly, \u201calso brings them close to some poets of the 1960s: they speak out directly, angrily … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":2468,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-36101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36101"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36728,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36101\/revisions\/36728"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}