After the Fact If When and Here Now

Christopher Merrill

ISBN 10: 1945680725 / ISBN 13: 9781945680724

Published by White Pine Press, 2024

About this Item

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences.The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other?and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future?which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

Seller Inventory # CIN1945680725VG

Bibliographic Details

• Title: After the Fact If When and Here Now
• Publisher: White Pine Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1945680725
• ISBN 13: 9781945680724
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

A iterary testament to friendship and the ways in which a vibrant collaboration can inspire poets to plumb the depths of their experiences.

The concluding volumes of a ten-year-long conversation in prose poetry between the award-winning poets Marvin Bell and Christopher Merrill. They write from different generations and places around the world on a range of themes from memory to politics, aging and mortality, the vagaries of desire and the imagination.

Bell and Merrill wanted to create a wide-ranging dialogue to explore the meaning not only of their separate experiences but of the very ways in which a collaboration fosters a deeper engagement with each other--and the world. In his penultimate message to Merrill, written just hours before he suffered a heart attack from which he never recovered, Bell said that what he loved about their collaboration was that each new prose poem defined his immediate future--which was what After the Fact provided both of them for ten glorious years.

About the Authors

Christopher Merrill has published seven collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries.

Marvin Bell's works include collaborations with musicians, composers, dancers, poets and photographers--among them, poet William Stafford and photographer Nathan Lyons--and volumes of an original poetic form most recently collected in Incarnate: The Collected Dead Man Poems. He lived in Iowa City, Iowa, and Port Townsend, Washington. He died in 2020.