Narrative

Poem of the Week

Marvin Bell is the author of seventeen books of poetry, including Mars Being Red and Vertigo (Copper Canyon Press, 2011). His poems and essays have appeared in hundreds of anthologies, and among his many honors is the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Retired from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Bell was Iowa’s first Poet Laureate and now teaches for the brief-residency MFA program at Pacific University in Oregon. He is the creator of a poetic form known as the “dead man poem.”

Around Us

by Marvin Bell

We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane’s wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,

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