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 ‘In the Nation’ Category
Go, Read: Jack Butler featured in Town Creek Poetry
faked by Professor Fury Monday, December 7th, 2009POEM FOR MAINE
faked by gorjus Thursday, November 5th, 2009Poem for Maine
on the occasion of the voters of Maine repealing gay marriage, November 3, 2009
Oh Maine, it’s okay, we understand you
down here in Mississippi.
We wouldn’t have voted to
integrate the schools in ’54, either
Joe Simon is Freaking Out and I’m Loving It: Brother Power and Prez
faked by Professor Fury Monday, August 3rd, 2009Thoughts on the Forthcoming Howard Chaykin Blackhawk Collection
faked by Professor Fury Friday, July 31st, 2009“I loved Blackhawk! [. . . ]It was about achieving liberal ends by fascist means. It was the first comic book I ever stole.” – Howard Chaykin, interview in Comic Book Artist #5 (2004).
(more…)
Three More of These Things
faked by Jack Butler Tuesday, March 24th, 2009More political verse. Been calling them octals since they have eight lines. Now I am considering referring to them as, since I send them to the White House by email, dottawa rima. I know, I know, that’s terrible, and an insult to the form used so well by Byron in Don Juan or Yeats in Sailing to Byzantium.
What can I say? I have terrible taste. You knew that already, right?
Maybe the tone is a bit combative in these. So? Obama’s not a wuss. I am greatly disturbed by Geithner’s Wall Street insider blinders, and when Obama went on Leno the other night, he seemed more interested in coming across as plausible and in charge than he did in actually confronting the problem. In my opinion we have had way way more than enough of officials telling us to keep quiet and trust them. It sounded like he was still campaigning. I DO trust Obama, sort of. But campaign strategy aint gonna cut it, and I think the citizens in a democracy are obliged to keep an eye of their choices.
Besides, who pays attention to poets? We may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but in my experience most of the emphasis in that phrase goes on the word “unacknowledged.”
5. BONUS?
The Secretary of the Treasury
paid off his friends first. Why should you be
defending this turkey? We believe in change
all right, you need a little time. Not strange.
But it doesn’t take time to begin, and you began wrong.
Same old greedy story, same old song.
I voted for you, but now you must get rid
of the “expert” crooks: We’re counting on you, kid.
6. YOU ASKED FOR IT
Listen, I hate to break the news to you,
but after the idiot self-righteous clown and his crew
did all that damage to our country, we need
a hero, a Lincoln. Don’t let it go to your head.
The heroes always have to pay a price.
It isn’t rhetoric, but sacrifice.
What’ll it be? Smooth-talking also-ran?
Or do you have the guts to be the man?
7. ON THE REVERENCE WE OWE ELECTED OFFICIALS
As far as I’m concerned, the president
is just a man, not some divine advent.
He campaigns well, and maybe, just maybe,
can throw out the bathwater but not the baby.
I’ve spent nearly fifty years on what I love,
and I’m better at it, when push comes to shove,
than he is at his job. So should I bow
and bend the knee? No way, no time, nohow.
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…)
On Glory, the Wonders of Life, Aretha Louise Franklin, the Transcendence of Hope, and American Rocketry.
faked by gorjus Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
There is a time of day on Magazine Street in New Orleans during the winter when the sun shines just so, and it gleams through a bit of cut steel and it draws on a wall the image of a telephone, of a little piece of metal and plastic we use to touch each other when we’re too far away to holler. The phone only lasts for ten minutes, at best—barely long enough to notice, to try and stream some of that light through a little hole and by doing so mash some chemicals down on sticky paper so you can remember.
The Failures of Fox amidst the Triumph of Florida.
faked by gorjus Friday, January 9th, 2009As a hardcore Bama fan, I cheered for the Tebow Child and Percy Harvin—plus those other guys—against the now Quad-Cursed Stoops Brigade. After the Sugar Bowl, I knew the Tebow was the real deal, a brush-cut QB/halfback straight out of a 1950’s football flick, complete with quaint (and real) honesty and devotion to his team.
