News at Eleven: The ideal is for a poem to be

so sewn throughout that everything in it has been used up at the end. Line three is aware of the manner and substance of lines one and two, line sixteen is aware of lines one through fifteen, etc. Recurrence, echo--that sort of thing. The old definition of a good lyric poem was that it was like a spider's web: touch one part of it and the whole thing trembles. [--Marvin Bell]

from Bellingham Herald: Poet Marvin Bell's work has been compared to Walt Whitman

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