When Gabi and I were publishing Mississippi Arts & Letters in the 1980s we had the great good luck to have a poetry editor, Larry Johnson, who knew more about literature than anyone we had ever known, and who introduced us to the works of a slew of great poetry and fiction writers.
The greatest of them was a man from Alligator, Mississippi and who had, for a very short time, been a preacher, like his father. This is the stuff of legends, I thought.
This poet and fiction writer, name of Jack Butler, had published a book of poetry with the intriguing title of The Kid Who Wanted to be a Spaceman and a novel with the equally fascinating title, Jujitsu for Christ. I read both books and realized I was in the company of genius. His novel, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1993.
In an autobiography, Jack included: “He has worked as a preacher, a member of a road maintenance crew, a bread man, a seller of fried pies, a poet-in-residence/poet-in-the-schools, a college maintenance man, a finish carpenter, an actuarial analyst for Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Arkansas, the Supervisor for Depreciation for the Arkansas Public Service Commission, the Assistant Dean of Hendrix College, and the Director of Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe. Now he writes and paints.”
Over the years, despite being separated by thousands of miles, Jack and my wife and partner, Gabi, and I have become close friends. We have published two of his books: Practicing Zen Without a License, a parody written as if a compilation of essays by a collection of international Zen experts; and Christmas on a Distant Planet, a lovely sci-fi children’s book that Jack asked Gabi to illustrate, which she happily did. Plus, we included 14 of his poems in our anthology Mud Flat Verse.
Jack’s poems have been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times Book Review and many other periodicals.
We are excited and honored to publish Firefish: The Collected Poems, a lifetime of poetry by Jack Butler. Working with these poems and soliciting the preface by poet Johnny Wink, in which he stated, “I have never encountered a poet who has seemed to me a better poet than is Jack Butler.” —designing the book and its cover with original art by Jack—all of that has been a labor of love for us. The result is a 498 page book that discerning readers will read and re-read and pass down to their children and grandchildren.
We hope you will read more about Jack Butler’s Firefish (and order it which you can do right from the Mud Flat Press website):
https://mudflatpress.com/firefish-the-collected-poems/
Alec Clayton