and his attention to the beauty of thought and of the mind in process. The steady political current in Bell’s poetry is as charged as Muriel Rukeyser’s, and his unapologetic antiwar evisceration of American policies is as radical as that ofany poet who came of age after World War II. His Bush-era poems are, in my view, the very best we have from that period of our history. It’s also time Bell’s deep love of William Carlos Williams (and the American vernacular) as well as his admiration for the Beat poets, especially Allen Ginsberg, be recognized as crucial elements in his poetry. From the beginning of his writing life, Bell understood the consolation of mystery in poetry and the lasting power and presence of art. Still, let’s be clear: Bell’s Dead Man only appears detached by virtue of our own definition of death; the Dead Man of these poems is ever of this dark world and its sorrows. To be alive, the Dead Man knows, is to die a little every day, even if—so unlike us—the Dead Man can no longer be betrayed by anything living.
Bell’s poetry has always exhibited a profoundly metaphysical intelligence. In the poems of the Dead Man, Bell has created a conversational and reflective philosophical music, establishing (as a formal choice) the poetic sentence as a measure of his poetic line. There is a declarative ease to this work that enables the poems to double back on themselves. The Dead Man poems are insistently bifocal and riddled with the dualities of experience. Perhaps it was Bell’s history as a photographer that in part motivated the distinctive “twin-lens reflex” modality of his Dead Man poems, yielding a fierce clarity from dual perspectives. For the Dead Man, paradox and duality constitute philosophical and moral clarity. Indeed, in one of Incarnate’s signature poems, Bell says of the Dead Man, “Like a camera, he squints to lengthen the depth of his field and bring the future into focus.”
The poems of the Dead Man are the living end. They are multivalent and protean, yet immediate and conversational. Even with the scent of the earth and its humus clinging to him (post-humus, as in: resurrected), the Dead Man is the oracle of the everyday. The Dead Man lives within the Taoist vision of the world of the ten thousand things. The Dead Man lives without us, of course, yet also within us.
Remarkable for its eclectic and culturally diverse vision, Incarnate embodies a vivid world of poetic reflection unlike anything else in American poetry.
Incarnate:The CollectedDead Man Poems
The Book of the Dead Man
(1994)
Live as if you were already dead.
(Zen admonition)
Preface
Before the Dead Man, minus-1 was still an imaginary number.
The Dead Man will have nothing more to do with the conventional Ars Poetica, that blind manifesto allegiant to the past. Let the disenchanted loyalist reconsider the process. Among motives, occasions, codes, needs and knucklehead accidents, the Dead Man accepts all and everything. He knows in his bones that writing is metabolic.
What are we to make of the Dead Man’s reference to Keats? That poetry should come, as Keats wrote, “as naturally as the Leaves to a tree”? To this the Dead Man has added the dimension of the minus. He understands that fallibility and ignorance are the true stores, the bottomless reservoirs of creation. He is the fount for that spillover. As for the tedium of objects distorted from their long imprisonment in books, the Dead Man has learned that to be satiated is not to be satisfied.
So he furthers the love affair between the sentence and the line. Whereas formerly the line took a missionary position, under the rule of the Dead Man the sentence once more invigorates the line. The ongoing attempt by dictionary makers to define “poetry,” as it has been called, is an object of derision to the Dead Man. The Dead Man knows that every technique is passé except when reencountered at its birth. The Dead Man moves as comfortably among nightingales as among house wrens.
“Perfected fallibility”: that’s the key, the solace, the right number (one of one, two of two, three of three, etc.). Hence, the fragment is more than the whole. The Dead Man is a material mystic. His hourglass is bottomless. No. 27 (“About the Dead Man and The Book of the Dead Man”) reminds us that the Dead Man is “a postscript to closure,” and “the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin’s-egg-blue to future generations.”
Has it not already been stated of the Dead Man in the poem “About the Dead Man and His Poetry” that he is the tautologist, the postscript, perfected fallibility, etc.? Yes. The Dead Man tells the truth the first time. The Dead Man, too, writes as he has to—with a watch cap and a sweatshirt, with a leaking skull and dilapidated lungs, at an hour beyond clocks. He lives on hunger. He eats his words.
Before the birth of the Dead Man, it was not possible to return. It was not possible, it was preconceptual, it was discretionary to the point of chaos and accident to return, since of course there was nowhere yet to return to. Since the birth of the Dead Man, however, it is possible, even likely, that one may return. From the future, one walks ever more slowly into the past.
All this the Dead Man knows. As for me, I know nothing. But do not think one can know nothing so easily. It has taken me many years.
M. B.
The Book of the Dead Man
The Book of the Dead Man (#1)
1. About the Dead Man
The dead man thinks he is alive when he sees blood in his stool.
Seeing blood in his stool, the dead man thinks he is alive.
He thinks himself alive because he has no future.
Isn’t that the way it always was, the way of life?
Now, as in life, he can call to people who will not answer.
Life looks like a white desert, a blaze of today in which nothing distinct can be made out, seen.
To the dead man, guilt and fear are indistinguishable.
The dead man cannot make out the spider at the center of its web.
He cannot see the eyelets in his shoes and so wears them unlaced.
He reads the large type and skips the fine print.
His vision surrounds a single tree, lost as he is in a forest.
From his porcelain living quarters, he looks out at a fiery plain.
His face is pressed against a frameless window.
Unable to look inside, unwilling to look outside, the man who is dead is like a useless gift in its box waiting.
It will have its yearly anniversary, but it would be wrong to call it a holiday.
2. More About the Dead Man
The dead man can balance a glass of water on his head without trembling.
He awaits the autopsy on the body discovered on the beach beneath the cliff.
Whatever passes through the dead man’s mouth is expressed.
Everything
