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Iowa Review CHRISTOPHER MERRILL AND MARVIN BELL M.B.: The apparent objectivity of objects is merely a useful facade, their visibility a deception like that of a citizen planning an escape even as he carries a flag to the obligatory show of support and wears the lapel pin of blanket patriotism. The hidden silverware retains a picture of the one who scratched at the dirt with a fork to bury it before fleeing. The discarded bricks took a handprint with them to the bottom of the well. If one were to reanimate the seemingly lifeless and inert objects around us, one would see how exile, insurgency, paramilitaries, preemption, and intervention trouble the mirror and the goblet, how turmoil takes the seabed, and the massed bodies point toward both those accountable and the marked who survived. Were we able to christen the knuckle of a tree or the imprint of a shoe, the vinegar of a dead crow, a slice of bread. . . . I offer these examples only to reveal the enormity of the task. If the chimes were a weather vane, if the arrow were a wing, if the calendar were ancient graffiti. . . . The guilt of the survivor undoes the efficacy of a fallout shelter. To picture a life without friends is to be bereft in advance. The Apocalypse, don't miss it. Count on it. Take it to the bank. All objects are objets d'art. |
Iowa Review The following excerpts were published in The Iowa Review, Volume 45, Issue 1, in Spring 2015. CHRISTOPHER MERRILL AND MARVIN BELL Editor's Note The following are entries #37–42 from Merrill and Bell's project After the Fact: Scripts & Postscripts , which began as a sequence of sixty paragraphs written back-and-forth over a period of fifteen months during 2011 and 2012. "Having written sixty," notes Bell, "we decided to go on to a second section. Hence the subtitle Scripts & Postscripts. We began the project thinking of our work as prose poetry. It was an editor who first recognized that these paragraphs are a form of poetic nonfiction." The latest of Marvin Bell's books are Vertigo: The Living Dead Man Poems (Copper Canyon); Whiteout, a collaboration with photographer Nathan Lyons (Lodima); and a children's book based on the poem "A Primer about the Flag" (Candlewick). He lives in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. Christopher Merrill's recent books include Boat (poetry), Necessities (prose poetry), and The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War. He directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. After the Fact: Scripts and Postscripts is available at |
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