Afternoon Workshop with Marvin Bell

by Tamam Kahn

Photo: Tamam Kahn

I wanted to take a poetry class with Marvin Bell because of the Dead Man poems. When I got to the workshop, on a rainy afternoon in Marin County, California, I mentioned to Marvin that these poems are my favorites. He seemed surprised, saying that not everyone likes The Dead Man series.

I wonder why—I had read them with great interest, and often refer back to individual poems or lines. I enjoy sequential poetry, and I love the notion of freedom associated with breaking the rules that govern the living, while using humor and language that calls up a vivid aliveness. Oh yes, and Marvin Bell is an excellent poet.

Speaking of that series, he once explained that nearly every line is a sentence. At the Marin workshop he added: “I have come to feel that the sentence is the secret, not just to prose but to poetry also.”

Here are a few lines from two Dead Man poems:

from…Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps (#17)

2. Walking in the Drowning Forest

…Here is artistry beyond self-flattery.
A rootworks wiser than the ball of yarn we call the brain.
A mindless, eyeless, earless skin-sense.
To which the crab comes sideways.
With which the sunken ship shares its secrets.
From which no harness can protect one, nor anchor fix one.
He knows, who has paddled an hour with one oar.
He knows, who has worn the whitecaps.
Who has slipped from the ferry or leapt from the bridge.
To be spoken of, though no one knows.

from… The Book of the Dead Man (#43)

2. More about the Dead Man and Desire

…To the dead man, there is something grave about umbrellas,
……something sinister about servitude, something
……debilitating about knowledge—like sunlight on slugs.

Marvin Bell taught for 40 years at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Iowa is the benchmark for excellence in the academic poetry world. Currently he serves on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. He is a spontaneous storyteller and a very good teacher. Whenever I have a chance to study with a master poet—who is also a master teacher—I don’t hesitate, and pull up the chair next to him.

Here are some highlights from my notes on the afternoon workshop in Marin County, where 14 or so poets sat at a long table and read and commented on our poems with Marvin Bell.

Photo: stock

Art is about how life feels, even for those poets, and I am one of them, who feel ideas as tangible expressions of emotion. That is why I say that I like ideas to have some dirt on their shoes.

You show in your writing what you’ve read, so you need good models.

I can put up with a lot if a poem locates itself.

Are you free to write what you need to? What art is doing is distracting the conscious mind so the unconscious can happen. There was a teacher in Washington State who began her creative writing class one day by standing on her desk wearing a high heel and a running shoe, one glove and strange clothing. She told the class to write down one thing you like about my outfit and one thing about how it can be improved.

After this story he turned to me and said, “OK, you start.”

So my reading was the opening of the workshop. After my poem came the silence. Then Marvin said, “Notice the way this poem fills the page. It’s nicely organized. It is daring and ambitious to tackle this subject. What is the subject she talks about?” The others began the discussion of my poem. He interrupted at one point: “If I were God, I’d cut the first two lines.” Then he smiled and said, “take out all the lines that are OK and leave in the lines that are better than OK.”

Titles limit a poem. Wait until the poem is done to title it.

Later, he told us about William Carlos Williams’ famous line: “It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.” Marvin shared that this was a message for Williams’ wife and meant: “I’m about to confess my infidelity and I hope you’ll forgive me, Flossie.”

You can see how he sat there holding the attention of everyone for four hours.

Here’s his aside about the mistaken omission of the article (a or the) when paring down a poem. Marvin compared it to Anthony Quinn pretending to be a Native American in a film of the Wild West: horse go over hill, see fire.

I’ll end with advice that came with a smile:

Learn rules.
Break rules.
Mak e up new rules.
Break the rules.