Thankyou, PrettyFakers!
For the link to Jack Butler’s interview, essay, and poetry!
A fine writer and thinker, also a friend (again, thanks are due to the fine folks at PF), I find Jack never disappoints, because he’s always at pains to speak as cogently as he can. So: do go look.
A Trout In The Milk 
As a Southerner transplanted to the West Coast, it’s so touching to recall the connection to nature there. Nature struck me afresh upon moving to California. Thanks for making the oasis of my undergrad days available to me once more; it’s more fun since I have let go of much of that terrible anxiety of accumulating educational debt and questioning how to prohibit it. It’s really more about what you learn in looking at life…Jack’s got a superb way of taking you there, which I’ll revisit soon.
I’m enjoying all of it; “Simple Desires” truly will be with me next time a day’s plans slip like water before I know I’m thirsty, so long as I spend that day with my loved one and we laugh and touch. I found such a day yesterday and was unwilling to voice my complaints to the indifference of passing time, knowing those ideas only ask me to brush away the non-response of apathy, all the while realizing: how many times have I thought
that words somehow on paper
would ease a man’s pain, or my own?
He’s got a very impressive gift for clarity, doesn’t he? And specificity, which I often think should be marked down somewhere as a virtue…hmm, but maybe it is, maybe it’s called “realism”. Not the best possible name, I guess, but…
Me, I’m roaming around that big essay today finding fascinating things…the “American foot” and so on…and the poems, of course.
Glad I could help direct you, Lue!
I would really, really have to slow down, to take in Jack’s poems fairly. I would have to produce, cast and shoot Paris, Texas in my head, basically. Sometime maybe.
But I’m moved to cut and paste this, from the late Mike Ford, his memorial on the Making Light site.
The villanelle is what?
Enter Mr Jno. Ford (the Elizabethan one) as King Edward the Fourth.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
This monarch business makes a fellow hungry.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.
What happened to the kippers left from breakfast?
Or maybe there’s a bit of cold roast pheasant.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
A civil war is such an awful bother.
We fought at Tewksbury and still ran out of mustard.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.
Speak not to me of pasta Marinara.
I know we laid in lots of boar last Tuesday.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
The pantry seems entirely full of Woodvilles
And Clarence has drunk two-thirds of the cellar.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.
If I ran England like I run that kitchen
You’d half expect somebody to usurp it.
I am the King now, and I want a sandwich.
I wonder where my brother Richard is.
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