Marvin Bell > Quotes

“Learn the rules, break the rules, make up new rules, break the new rules.”
― Marvin Bell

“The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking”
― Marvin Bell, Mars Being Red

“Try to write poems at least one person in the room will hate.”
― Marvin Bell

“Poetry is the least imposition on silence in a world of chatter.”
― Marvin Bell

“The "I" in the poem is not you but someone who knows a lot about you.”
― Marvin Bell

“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.”
― Marvin Bell

“You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.”
― Marvin Bell

“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.”
― Marvin Bell