MARVIN BELL'S COMMENTS ON RECEIVING THE DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI AWARD

In 1960, from a village on eastern Long Island, I had made it as far west as Chicago, where I took a slow M.A. at the university, worked for the law library, and hung around with people who I can only guess must by now have sizable FBI folders. My Henry James professor, Napier Wilt, liked to wax poetic about his backwoods childhood, and he used to speak of a place so primitive that pigs came right up to the porch. It was Iowa City. So when I scheduled an interview here, hoping to enroll in the Writers' Workshop, I rode the bus because I was anxious about driving into the wilds.

I stayed in what was then the Burkley Hotel downtown on Washington Street. In the morning I asked the desk clerk if he could tell me how to find the University of Iowa. He could. He pointed out the window. So I walked to the Student Union for an interview with the poet Donald Justice. We had just begun when the printer Kim Merker came by, and we all went bowling. There were bowling alleys in the Union in those days. I figure I must have bowled all right because I was accepted into the writing program. And it turned out that Iowa had more than pigs. Among other things, it had fields of soybeans and acres of artists and writers. Recently, an interviewer asked me if I was the best poet in Iowa City. "I'm the best poet in the 1400 block of College Street," I told her, "unless someone I don't know about has just moved in."

It also turned out that bowling could well have been the admissions test for the writing program—ungraded, of course. The Workshop liked to play, and the poets, always sensitive to the charge of ultimate wimpiness, liked to win. Softball doubleheaders on weekends, ping-pong and volleyball in bad weather, jumping the pig roasting pit at Vance Bourjaily's Redbird Farm—we may have been committing verses, but we also played and gambled. When Kenney's Tavern—along with the original Donnelly's, the evening hangout for the writers—brought in the town's first pinball machines, it was a penny a point, which turns out to be a substantial amount when a bad player plays a good one. I left Iowa for two years and, when I returned to teach, the gamesmanship had not subsided. Most of us played nickel-dime-quarter poker—Kurt Vonnegut had a routine of staying one hour, drinking one beer, and losing $10—but Nelson Algren, true to his Man with the Golden Arm tough guy image, bought into a table stakes, pot limit game run by a lingering history student and featuring a player who carried a sword cane, and in a single semester Nelson lost something between ten and twenty grand. But he loved being in the game, playing in a strap undershirt and a green visor like one of his characters.

Being in the game—that's what Iowa did for me. People are always wondering aloud if writing can be taught. I don't know if anything can be taught. But everything can be learned—if one gets in the game. The University of Iowa has put a lot of us into one game or another. Admittedly, Saturday nights in the bars, one rarely hears anyone say, "How about them poets?" Still, there are lots of serious players here alongside the athletes: from the Socratics and Aristotelians all the way to the Brain Inspectors and String Theorists, to all of whom I say, with gratitude and with a firm sense of how much fun the work has been, Go Hawks!

Marvin Bell
June 10, 2006