An Interview with Marvin Bell

AN INTERVIEW WITH MARVIN BELL Marvin Bell photo by John Riley courtesy of Atheneum Publishers An Interview with Marvin Bell / Larry Levis Levis: Would you read "Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See" and then talk a little about that poem? Bell: "Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See" They sat by the water. The fine women had large breasts, tightly checked. At each point, at every moment, they seemed happy by the water. The women wore hats like umbrellas or carried umbrellas shaped like hats. The men wore no hats and the water, which wore no hats, had that well-known mirror finish which tempts sailors. Although the men and women seemed at rest they were looking toward the river and some way out into it but not beyond. The scene was one of hearts and flowers though this may be unfair. Nevertheless, it was probable that the Seine had hurt them, that they were "taken back" by its beauty to where a slight breeze broke the mirror and then its promise, but never the water. Levis: Ok, thank you. That is a beautiful poem; one of the lines that seems most powerfully evocative to me is the line "Nevertheless, it was probable that the Seine had hurt them." I remember writing something about place in poetry and arriving at a conclusion: that place was an excuse, that people locate their sorrows at a given place and it's an excuse to talk probably about some other loss that would be inevitable, unavoidable whether they were in Nebraska or Paris or wherever. I notice you say the same thing in a short essay about your poem "Gemwood." You mention the xerox print of your son's hand and how something about the print of that hand always gave you an enormous feeling of sadness—you mention it being continually saddening to you when you would think about it and I just wonder if you would care to talk about or define or locate in any way that emotion since it seems to preside both in the last poems of Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See and certainly in the new book These Green-Going-to-Yellow. You have this The Missouri Review · 35 sense of the poem descending somehow, or the spirit descending, combatting sadness, but at the same time allowing it into the work. Bell: Yes, I think you're right. There are a number of things to say at once, perhaps. If I start with "Gemwood," the earliest of the poems you mentioned, I can remember what it was called originally. It wasn't called "Gemwood." It was called "How We Think Back," because I knew that the poem was an expression of my trying to think back, having looked again at that xerox of my youngest son's hand when he was five years old and I was showing him how a xerox copier works. It's such a silly thing, perhaps, to attach emotions to, but it was true nonetheless that I did. A five-year-old kid's hand, a little boy is full of fleshy innocence and, at the same time—well, I shouldn't say "at the same time"—in your mind at the same time there's the end of innocence and you look at it and you...Poe wrote that the most moving subject was the death of a beautiful woman. He may have said the death of a beautiful young woman. I half agree, but I would say the death of a child is more moving. In "Gemwood" I was trying to think back to what else might have been in my mind or I might have been feeling underneath when I looked at that xerox print of Jason's hand. I was putting these things together, but not artificially. I was letting them go together because they did seem to go together, maybe because they had similar emotional weights. I was able to think back to when we had gone to Vermont, and what my big son had been doing during that time, what my little son had been doing, and a pet rat...