New artifact with stories from all yr favorites. Available at Sneaky Beans and from that cool girl in class that you can’t quite manage to talk to yet.
Archive for the ‘Jack’ Category
LOST BATTLES IS COMING
faked by gorjus Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
A new zine featuring work from lots of pretty amazing people. Look for it in stores near you this week!*
*A/k/a one coffee shop in JXN and maybe a street corner in Brooklyn.
New Jack Butler! Practicing Zen Without a License
faked by Professor Fury Monday, February 28th, 2011All! I’m here to spread the word that there is a brand new Jack Butler book out right now: Practicing Zen Without a License. Here’s some of what the publisher’s website has to say about it:
Like zen, whatever you expect Practicing Zen to be, it will be different. Think of a source-book on the origins of zen, like the scholarly source-books that we use today to study zen’s origins in Chinese Buddhism and its coming to full flower in Japan. Such source-books are necessarily fragmentary, since much of the original writing has been lost. Now translate that source-book to the 25th century, and replace the fragments from China and Japan with fragments from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the only remaining records of how a version of zen (called Easy) took over the U. S. Throw in a wildly humorous and semi-science-fictional version of history, and spice it up with anecdotes about and utterances by fictional zen masters, who quarreled among themselves.
You can get it at Amazon right now. My copy is wending its way Baton Rouge-ward and I’m looking forward to diving in to a book that is sure to be strange and disorienting—in the very best ways.
Go, Read: Jack Butler featured in Town Creek Poetry
faked by Professor Fury Monday, December 7th, 2009Friends! Ninjas! Poetry Lovers! You will want to direct your browser over to the latest issue of Town Creek Poetry, the online magazine with the good sense to feature the poetry of Jack Butler. In addition to nineteen poems drawn from across Jack’s career, the issue features an essay on the state of poetry and a new interview. It’s like Jack Butler box set with extensive liner notes, all for free on your computer. I’m amazed you’re still reading this paragraph. Follow the link!
Don Harington
faked by Jack Butler Sunday, November 8th, 2009At midnight November the 7th, Don Harington became his admirers.
octals
faked by Jack Butler Friday, March 13th, 2009Like everybody else, I’ve been using the whitehouse.gov contact function. Sending comments to political types makes me feel helpless, so I made a sort of sport of it by coming up with rules. I wanted my comments to be short (under their word limit) and figured there was no point trying to talk about more than one subject at a time.
Since I’m a poet, I naturally thought of a poetic form. What I came up with is a variation on an old standard, the heroic couplet (two lines of rhyming pentameter). My variation is eight lines or only four couplets long, way under the limit, but who wanted to say that much anyway? Naturally, I use the movement of speech to jazz up what would otherwise be the monotony of meter.
I’m writing them whenever the mood strikes, whenever a subject coalesces from the general furor and seems to merit a comment. A bonus: Though technically speaking I am sure I am just as powerless, the act of construction required to put my thoughts into a form, even a slight one, has done away with my sense of helplessness.
Here’s the first four. There will likely be others. (more…)
The Greatest Comix Ever
faked by Jack Butler Wednesday, February 4th, 2009Just thinking out loud here. I figure I have to or this becomes another one of those “essays” I “ought” to write instead of a fun thought that others might want to elaborate.
What I have in mind isn’t a list. What I have in mind is whys and wherefores, sort of the way professor fury writes about G.P.R.D.
Okay, define your category. Not to exclude other possibilities but so as to not waste time arguing over.
And the Oscar for Greatest Superhero Graphic Novel (or Series of Graphic Volumes Telling One Story (or World Evoked by a Complex of Interlinked Stories)) goes to . . .
Hearing blank verse in all the wrong places
faked by Jack Butler Monday, January 12th, 2009Shakespeare has an overwhelming affect on some of us. I remember my youthful frustration that one could no longer write Shakespearean blank verse and be taken seriously. (A fact I discovered in the trial, by the way.) But some of us can’t give up that easily.