Full Description
"Prose was always meant for colloquy, risk, and intimacy. With these rich and conversant prose poems, Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill return spoken language to sport--sometimes competitive, but often cooperative, exploratory, even humanely probative. What is a friend? Bell and Merrill demonstrate friendship is drawn from imagination."--Stephen Kuusisto, author of Letters to Borges "The best conversationalists intuit and respond to unspoken questions and interstitial meanings, sidelong concerns and secret subjects. They also know how to listen to another's story and hear the line or inflection that calls forth their own tale in a way that enlarges, well, everything. Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill's stunning epistolary paragraphs illustrate the inner workings of just such an intimate, agile, and sustained conversation. This collaborative, high wire act offers up profound truths in exactly the way the most exciting poems take shape--by leaps of imagination and complete trust in the power of association to bring up riches, songs, and wisdom from the depths."--Lia Purpura After the Fact is a lively and imaginative conversation between two legendary poets.
Marvin Bell, writing from Iowa City and Port Townsend, and Christopher Merrill, writing from around the world, give us an intimate look into collaboration at its best. Christopher Merrill's recent books include Boat and Necessities. He is the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Marvin Bell's works include collaborations with poet William Stafford and volumes of an original poetic form, most recently collected in Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems.
Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
Scripts
#1 Reunion
#2 Joe
#3 The Red Balloon
#4 Burke
#5 Aztec Two-Step
#6 Code
#7 The Score
#8 Frankie
#9 Prayer Rope
#10 Kenny
#11 Stories
#12 Sylvester
#13 SOS
#14 Nat
#15 Greystone
#16 Mr. Pople
#17 The Lake
#18 Staircase
#19 Breach
#20 The Dock
#21 Combs Hollow
#22 9/11/01
#23 9/11/11
#24 Aesthetic Wobble #1
#25 The Unwritten
#26 Skippy
#27 Fodder
#28 Celebrity
#29 Yasnaya Polyana
#30 Afterward
#31 The Fountain House
#32 At the Point of Death
#33 The Bridge
#34 Carlyle
#35 Conference
#36 Aesthetic Wobble #2
#37 Fairy Tale
#38 The Evangelicals
#39 After the Workshop
#40 Luxury of Circumstance
#41 From the Vineyard to the Sea
#42 Forensics
#43 Afghanistan
#44 The Scope
#45 Tactics
#46 Aesthetic Wobble #3
#47 Proverbs
#48 Aesthetic Wobble #4
#49 A Note on Aesthetics
#50 On Time
#51 Holding Action
#52 The Revolution Needs a Song
#53 Tamara Khanum (1906-1991)
#54 Jack
#55 The List
#56 Aesthetic Wobble #5
#57 Angkor
#58 Thermal
#59 Utopia
#60 Bled
?
Postscripts
#61 Meteor
#62 Brown vs. Board of Education
#63 Relativity
#64 Radioactivity
#65 Clive Wearing, March, 1985
#66 Hiatus
#67 V
#68 Haze
#69 Kitty Hawk
#70 Petty
#71 Nu descendant un escalier no 2), 1912
#72 The Names
#73 Brain
#74 The Hat
#75 The Performance
#76 Critical Point
#77 White Lines
#78 Heat Lightning
#79 The Act
#80 Feverish
#81 Soldier Aristotle
#82 The Headless Horseman
#83 Dolly
#84 Effluent
#85 Russell
#86 The Dolly Zoom
#87 Guff and Jive
#88 Medicine
#89 Happiness
#90 The Ladder?
