by John Poch


I wanted to write something to my students (and friends) about Marvin Bell. Especially, I wanted to encourage my students to whom I’ve taught prosody in the past twenty years. So many of them have excelled and continue to make their way in the formal tradition of English poetry, and I can point to Marvin as my own mentor through this little anecdote. Leon Stokesbury first introduced me to an awareness of meter when I was an undergraduate, but it wasn’t until I got to Iowa where I learned how to work a line of iambic pentameter. Marvin Bell taught it to me in a one-hour session over coffee in Iowa City on a winter morning in late 1992 or early 1993. He would have been just about the age that I am now, and I thought of him as very old then.

As was my wont in early days, and even now, I sought out every poet I could find to teach me a little of what they knew (Now it’s the younger, talented students of mine from whom I steal). I knew that language, especially poetry, is gotten by osmosis and that it rubs off on you. So if I could have a little bit of time with a good poet, I could then write the good poems. It doesn’t work exactly this way, as there was so much hard work to do, but who would tell me no? During my first year at the Writer’s Workshop, I took classes with Gerald Stern and James Galvin. But I met individually with Jorie Graham, Donald Revell, and Marvin Bell, and each looked at a struggling poem or two and gave me some good advice. I cornered Marvin in the hallway one day and asked if he would meet with me to look at a poem. He asked Why?—I was not one of his workshop students. I told him I wanted what he had, and he said ok. At his suggestion, one cold morning I met him at The Cottage. I would go there on my own a few times a week anyway and get a refillable coffee and a day-old muffin because in those days I had almost no money, and I would camp out there for a few hours and try to muster up some lines.

I remember showing him a sestina or a sonnet I’d written. I know it was one of those two forms, as he seemed baffled that I would call it such a thing, for he hadn’t recognized the meter. I was sure that I had written perfect pentameter lines, though at the time I thought I could put a substitution of a trochee or spondee or anapest anywhere. And I freely used as many in a line as I wanted. Look, here are my five feet, I said, and likely had two trochees and three anapests on a given line. He disabused me of this bad practice by showing me where substitutions did not work and why. Also, where they were likely to work better. It was my first real lesson in the actual music of a line of poetry in English. My lines were NOT music, but if I were to alter the order or use a different word, look what good could come of it. It was nearly a lesson in negative prosody, and it was as good to me as any negative theology that might orient me toward God. I was taking a prosody class with James Galvin at the time, but it was a raucous and highly competitive class of poets who were climbing over each other (It seemed to me that Galvin was aloof) to be the anointed. Maybe it’s romantic to say that my one hour with Marvin trained my ear more than an entire semester in that forms class, but it might be true.

In an entirely different class in the spring, the workshop I took with James Galvin, the students would recite poems at the beginning of each class if we wanted. One day I recited Marvin Bell’s “Ending with a Line from Lear”. As I finished the last line, there were audible sighs (and cursing) of approval. I must not have mentioned Marvin’s name before introducing the title, or Galvin hadn’t heard me, because when I finished he said, “Who wrote THAT?” “Marvin!” I answered and gestured with my thumb to the other workshop that was taking place down the hall. Galvin seemed briefly embarrassed not to have known, and he asked where it had been published. I had been reading The Atlantic in the current periodicals section at the library. Or maybe I’d found the magazine in the student lounge, as I remember now I had torn out the page and carried it around in my notebook. I likely still have that original page somewhere among the papers I’ve kept from that time.

I believe if I had taken a class with Marvin Bell, I probably would have stayed at Iowa. That’s an entirely different story; but I left after only a year: angry, confused, disappointed, and frustrated among my other unique stages of grief. A year after that, I would start over at Florida where I would get the more formal education that I needed, mostly from William Logan. Coincidentally, Logan was a student of Bell’s at Iowa many years prior, but I believe his mentor was Donald Justice. For me, it all worked out, as things do. But that one hour with Marvin Bell—that changed me. I remember feeling that he treated me with respect and kindness. He didn’t have to meet with me, and he gave me his time. I saw him over a dozen years later at the AWP bookfair, and he seemed genuinely thrilled that I had gone on to publish my first book of poems.

I guess this anecdote largely having to do with prosody is even more interesting, in the end, because Marvin wrote almost strictly in free verse. But in my favorite poem of his, “Ending with a Line from Lear”, one of the most famous lines from Lear is remembered because of its trochaic pentameter. It is the standard line in English turned backwards, which rightly shows the reader, the hearer, a world turned upside-down with deepest sorrow. For Lear, this almost simplest of lines portrayed his grief at the death of Cordelia. For Bell, it was the death of his own father. And now, for me, it is my recognition at the death of Marvin Bell: “Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.”

Ending With a Line From Lear

I will try to remember. It was light.
It was also dark, in the grave. I could feel
how dark it was, how black it would be
without my father. When he was gone.
But he was not gone, not yet. He was only
a corpse, and I could still touch him
that afternoon. Earlier the same afternoon.
This is the one thing that scares me:
losing my father. I don’t want him to go.
I am a young man. I will never be older.
I am wearing a tie and a watch. The sky,
gray, hangs over everything. Today
the sky has no curve to it, and no end.
He is deep into his mission. He has business
to attend to. He wears a tie but no watch.
I will skip a lot of what happens next.
Then the moment comes. Everything, everything
has been said, and the wheels start to turn.
They roll, the straps unwind, and the coffin
begins to descend. Into the awful damp.
Into the black center of the earth. I
am being left behind. The center of my body
sinks down into the cold fire of the grave.
But still my feet stand on top of the dirt.
My father’s grave. I will never again.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.