DEAD MAN TALKING

       Marvin Bell is another of my favorite American poets.

I had the privilege of interviewing him for The Wichita Eagle newspaper when I was Books editor there. Bell was impishly funny, deeply philosophical, delighted in his work, and passionate when explaining his greatest achievement: the living Dead Man poems.

       Of his approach to poetry, he has said elsewhere that “I would like to write poetry which finds salvation in the physical world and the here and now and which defines the soul, if you will, in terms of emotional depth, and that emotional depth in terms of the physical world and the world of human relationships.” As to style, he explains, “I’d like to write a poetry which has little if any insistence about it, as little as possible. I would like to write a poetry which doesn’t seem either to button-hole the reader, or demand too much allegiance, or demand that too much of the world be given up for the special world of the poem.”

       He accomplished all this in his innovative and irascible living Dead Man collections. The Dead Man is a character he  developed after he encountered a dead body on a beach in Washington state. The stark, mute witness of the corpse spurred him to develop a character who lived "as if he were already dead," to borrow a maxim of Zen Buddhism. As a result, the Dead Man is both an independent presence in the poems and, at times, an alter ego for Bell.

       With the Dead Man's voice, he pronounces on politics, nature, philosophical perplexities, and anything else -- from the profound to the vaudeville gag -- enlivening his poems with the palpable presence of a type of Dantean guide to the afterlife, which seems a lot like this life, but with the intensity dialed to
a 10. 

       Copper Canyon Press, a poetry publisher in Port Townsend, Washington, where Bell lived before his death in 2020, has done readers of contemporary poetry a great service by collecting all the Dead Man poems into one v olume, titled Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems. This book from 2019 emphasizes another aspect of Bell's poetic style: He has declared the sentence to be the poetic line, which means his poems often need a "wide load" sign to warn the reader. Because of this aesthetic, Bell's later poems stretch across the page.

       "The sentence is the line," he told me in our interview. Which means the line can be very long, and thus very wide on the page. Once you get used to this approach, it succeeds perfectly and, in yet another way, adds an innovative
dimension to Bell's work. Don't miss it; it could change your  understanding of poetry in our postmodern modernist culture. The Dead Man will shadow you ever after. Remember to watch your back! AWD