Firefish: The Collected Poems

by Jack Butler

From the FOREWORD of Firefish by Jack Butler:

None of my published books of poetry have resembled any of my private collections. I think of the published books now (with an appropriate degree of irony) as collections of Jack Butler’s greatest hits.

At last I decided to put together a personal “collected” for circulation to friends and perhaps a few other interested people-this book.

I’ve decided to call the volume Firefish (FF). There’s a poem in the book (“How my Daughter Gave Me the Word”) which explains the origin of the title, but doesn’t begin to suggest the overwhelming effect the moment it celebrates has had on my life. I’ve never been able to commemorate that moment well enough, but the poem at least records the sequence of events accurately, and perhaps a few may glimpse the spark.

For an instant I saw the living goddess of language, and from then on began to understand that we have it backwards: Language has not created poetry, but poetry has created language.

Poetry is not the most specialized, highly evolved, and stylized usage of language, but is there at its very heart, at its root: It is that moment when the word is invented (as all words have been), the moment when the mind makes a connection, and finds its voice.

For me, printed poetry is the record of a speaking voice. I have little interest in purely spatial form, the graphic values of print distributed across a page. What does poetry supply if not story and song? I love the music of meter and rhyme-sonnets, villanelles, ballads, blank verse, tetrameter couplets, nonce forms, all of it. I learned that music early, in the way blues musicians learned to play the guitar from listening to the radio.

It’s not everyone’s music, but it’s mine, and I’ve devoted as much energy and study to it as any astrophysicist deducing the existence of a quasar, as any first violinist in the New York Philharmonic.

That love and study has taught me that meter is at best a friendly and useful ghost, or x-ray skeleton. It is no guarantee of rhythm, much less music. Poetry is a living being, and its musical resources are inexhaustible, no matter what the advocates of any given approach might tell you.If you don’t have a good ear-and there are many Ph.D.s in English who do not-then you will never truly write or even appreciate poetry.

As Louie Armstrong said, “It don’t mean a thing if it aint got that swing.”  (I quoted him at the Faulkner Conference in New Orleans in 1999, when I was on the panel “The Meter and Musicality of Poetry,” a panel whose discussions led me later to write “The Mother Tongue.”)

Perhaps as many as half my poems are not explicitly formal, but my mind’s ear has been trained on formal verse, and that influence has greatly affected my “free” verse. My senses of movement, pause, echo, color, and music all owe a great deal to the love of formal music.

From the first moment I read a Jack Butler poem I was hooked. Even more, I was awed—by the verbal brilliance, the sense of serious play, the depth of emotion and subject matter, the existential embrace of all his poems. All of these qualities are on full display in these collected poems. While we share Southern roots, and Butler’s poems do reflect those roots, he transcends them, his work is universal in the deepest sense. So, Dear Reader, one could do worse, a lot worse, than be a reader of Jack Butler’s luminous work. I certainly have been and will be. Please join me.
— George Drew

As both poet and novelist, Butler is a most audacious and brilliant writer.
— Alec Clayton

For anyone interested in a clear-eyed assessment of the evolution of the contemporary South, I recommend the poems of Jack Butler. Elsewhere, he has written, “A southern author now must provide not only character but also the context in which that character is credible. The shopping malls, the trailer houses, the corporate offices, the frozen yogurt shops, the video racks in the country groceries. Before a writer was measured by the fidelity of his rendering. Now she is measured by her ability to accumulate real-world details.” This statement is seminal to any consideration of Butler’s poems.  Also, for anyone interested in the potentialities of poetry’s music, a mastery of technique, and good storytelling, this is one-stop shopping.
— Samuel Prestridge, author of A Dog’s Job of Work

Jack Butler always chooses correctly to show us a world we haven’t looked at yet.  . . . to read him is to find out that there are no limits to the boundaries of the human imagination. Don’t just read him. Climb on his back and fly with him.
— Larry Brown

Meet Jack Butler here.

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Firefish: The Collected Poems

Butler, Jack

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Firefish: The Collected Poems

Butler, Jack

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