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Notes on Writing at Night, Art, Bananas, the Philosophy of Language, Jazz, News,
Some Wisdom, Reading, Something Important or: Why Every Poet Needs to Read Marvin Bell

Jeremy Voigt

When I think of Marvin Bell, I think of bananas. Each day at the Port Townsend Writers Conference at 9:30 sharp Marvin would eat a banana. So, at the end of the week one of my fellow classmates brought in three grocery bags full of bananas. That is one of my last images of the conference: Marvin Bell sitting at a table listening to poets reading their poems sourounded by bananas. Of Marvin Bell's poetry there is little I can say that has not been said in much more eloquent and precise terms than I could come up with. What I can tell you is that through my reading of his poems and essays as well as the opportunity I had to spend a workshop with him he has become a poet close to my reading heart, and my writing heart. Bell's poems seem both mysterious and accessible. They are personal and universal. He is both the magician and the guy in the crowd leaning into my ear explaining each trick as it unfolds on stage.

In an interview from her web magazine, The Drunken Boat, Rebecca Seiferle says of Bell,

His work is grounded in a sweetness of being, and yet it is a sweetness without sentimentality or rhetorical flourish. It is this very sweetness, I think, a kind of humility that has made Marvin a friend and teacher to many poets, that has also kept his work somewhat undervalued.

The first Bell book I read was, The Iris of Creation. I bought it in Port Townsend, before I knew he lived there or that Copper Canyon Press was there, and I stood on the sidewalk two doors down from the Elevated Ice-cream shop and read the poem "Dark Brow." I was mystified. It was a sunny day.

I had bought the book based on two things: the cover (an enormous blue eye) and the fact that I loved the only Bell poem I had heard up to that point, "To Dorothy."

I glanced at the back of the book and read the comment from a reviewer, "One often senses that a Bell poem begins where other poets quit." So I read it again:

Dark Brow

The dark brow of the creek wrinkles over time
as if something had been born there.
Scavenging all night, the water that runs there
brings things from time past.
Some of these things are the wrappers, the coats,
of what it meant to say, "I tasted"
or "I felt." And this, whatever it is, is not that.

All of us have felt the fatigue of dark water,
the burden massed at yard's edge,
and in the line of the garden
beyond the onions, there are fresh tears.
I do not say we should live forever,
for who could bear it,
only that we should one day enter completely into life.

In the beginning, as at the end, there was nothing,
though "was" is the psychic's verb,
the one that proves the existence of a current
by rising after it has passed
and shaking its hear furiously, spraying water.
" I was," we say. "Therefore, I am." We also believe
a piece of us has washed away and may be worth something.

Thinking about the line, "One often senses that a Bell poem begins where other poets quit" and rereading the poem I get a new sense of the entire poem. It begins with an image "The dark brow of the creek wrinkles over time" where we get to see the physical place he is talking about, and the metaphor of this face in the earth. I am reading and thinking, "how Walt Whitman like" but then the second line: "as if something had been born there." Now I am thinking something else is going on, this is also a place of origin. Reading on: "Scavenging all night, the water that runs there / brings things from the past. / Some of these things are the wrappers, the coats, / of what it meant to say, "I tasted" / or "I felt." This place seems to be some kind of oracle, a place that will show the marrow of what it means for us to be alive. But it will not give it to us directly, it brings the covers of those things and we are to figure out on our own. Then the dismissive line, "And this, whatever it is, is not that." So everything we have seen is not what we thought it was, or the speaker realizes that image is not enough. Image is to vague, to subjective to show us something exact in our life, to show us what we have "tasted" or "felt." Image seems inadequate for this speaker, "scavenging all night" and will show us the "wrappers" of what it means for us to be alive, but that is not enough. It is not enough because "we should one day enter completely into life" and not be handed or shown things we know. We should stop searching and simply taste and feel and cry by the onions in the garden.

All this seems well and good and perhaps the poem could be over with the suggestion at the end of the first stanza. But Bell keeps going. He invokes a mythological sense with "In the beginning, as at the end, there was nothing," and it seems that next we might be in for another image, but Bell turns to language picking out the verb "was" saying: "though 'was' is the psychic's verb. / the one that proves the existence of a current" a nice nod to the first stanza and a deepening of the opening metaphor as he continues, "by rising after it has passed / and shaking its head furiously, spraying water." We are obsessed by the past and that we are also dependent on the past to prove we exist. "'I was,' we say. 'Therefore, I am'" We need our language to give us meaning and value to our lives. We need to have existed, and this creek that is passing will allow us to see we have existed because it brings parts of who we are to us.

This brings some kind of assurance so that whether or not it is true "We also believe / a piece of us has washed away and may be worth something." We believe there is some part of us out there in some place, in some time that has some value to some one. For the mystical feeling of this poem it is rooted in the desires, and thoughts of humans. I think the poem itself moves the way we think. We see an image, it reminds us of something, we realize we are not that different from others, then we get some advice: to enter completely into life, and then we discover that words are not enough, we must realize that no one can tell us we are valuable, we exist, we will be happy, we can only believe.

In the same way no tenor saxophonist can play today, with any skill, and not sound, at least at times, like John Coltrane no poet worth their salt can write without some influences. In both arts,

the masters must be acknowledged and in both arts they can open doors of possibility for a younger or modern artist to step through. Bell leaps through and open doors we cannot even see yet because our eyes have not adjusted to the dark. Take his poem which acknowledges influence and runs with a line from Carlos Drummond de Andrade:

Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade

"It's Life, Carlos"

It's life that is hard: waking, sleeping, eating, loving, working
and dying are easy.
It's life that suddenly fills both ears with the sound of that
symphony that forces your pulse to race and swells your
heart near to bursting.
It's life, not listening, that stretches your neck and opens your eyes
and brings you into the worst weather of the winter to arrive
once more at the house where love seemed to be in the air.

And it's life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that
is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because
you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the
nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is
winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.
It isn't death when you suffer, it isn't death when you miss each
other and hurt for it, when you complain that isn't death,
when you fight with those you love, when you misunder-
stand, when one lines in a letter or one remark in person ties
one of you in knots, when the end seems near, when you
think you will die, when you wish you were already
dead-none of that is death.
It's life, after all, that brings you a pain in the foot and a pain in the
hand, a sore throat, a broken heart, a cracked back, a torn
gut, a hole in your abdomen, an irritated stomach, a swollen
gland, a growth, a fever, a cough, a hiccup, a sneeze, a
bursting blood vessel in the temple.
It's life, not nerve ends, that puts the heartache on a pedestal and
worships it.
It's life, and you can't escape it. It's life, and you asked for it. It's
life, and you won't be consumed by passion, you won't be
destroyed by self-destruction, you won't avoid it by
abstinence, you won't manage it by moderation, because it's
life-life everywhere, life at all times-and so you won't be
consumed by passion: you will be consumed by life.

It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime…
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now…
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before you
go…

Too late: Life got its tentacles around your, its hooks into your
heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time,
and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
sweet-your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you
apart in her arms.

These long lines are full of repetition, sound, the stuff of life, despair, and the joyful submission to the cruel power and beauty of our world. Bell says in his "32 Statements about Writing Poetry," that "Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out." This poem defines life by what it is not as well as what it is. It is difficult for me to talk about this poem because I am very close to it emotionally and I hesitate to talk about it analytically because I am afraid I will spoil the feeling in my gut it creates. So, I have shared it above and I will leave it alone with a brief comment.

I read this poem to my Language Arts class on September 12, 2001. The poem for me is powerful and uplifting because it sees life for what it is and submits itself to life's power. And in that submission life can be felt deeper and I feel I can live with greater intelligence and compassion. Is there another reason to read poems? Or write them? I read this poem to a group of adolescents whose lives were only partially shaken up by the tragedy of September 11 because they could not realize the impact of that day. It was to far away from their lives both geographically and emotionally. What they did feel was some fear and nervousness about what might happen. So I read them this poem saying that it brings me comfort to acknowledge that life is painful and it will consume you and you cannot fight it. It is a force greater than any individual and more beautiful than anything. Ironically, rereading the poem, I cannot find a "positive" image or line throughout. All the lines are about pain, suffering, and being eaten alive, but for me the reality of this pain and accepting these facts brings great relief and joy. Because it makes me say, "Ok! Life is hard and it will blow me 'apart in her arms.'" Living in that knowledge I feel free from the pain and able to love life.

"Poetry is a way of life," Bell says, "not a career." It seems to me that it is important to live our lives attentively and with precision, by this I mean precision of thought or keeping things in perspective. Life can be messy; let it be messy but never stop paying attention. I have a colleague who works with special needs children five days a week, runs her own catering business, works in a nursing home on the weekends, and helps her sister run her bar from time to time who can sit down and tell you everything about the people she works with (personalities, hopes, fears) she can talk intelligently about current thoughts in science, world views, and our society as a whole. I asked her how much time she spent reading and she replied while she loves to read she does not have much time, she just pays attention. Reading Bell's poems reminds me to both pay attention to my life and my language.

People say poets don't work in the realm of ideas but in the realm of words. Words are full of ideas and when we write them we need to know what they mean. People look to poetry for answers. I believe they are not looking for answers from poets but answers from language. It is up to the poet, like any teacher, to raise the questions and remind the reader to pay attention.

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