Friends! 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!
Archive for the ‘Jack’ Category
Go, Read: Jack Butler featured in Town Creek Poetry
faked by Professor Fury Monday, December 7th, 2009Don 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.
Bayer aspirin, W. B. Yeats, and native Americans with toothaches
faked by Jack Butler Monday, January 12th, 2009“Only connect,” writes James Dickey in a poem about a powerline worker. I make a few small connections from time to time, and they always give me pleasure. Not much to do with them otherwise but report them, so here goes.
Here’s one: We have all frequently heard the phrase “common sense,” usually together with the popular remark, on the verge of cliche itself, that it isn’t really common at all. I suspect there is a confusion here between two senses of the word “common.” In the modern sense, we mean “to be found anywhere.” I suspect the phrase originally meant “common” in quite another way. The older meaning is “basic, fundamental.” In other words, if you had even the elements of the most basic rules of making sense, you had common sense. The implication is that it does not require a genius of logic or philosophy to tell what is what, but that even “common” or basic sense will suffice.
A bit of satirical fiction
faked by Jack Butler Thursday, October 16th, 2008Okay, blame Professor Fury. He said I could do this. I aint taking the heat. This is a story, yes, an entire short story. Long for a post, but then, in hyperspace there’s infinite room, aint there?
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