An Interview with Denver Butson

Published in Knockout #2, Spring 2009.

Jeremy Halinen and Brett Ortler

Like those of all contemporary poets, Denver Butson’s poems have not yet stood the test of time. They haven’t had the chance. Yet, in another sense, they have stood that test, as they have been praised by poets of prior generations as accomplished and varied in their poetics as Agha Shahid Ali, Ronald H. Bayes, Billy Collins, Theodore Enslin, Thom Gunn, Jim Harrison, and W. S. Merwin.

Butson, a 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Individual Artist Fellow, has published three full-length collections of poems, triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999), Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews College Press, 2001) and illegible address (Luquer Street Press, 2004). His poems also appear in grace by Pietro Costa (Luquer Street Press, 2003), in Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry (Random House, 2003), in Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), and in numerous literary journals.

Butson’s ear is astutely attentive to the possibilities of musical repetition and variation inherent in language. His lingual cadences tend to mimic those of a mind in a state between waking and sleeping, and his images borrow heavily from a dreamlike world but are nevertheless positioned in a "real" world that fits our waking expectations.

Butson’s poems remind us, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, that all things are truly magic. Consider the first four stanzas of Mechanical Birds’ "Magic":

If you take the word bird

and reverse the i and r

and add an e to the end

you have bride

 

a bird that has turned into a bride

 

who with the insertion

of one simple g

becomes bridge

 

if you have all three

in flesh not ink

a bird over a bride

on a bridge

you have magic

It is crucial that it is not until "you have all three / in flesh not ink" that "you have magic," which is not to say that the clever wordplay is not magical but that living flesh is more magical, more complex, by far. Ultimately, the existential questions the poem raises are not the point. The point is that it is by magic that they can be raised at all.

We spoke with Denver in his walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, actor/filmmaker Rhonda Keyser, and their daughter, Maybelle.

 

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