Peacetime
Puzzle
Radio
The Red Wheelbarrow
Rhino
The River
The Roads
Scars
The Shovel
The Sun
Superhero
Vertigo
The Vote
Wartime
Whiteout
The Writers
Your Hands
Zine
Dylan’s Names
Corn
The Bus
The Batting Cage
Desperate in America
Dreams and Daydreams
Celebrity
The Election
His Papers
If & When
The Fountain Pen
Joyous Dead Man
His Whistling
Milk
Silence
Work
Van Gogh
Water
Poetry Readings
The Metaphysician
Writer’s Block
The Angel of Apocalypse
That Wednesday
The Uprising
Mayhem
Dead Man’s Float
Author’s Preface
I would like readers of this volume to think of it as a lifetime book, not of the lifetime of the writer but of the reader, hence a book to be read over time, to dip in and out of. For me, it has been a form for truth and defiance, begun in joy and verbal music, in the face of the inevitability of death and the kaleidoscopic nature of perception. It is life amid the dark matter and sticky stuff. It voices a way to live there.
I have been asked if I am the Dead Man. No, but he knows a lot about me. Are the poems chock-full of autobiography? Yes, but it is not presented as such and asks no credit. The Dead Man is not a persona but an overarching consciousness. He is alive and dead at once, defeating time.
I waited four years after writing the first Dead Man poem, or perhaps being found by it, before writing another. A couple more, and the form had hooked me with its music and capacity. I wrote the first of these poems at age fifty-three and the last at age eighty-one. Blessings on the reader who leans forward.
A note about what is included here. Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems incorporates only the first four of the twenty-four poems from the 2011 book Whiteout, a volume of Dead Man poems written in response to photographs by Nathan Lyons. I felt that those four (“Light Skeleton,” “Big Eyes,” “Whiteout,” and “The Palm”) could stand alone, as they did in 2011 in Vertigo, while the other twenty are best read in direct relation to the photos to which they responded.
M. B.
Incarnate: The Life of the Dead Man
David St. John
For more than twenty-five years the Dead Man has lived among us. For those readers who, from the very first, recognized that the Dead Man was also living within us, it has been astonishing to watch as Marvin Bell created poem by poem, book by book, one of the most powerful bodies of poetry (this collection, Incarnate, is the Dead Man’s body) in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century American literature. No voice in our poetry has spoken with more eloquence and wisdom about the daily spiritual, political, and psychological erosion in our lives; no poet has gathered our American experience with a more capacious tenderness—all the while naming and celebrating our persistent hopes and enduring human desires.
When the Dead Man embraces us in these pages, he also breathes into us faith in ourselves, a resurrected belief in our own ability to reckon—as he himself does with his wry humor and brilliant yet simple grace, illuminating the complexity of our lives as they have seemed to fragment around us. If we somehow feel we have lost our way along whatever paths we have traveled, the Dead Man arises as the lens through which we can see those tumbling pieces in the kaleidoscope—those jagged shards of personal experience or of historical or social wreckage—resolve into focus.
Throughout his career, Marvin Bell has always brought to his poetry a devotion to the lyric intensity of Dickinson as well as the broadly woven gestural expansiveness of Whitman. He has always echoed the performative genius of John Berryman alongside the postapocalyptic vaudeville of Samuel Beckett. In the Dead Man poems, as he rehearses the Zen admonition Live as if you were already dead, Bell employs a wicked humor as deeply American as Mark Twain’s (or Lenny Bruce’s) yet as intimate and local as Buster Keaton’s.
