The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Thu 1/18/2007)

[RetroLounge]

My Brother

To escape headaches and fears of an unfaithful wife
my brother perpetually reforming drug user
machinist scrapper arrested at 14 for arson
and incarcerated for a few weeks
father of one son and one aborted fetus
occasional bowler heavy metal fan
connoisseur of ketchup potato chips stromboli
and cheesesteak wearer of faded jeans
faded flannel shirts pocket-tee shirts
unlaced hightops or workboots
concert tee shirts painters' hats and
army coat sufferer of aloneness
of paranoia and fear insomniac and talker
of another language in his sleep
expert belcher and marksman constant but lousy liar
moderate drinker of cheap beer violent rampager
demolisher of lamps electric fans telephones
blue-eyed ladies' man father brother and son
shy blushing ladies' man skinny-legged blue-eyed
ladies' man stuck the open end of a .357 Magnum
in his right nostril with the other end
in his calloused and stained hands
and blew his headaches and his head
from this world into the next
one night just like that.

Denver Butson

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U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins says that DENVER BUTSON’s “imagination unlocks for us the cells of reason and sets us loose in a world of dizzying possibilities.” Collins recently selected Butson’s poem “Tuesday 9:00 AM” to be included in Poetry 180, a grouping of 180 poems that will be read in U.S. high schools and published as an anthology, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry by Random House in 2003.

Butson has published two books of poetry: triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999) and Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews College Press, 2000). His poems have also appeared in The Yale Review, Ontario Review, Quarterly West, Caliban, The Mid-American Review, tight, and Exquisite Corpse, among other journals. Late in 2000, three of his “drowning ghazals” were in Agha Shahid Ali’s anthology, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English on Wesleyan University Press. Butson has work forthcoming in numerous journals, including FIELD, Contemporary Ghazals, SOLO, Crux, la petite zine, and Ontario Review, and in The Brink: Contemporary American Poetry, 1965-present.

During the fall of 2000, Butson served as Ezra Pound Visiting Writer at Brunnenburg Castle (Pound’s daughter’s home in the Italian Alps). In 1999, he was the first Ronald H. Bayes Resident in Creative Writing at St. Andrews College and the first featured poet on FOX News Online’s “Book Page.” Also in 1999, Joyce Carol Oates nominated his poem “Beauty or Flight” for a Pushcart Prize.

http://denverbutson.com/bio.html

An interview with the poet: http://freewebs.com/lilylitreview/1_6butsoninterview.html



***************



RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[Callalily]

1. How tragic!

[Chorophyll]

2. ...

D'oh. Ignore what I wrote a minute ago. Great poem. I must have my coffee now.

Yeesh.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear Retro.........

So damn vivid, and so damn sad........

Really amazingly vivid.......

My BIL did that to himself, too.......

So I can really identify with this one myself......

Not to worry, though........it no longer makes me sad......

I have become accustomed to his death now......

Thank you........:hug:

[BarenakedLady]

4. ....

I shouldn't have read that, considering the current level of my depression.

[momophile]

5. easy to imagine this guy

seems like I've met him and seen him several times around.

[wildhorses]

6. what i like about this poem is the way he lives through the pen of

his brother...he has managed to capture the essence that was and i know somewhere that dude is still struttin' his stuff and shootin' the shit and no longer worried about whether or not his wife is fuckin' around on him. least ways that is what i like to think...

RL, dude keep the hits comin'

you are really starting to blow me away with the stuff you have been posting lately...


this is another one to bookmark:thumbsup:

[RetroLounge]

7. I have an excel document with every poem I've posted

for over a year now, along with links to the threads.

I have no idea how to make that available to the lounge...

:shrug:

RL

[wildhorses]

8. i sometimes click on the links that you give and read about

the poet and some of their other works but, really RL what you do here on a daily basis is a treasure...if there was someway to officially commend you for this, i would gladly do it.

your and aristus and johnnie are wonderful assets to this place and i think should be added to the front page...

kinda like a newspaper has diffent sections...

am i making sense?

but really :yourock:

[idgiehkt]

9. "unlaced hightops or workboots..."

I'm sad about this. It reads like one of Raymond Carvers short stories. Man.

:(

Thanks for posting it though.

[RetroLounge]

10. "like one of Raymond Carvers short stories"

So true, so true...

:hi:

RL