The Iowa Review, 1977

Compared to the purity of St. John's abnegation even EUot, even the Gita are a Uttle noisy: Descend lower, descend only Into the world of perpetual soutude, World not world, but that which is not world ... "Burnt Norton ' In the dark night of all beings awakes to Light the tranquil man. But what is day to other beings is night for the sage who sees. Bhagavad Gita 2 Ascent or descent, these are equal metaphors and do not occupy the hero of the void, the eremite?the true eremite, of course, Uving in the maw of night, not the romantic version who keeps a mossy stump and shrives the agonized voyager. What occupies the true eremite is the perpetual paradox that for our good he must raise a paean to nothing ness, sing the via negativa, but without words, with only melodious silence.

1977

Gaston Bachelard) Maw and mouth, womb and tomb, hut and house, these are our spaces. And the hero of the round is, of course, the slain god, he of endless veg etative vitaUty. Borne on the wind from what other world we know not, consumed (Uke Uttle Jens in Dinesen's "The Dreaming Child") by recol lections of other fathers and other mansions, buried, harrowed and har vested, sacked and cellared, swallowed at last, he never fails us with the multipUcity of his members. Line At the end of Borges' fascinating EucUdean fiction "Death and the Compass," the Parisian mobster Red Scharlach shoots and kills the de tective Eric L?nnrot. "Red Red" kills "Red Line-red." Or, through a punning on the Indo-European roots and a more attractive arrangement of word order: "Red Red" meets "Red-line Red-line." The assassination comes after an illusory rhombic chase and the simple animadversions of

The Iowa Review, 1977

Uke the paleontologist who extrapolates huge structures from ossicles that look to others Uke faceless dice. But the skeleton the writer of metaphysical tales constructs leans ambiguously out of the fronded swamp of prehistory and into the sky of some future night, where Pegasus has overtaken the eagle, and Orion's great club is canted to the east. Homage to Poe, Kafka, Dinesen, and Borges The Melon-eaters Somewhere, perhaps in a dream of starvation, you have seen such melons. They are called bread fruit. At first glance they look Uke huge breasts, ample to the hungriest mouth. How, you wonder, can the vines sustain them, or the thin bamboo pickets that bend precariously under the weight of the mother fruit? But look more closely. The pale rind is almost translucent. The interior is not so much flesh as a kind of veinal cloud. This conspiracy of sun and soil is decidedly ephemeral, nothing more than a decorative globing of air, a summer festoon against the dark jungle. Nevertheless, it is true that on a board, under the single blow of a bulawa knife, the melon will spUt into succulent red halves. Furthermore, these hemispheres will continue for a long time to rock slowly to and fro Uke objects of great moment, or perhaps Uke the inconsolably divided androgynes of Plato's fable. You may even begin to imagine that it is not weight but appetency that keeps them rolUng so long on their rinds. Ritually, the natives will not touch the fruit until it is still. Meanwhile the pale seeds gUsten in the sun as though smeared with a placental fluid. Now look at the natives. You find a plumpness that matches the melons. But again, look more closely. The hair, thatched elaborately in curious imitation of the construction of their huts, is brittle and frayed. The amber of their eyes is rheumy. The teeth are ramshackle. And note, the heavy breasts and belUes of the women are striated, as you have seen in the flesh of your own women just after deUvery, with a kind of gristly separa tion of the subcutaneous tissue. These people are starving amid an opulence of bread fruit. Our captain, a man of considerable presence, was a lover of photographs 4

The Iowa Review, 1977

Gaston Bachelard) Maw and mouth, womb and tomb, hut and house, these are our spaces. And the hero of the round is, of course, the slain god, he of endless veg etative vitaUty. Borne on the wind from what other world we know not, consumed (Uke Uttle Jens in Dinesen's "The Dreaming Child") by recol lections of other fathers and other mansions, buried, harrowed and har vested, sacked and cellared, swallowed at last, he never fails us with the multipUcity of his members. Line At the end of Borges' fascinating EucUdean fiction "Death and the Compass," the Parisian mobster Red Scharlach shoots and kills the de tective Eric L?nnrot. "Red Red" kills "Red Line-red." Or, through a punning on the Indo-European roots and a more attractive arrangement of word order: "Red Red" meets "Red-line Red-line." The assassination comes after an illusory rhombic chase and the simple animadversions of L?nnrot's assistant, Treviranus, the Christian, whose trinitarian principles determine his plainness.

The Missouri Review, 1982

An Interview with Marvin Bell When The Iowa Review got under way in 1970, Marvin Bell was its first poetry editor. Eleven years later, we conducted a comprehensive interview with him (12/1, 1981). Marvin, of course, has remained a colleague and friend; for years his students have been key members of our staff, and occasionally, with tact I think and all due hesitation, we have sampled his poems in our pages. So now, after nearly another twenty years, I thought it would be valuable and enjoyable to interview him once more. Marvin was graciously willing, and we set out on tape in the traditional way. Somehow, though, email became our medium, and that is the means by which we conducted this conversation throughout the early months of this year. Much of this time, Marvin was on the road, on a long, winding journey to Long Island, Florida, Tennessee, and New Mexico before arriving in Washington. He and his wife Dorothy have a home in Port Townsend to which they return most summers. Email, as will surprise few any more, kept us in touch all the way. This fall Nightworks, Poems 1962-2000, will appear from Copper Canyon Press. Beginning with a series of twenty-one new poems, "Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man's Footsteps," this publication culminates and contin ues a rich sequence of work of the nineties. The Dead Man first appeared in Iris of Creation (1990), then again in A Marvin Bell Reader (1994). The Book of the Dead Man (1994) followed and soon a second Dead Man volume, Ardor (1997), both from Copper Canyon. The Resurrected Dead Man sounded his footsteps first in Wednesday (1997) from Salmon Publishing, in Clare County, Ireland. So the project grows. The Dead Man is a voice, a way of being, the character of Marvin's poetry enacted. He is an archetypal figure with sacra mental dimensions. He is equally understated, a creature of the corner of your eye muttering about wristwatches, mufflers, and cardboard boxes. With something to say about almost everything, he is a listener to the sermon and a sermon-maker too, a vernacular philosopher who follows every funeral he meets, the gentleman who stopped for Emily and who waits for each of us, as for Marvin, who explores the way ahead in the Dead Man's nightly company, learning to live "as if already dead." We trust that the way will continue long and winding, for Marvin still has much to do among us, one sign of which is that in the midst of our conversa tion, in early March of this year, he was named the first Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. He and the Dead Man, for they are now inseparable. 3 University of Iowa is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Iowa Review www.jstor.org ® DH: Marvin, your poetry often reminds me of Montaigne on essays. "It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our minds. ... I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.. .. My style and my mind alike go roaming." (Trans. Donald M. Frame) Doesn't that sound familiar to your way of writing? MB: God bless Montaigne. It's fundamental to acknowledge that writing is a design of the mind. My poems seem clear to me, sometimes painfully so.

1999

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Turkish studies, 2024