Listen in for a remarkable reading from Mars Being Red by Marvin Bell, Iowa’s first Poet Laureate.

Marvin Bell has been called “an insider who thinks like an outsider,” and his writing has been called “ambitious without pretension.” He was for many years the Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches for the low-residency MFA program based at Pacific University in Oregon. Mr. Bell served two terms as the state of Iowa’s first Poet Laureate. He has served also on the faculties of Goddard College and the Universities of Hawaii, Washington, Wichita State, and Portland State. His list of former students reads like a Who’s Who of American Poetry. He has collaborated with composers, musicians and dancers and is famous and infamous as the creator of what are known as the “Dead Man” poems and the “Dead Man Resurrected” poems.

The most recent of his nineteen collections of poetry and essays are Iris of Creation, The Book of the Dead Man, Ardor, Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000, Rampant, and his latest collection, Mars Being Red (2007). Mr. Bell has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Poetry Review, and has held Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships as well as Senior Fulbright Appointments to Yugoslavia and Australia. Mr. Bell, and his wife, Dorothy, divide their year between Iowa City and Port Townsend, Washington.

Recorded Wednesday, May 07, 2008 at Jane Addams Hull-House Museum.