On the Illusion of Time in a Difficult Period

Marvin Bell (1937–2020) was the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems; Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000; Mars Being Red; and collaborations with poets, artists, and photographers, among them, After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts, the first volume of a trilogy of prose poems written with Christopher Merrill. Excerpts from that trilogy’s final volume, Here & Now, are published here for the first time. Bell taught for forty years in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was Iowa’s first poet laureate.