Quotes from Marvin Bell

Prose is prose because of what it includes; poetry is poetry because of what it leaves out.

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

I'm partial to coffee shops, brain work, and poems on the page. I write after midnight. Sometimes, twisty syntax happens, and I surrender.

A nation's art is the expression of its soul.

Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.

Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.

The "I" in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.

Much of our lives involves the word 'no.' In school we are mostly told, 'Don't do it this way. Do it that way.' But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.

There is a moment when the dead man, too, cancels further revision of the impure. Thus, the dead man is a postscript to closure. The dead man is also a form of circular reasoning, the resident tautologist in an oval universe that is robin's-egg-blue to future generations. Perhaps it's so not important that the dead man lives. After all, the dead man deserts the future.