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    Mars Being Red
    Mars Being Red
    Mars Being Red
    Ebook92 pages49 minutes

    Mars Being Red

    By Marvin Bell

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    About this ebook

    - Marvin Bell one of the leading poets in America - long-time teacher at Iowa Writer’s Workshop, one of the country’s foremost writing programs - first poet laureate of Iowa (2000-2004) - Bell’s last book, Rampant, was very well reviewed, including cover feature in American Poetry Review and review in New York Times - includes several new “Dead Man” poems, for which Bell is both famous and infamous - most political book of Bell’s career - Bell's sixth book with Copper Canyon Press
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2013
    ISBN9781619320024
    Mars Being Red
    Author

    Marvin Bell

    Marvin Bell’s twenty-three books of poetry and essays include Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems, Whiteout (a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons), Mars Being Red, Rampant, Nightworks: Poems 1962–2000, The Book of the Dead Man, and Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See. His literary honors include awards from the Academy of American Poets and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. He taught for forty years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches now for the brief-residency MFA based in Oregon at Pacific University, and lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington.

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      Book preview

      Mars Being Red - Marvin Bell

      Prodigal?

      If I put some straw into the suitcase,

      I’ll always have a bed. Scraps of olive wood,

      slow to light, dense, will burn all night.

      Some hard pumpernickel for good gums.

      A sad bundle of underwear. A leaf

      dropped by a poor scrub oak to remind me.

      It will be a long Monday when I go.

      The alarm throbs inside me, the early news

      is crowded with bodies returning.

      I’m off to the front lines in the war to preserve

      the privilege of myth-making,

      the consternations of art, the nerve to think

      the future and remember the past. Others

      left their homes to sail and trek, to consort

      with consorts and outsiders and so

      learn the reaches of mankind’s instinct

      for survival. They breathed the fumes and ate

      the stew. They lived among the heroic

      who did not want another life, and if

      they erred in creating bigger-than-life characters,

      they broke bread with the unspeakable,

      and that is worth something.

      I Didn’t Sleep

      I didn’t sleep in the light. I couldn’t sleep

      in the dark. I didn’t sleep at night. I was awake

      all day. I didn’t sleep in the leaves or between

      the pages. I tried but couldn’t sleep

      with my eyes open. I couldn’t sleep indoors

      or out under the stars. I couldn’t sleep where

      there were flowers. Insects kept me up. Shadows

      shook me out of my doziness. I was trying hard.

      It was horrible. I knew why I couldn’t sleep.

      Knowing I couldn’t sleep made it harder to try.

      I thought maybe I could sleep after the war

      or catch a nap after the next election. It was

      a terrible time in America. Many of us found

      ourselves unable to sleep. The war went on.

      The silence at home was deafening. So I

      tried to talk myself to sleep by memorizing

      the past, which had been full of sleepiness.

      It didn’t work. All over the world people

      were being put to sleep. In every time zone.

      I am busy not sleeping, obsessively one might say.

      I resolve to sleep again when I have the time.

      The Method

      Of the knees we might say they beseech,

      seen together on the floor, the head bowed,

      wherefrom one senses penitence and dread.

      From a future of the numerous, a single sword

      is held aloft. It takes two hands. From the sound

      of no-sound the soon-to-be-beheaded is aware

      the steel blade is beginning to descend. At once

      the stricken neck flowers, a thousand rosettes,

      and the head, picked up by its hair,

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