W.E. Butts, the 2009-2014 New Hampshire Poet Laureate, is the author of eight poetry collections, including
Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café, winner of the 2006 Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize, and the chapbooks Sunday Factory (Finishing Line Press, 2006) and What to Say if the Birds Ask (Pudding House, 2007). The recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, he teaches in the low-residency BFA in Creative Writing Program at Goddard College.
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W.E. Butts Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
Faith and factory seem to overlap in the minds of the people as well as in the imagery in your poems. Can you speak to the way this overlapping happens, and to the way this has influenced your voice and focus as a writer?
I was raised in a working class family. My mother was a devout Catholic, while my father, a factory worker, was a Methodist. As a child in the 50’s, I attended parochial school. I became very aware early on of the powerful implications religious and industrial symbols had for people, and through that acquired a sort of secular faith, a sense that labor itself was prayer—and somehow there was an inherent dignity in that. And so my poems often explore the relationship between the corporeal, the spiritual, and the temporal, and how that speaks to the human condition.
Another theme that recurs in your work is that of killing, ending, aftermath, the inevitability of change and resurrection—and the accompanying fear, confusion, and loneliness. Is this theme one of the reasons you write: to acknowledge endings, but to resurrect previous lives (and acknowledge new lives) through reassembling memories and recounting them as poetry? On a similar note, what drives you to write?
Your comments here are perceptive. Since both my parents were considerably older when they married, I was an only child, and my father passed away when I was still a teenager, I’ve always had an acute sense of mortality, but I’ve also come to believe pretty strongly in the restorative value in change and what we might learn through it about the self, in a larger context. And so I’m increasingly interested in how the past informs the present to shape that understanding. I’m also struck by your phrase, “reassembling memory.” Quite often, when we reconstruct the past, we find what we thought we knew is not, after all, what we really know.
Your poems grapple with the idea of self-identification: at times, people become their words; at times, people are indistinguishable from each other in a dark theater; at times, people identify with something outside themselves, like their job or their father; and at times, we readers seem to become part of the poem when the poem reaches out with a “you” or “we” that seems to include us. I’ve found that writing helps me clarify my own thoughts, and I know other writers who think the same. Is your poetry an attempt to help you clarify the identification of someone, something, a group or people, and/or yourself? How do you understand the idea of identification as part of your poetry?
Your poems grapple with the idea of self-identification: at times, people become their words; at times, people are indistinguishable from each other in a dark theater; at times, people identify with something outside themselves, like their job or their father; and at times, we readers seem to become part of the poem when the poem reaches out with a “you” or “we” that seems to include us. I’ve found that writing helps me clarify my own thoughts, and I know other writers who think the same. Is your poetry an attempt to help you clarify the identification of someone, something, a group or people, and/or yourself? How do you understand the idea of identification as part of your poetry?
For me, it’s a question of how the private might be made public; how those events and experiences embedded in memory can lead to discovery and surprise – some unexpected, new meaning that resonates with both the self and the reader. And so yes, it is a matter of a personal and yet also communal identification, arrived at through language that extends beyond the limitations of self and subject matter. To some extent then, the poem engages in conversation with the reader.
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THE GIFT OF UNWANTED KNOWLEDGE
Because every evening, ten miles east,
small men guide their nervous horses
to the starting gate, afternoons in our town
my father leans over a pockmarked bar,
checks the history of losses and wins
posted in the latest racing form, collects
the folded slips and wrinkled bills of barroom regulars.
Here, at the dust twirled Eagle Tavern,
it’s 1958, and light glows amber in their glasses
of Pabst Blue Ribbon, Black Label and Genesee.
Where else could faith assemble when the factory’s gone,
but in this dark cathedral of last chances? They know
the odds are never with them, but place their bets
like a devoted Sunday congregation.
Outside, the sun is gleaming proudly on the hood
of a new Edsel driving slowly down Main Street.
A few loud boys waving Hubley cap pistols
run from the 5 & Dime, falling then quickly rising
into the repeated resurrection of their play,
as troubled, speechless shoppers step back now,
worried in their sudden search for safety.
And I am one of those running, screaming kids,
toy gun in my hand, freed from school to an afternoon
that needs killing. We had learned what doesn’t survive:
Sputnik a cinder descended from the atmosphere
of stars and other planets, Roy Campanella,
once called the best catcher in baseball,
crippled by his car’s bad slide and crash.
We heard our fathers, late at night in their darkened houses,
sleepless and bitter, so many things already gone.
We skip flat stones across the surface of the murky creek,
lie shirtless beneath a lowering sun and cool breeze.
If we have questions, they are here in whatever light
is left to hold us, each one his father’s son,
and to know what’s next is not what we expected.
THE OTHER LANGUAGE
Even her worried voice couldn’t bring me
to answer the morning I hid in weeds
by the willow, some child’s wrong idea
of his importance in the known and safe world.
Or perhaps it was a simple insistence
that my life mattered, that Mother would,
if I were really gone, after all miss her only son,
and regret those scoldings and rules.
But I came then to understand silence’s bitter ache:
Mother turned away at the kitchen stove,
her darkened thoughts of a cold river
and drowned boy shadowing the sun-filled wall.
When Barbara Jean stepped from the line
of high school cheerleaders and leapt
into the brisk October air, calling out each letter
of my name, I ran gladly with the others
onto the field of end runs and tackles.
But what was announced over the PA that afternoon
we stood assembled at the gymnasium rally,
navy blazers and striped ties, our season’s ritual
of recognition and awards: the President
shot and yes, dead, startled everyone quiet,
and then so strangely alone.
Once, I watched my father and his deaf mute friend
speak in the quick conversation of hand and fingers,
saw how it was we might become our own words,
and for years after Father died there were nights
I dreamt back his voice, but woke to my loud cries.
At Sunday Mass with my parents, I had believed
those mysterious Latin chants would save me,
held as certain scripture the impossible
stories of a favorite uncle, learned the lessons
of home and school, and listened for the truth,
as I do still, of who we are that has not been said.
ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW
Kallett Theater, 1959
Here are three men driving through the fast fall-off
of noir light and shadow, following the Hudson River
toward a small town bank outside Albany
that the disgraced former policeman swears will be an easy score,
and you can tell by the look in their eyes
and grim set of their mouths they need to believe it:
the Harlem musician tired of crooning to the ofay crowd
in smoke-filled bars; the racist war vet, just out of the joint
for hitting a man so hard he killed him but, he reminds his girlfriend,
he didn’t mean to do it. Something snapped and he can’t remember.
Now they’re at a lake’s gray shore, close-up
of a half-submerged and ruined china doll, the ex-cop
tossing stones at a crumbled can. In the nearby woods
the veteran points his shotgun at a startled rabbit,
and we have to wonder why he hesitates, until
the frightened animal scurries away, he shoots,
and then we understand. Of course, the robbery goes wrong.
We already knew this plan wouldn’t work: the ex-cop dead in an alley,
the musician and veteran running past the rail yard into the looming rows
of oil terminals, and a confrontation that had to happen.
But it’s what the camera shows us next that makes us
sit up straight. In a scene reminiscent of Cagney’s finish
in “White Heat,” they climb on top a tank and fire simultaneously
at each other, the screen exploding in flame and rising smoke,
in the aftermath, their scorched bodies laid side by side.
And in this time out of time we know failure,
desperation, even greed, each of us unrecognizable
in the darkened theater of our collective breath:
student and teacher; housewife and sales clerk;
grocer and mechanic; the teenage couple
necking in the last row. And “Who,”
the first detective to arrive is asking,
“can tell the difference?”