In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • From Everything at Once
  • Marvin Bell (bio) and Christopher Merrill (bio)

Everything at Once is a sequence of sixty paragraphs written back and forth with Christopher Merrill over a period of fifteen months in 2011–12. Chris and I first met in 1978. It was Chris who knew of the back-and-forth poems I had written with William Stafford, published in 1983 as Segues: A Correspondence in Poetry, and who suggested we try something like it. It was to be thought of as poetry, but we decided on paragraphs, which it seemed might better embody a wide range of experience and imagination.

Chris has undertaken cultural-diplomacy missions for the State Department to more than thirty countries. Hence, while I sent my paragraphs from Iowa City, Iowa; Port Townsend, Washington; and Sag Harbor, New York, Chris sent his from Lebanon, Afghanistan, China, the Congo, Uzbekistan …

Given the nature of Chris's experiences, and my predilections, as the sequence pushed ahead it took up matters philosophical, sociopolitical, and aesthetic. The title, Everything at Once, revealed itself only after we were well under way. In retrospect, perhaps it characterizes the international character of a digital age. These are the paragraphs numbered 31 through 36.

—MB

The Fountain House

The long years in the communal flat, across the courtyard from the palace, with her ghosts, her packed valise, her lover’s wife steaming fish in the kitchen. There were informants everywhere. And in the walls—from which hung paintings and photographs, an icon and a pair of wooden skis—were listening devices. From the silence she monitored came a requiem for her generation: Can you describe this? On her table were letters, her son’s identification card, drafts of poems. I see it all at one and the same time, she wrote: a definition of poetic vision. From her window I saw a white cross and, through a scrim of red and yellow and green leaves, the last rays of the setting sun; my notes revealed nothing of the emotion I felt among the things of the woman Stalin called “our nun”; the picture I took of the three crones minding the museum didn’t turn out. But that night in my hotel room, when I finished packing, I found a grainy photograph of Akhmatova posing on a marble sarcophagus, like the Sphinx. Man is one answer to the riddle of her poems; day and night is another. The fate of her brilliant artist friends—glory, madness, suicide, execution, exile, death—didn’t escape her lucid gaze. Sleep before my flight at dawn was out of the question.

—CM [End Page 39]

At the Point of death

Between the dreadful detail of the normal and the blur of the paranormal lay an abyss of emotional in extremis. The young Ukrainian boys dug trenches so they could reach the bodies between shellings. They hid in the forests to evade conscription or severed their trigger fingers. They went AWOL from the front lines. Then they left for the New World. Artists recorded the imprisonments, exile, madness, and suicides of the famous, creating a flame in the midst of the horrific, while the peasantry ran, leaving behind anything that could be traced to them. They sought anonymity. They went to the movies to learn English. They had garlic parties in their strap undershirts and toasted life in Russian, but said nothing of the past. If you tell, someone finds out. They experienced everything at once. Their children, like all children, believed the world into which they were born was the normal one. The exponential pace of change would not be, for the new youth, a bareback ride to steerage and safety, but a walk in the park. The story goes that a large corporation experienced a computer problem for which it needed help. The tech guru who showed up was only sixteen years old. However, he could not solve their problem. They needed a thirteen-year-old. Someone with tunnel vision. Someone who was not yet himself. Another someone who would outlive the moment.

—MB [End Page 40]

The Bridge

And so they spent another night in the mountains, in the spirit of the proverb...

pdf

Share