New Poets Series

Marvin Bell was born in New York City on August 3, 1937, and grew up in Center Moriches, on the south shore of eastern Long Island. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Alfred University, a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa.

Bell’s debut collection of poems, Things We Dreamt We Died For, was published in 1966 by the Stone Wall Press, following a year of service in the U.S. Army. His following two collections were A Probable Volume of Dreams ( Atheneum, 1969), a Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See (1977), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Since then, Bell has published numerous books of prose and poetry, most recently 7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Book (Trinity University Press, 2009), a collaboration with six other poets, including Tomaz Salamun, Dean Young, and Christopher Merrill, and Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) , which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Bell’s other collections include Rampant (2004); Nightworks: Poems, 1962-2000 (2000); Ardor: The Book of the Dead Man, Volume 2 (1997); A Marvin Bell Reader: Selected Poetry and Prose (Middlebury College Press, 1994); The Book of the Dead Man (Copper Canyon Press, 1994); Iris of Creation (1990); New and Selected Poems ( Atheneum, 1987);

He has also published Old Snow Just Melting: Essays and Interviews ( University of Michigan Press, 1983) , as well as Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry with William Stafford (Godine, 1983).

About his early work, the poet Anthony Hecht said, "Marvin Bell is wonderfully versatile, with a strange, dislocating inventiveness. Capable of an unflinching regard of the painful, the poignant and the tragic; but also given to hilarity, high-spirits and comic delight; and often enough wedding and blending these spiritual antipodes into a new world. It must be the sort of bifocal vision Socrates recommended to his drunken friends if they were to become true poets."

Later in his career, Bell created the poetic form known as the "Dead Man poem," about which the critic Judith Kitchen has written: "Bell has redefined poetry as it is being practiced today."

Beginning in 2000, he served two terms as Iowa's first Poet Laureate. His other honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The American Poetry Review , fellowships from the Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts, and Senior Fulbright appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia.

Bell taught for forty years for the Iowa Writers' Workshop, retiring in 2005 as Flannery O'Connor Professor of Letters. For five years, he designed and led an annual Urban Teachers Workshop for America SCORES. Currently he serves on the faculty of Pacific University's low-residency MFA program. He has also taught at Goddard College, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington and Portland State University.

Bell has influenced generations of poets, many of which were his students, including Michael Burkard, Marilyn Chin, Rita Dove, Norman Dubie, Albert Goldbarth. Robert Grenier, Joy Harjo, Juan Felipe Herrera, Mark Jarman, Denis Johnson, Larry Levis, David St. John, and James Tate.

Marvin Bell also frequently performs with the bassist, Glen Moore, of the jazz group, Oregon. He and his wife, Dorothy, live in Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington.

Source: Poets.org

Poems by Abby E. Murray, Jesse S. Fourmy, and Karen Holman

Poetry Anthology  |  ISBN 978-0-9844510-2-9
$16.95 US  |  $18.95 Canada
5.5 x 8.5 inches  |  84 pages

This fourth volume of the Lost Horse Press New Poets | Short Books series offers three strong voices, each with a personal brand of courage. Their lives are as different from one another as can be, and their sensibilities are very much their own, yet in practicing the art of poetry they share something too mysterious and vital ever to be replaced by a new technology. That is because poetry is a primary and, one might argue, primal manifestation of the life force itself. All of our brilliant inventions notwithstanding, what life feels like remains inside us. Here are three poets, each of whose personal language is part of that richness we cannot do without.

—Marvin Bell

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Poems by Emily Bobo, Joel Craig, and Amy Lingafelter

Poetry Anthology  |  ISBN 978-0-9800289-2-8
$16.95 US  |  $18.95 Canada
6 x 9 inches  |  76 pages

The lunatics and hacks that have made up our national government for eight years could not keep Americans from singing and dancing, from imagining and pretending, or from making art in numberless ways. And they could not make poetry small. For the poets of any age are not only of their time. They hold hands with the poets of ancient times and of all time since. Poets and other artists have kept alive the life force of nations when it was hidden from the rest of the world. Let it be so again.

—Marvin Bell

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Poems by Tim Krcmarik, Patricia Staton, and Victor Camillo

Poetry  |  ISBN 978-0-9800289-0-4
$16.95 US  |  $18.95 Canada

This book, like the volume that initiated the series, is appearing during a terrible time in our country. Let it be remarked, therefore, that we who can see the reality, or can imagine something better, will not close up shop. In a time of hate radio and the cruelest forms of capitalism, during a period of unsurpassed government corruption and incompetence, poetry, like every art, remains a survival skill.

—Marvin Bell

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Poems by Gwendolyn Cash, Boyd W. Benson, and Lisa Galloway

Poetry  |  ISBN 978-0-9762114-7-1
$18 US 

These samplings, presented with as few trappings as possible, will reaffirm for readers the nature of the poetry in poetry. Serious poetry is not written to satisfy literary opinion. Poetry, like philosophy, is a survival skill.

—Marvin Bell

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