Butterfly Bones

Larry Butler’s poetry is about the rare joys of life – munching stolen chanterelles over an open fire in the rain, working at a desk and hearing your lover finally return home from a journey – joys brought to their absolute peak by a backdrop of death from old age and cancer, the beating of a child and an old man weeping at a funeral. Butler sentimentalises neither the good times nor the bad. His poetry spans many forms and techniques acquired through a life of writing, all of them handled with assurance and energy.

Praise for Butterfly Bones:

‘Here we find echoes of Frank O’Hara, as well as unabashed candour in poems about childhood traumas. Butler, perhaps through the poems themselves, transcends blame and moves on to celebrate the richness of ordinariness in the place-names, people-names and landscapes of his beloved Scotland.’ Linda Chase Broda

‘Butler is a unique voice in Scottish literature, demonstrating clearly a readiness to experiment with form as well as content, demonstrating an open eye, heart and mind which comprise the attributes of real and moving poetry.’
Gerry Loose

About Larry Butler

Black Sheep in the Family

Me or Uncle CC? Everyone called him CC; his real name was Clarence Cecil Short. I’m blacker because I left America and never came back. CC is less black. After touring the world in the Merchant Navy, he came back. Inherited Grandma Short’s house – did it up and sold it, then bought two more houses. Eventually he bought the whole town of South Pekin, Illinois. He was a real estate man, a slum landlord during the Depression. He owned two whore-houses and a herd of rent boys. During his time in the Merchant Navy he collected tattoos all over his body – even his penis – but you could only see the design when it was erect. I won’t go into detail. He was buried fifteen years ago with a Swiss bank account number tattooed somewhere on his body – so the rumour goes. My mother employed a detective to try to access the account and get the money. He was probably worth millions.

I started turning black when I failed everything at school. But maybe I’m blacker than CC because I fought for the voting rights of Afro-Americans, civil liberties for Chicanos, better pay for Mexican migrant workers in California, and crosses were burned on my lawn in Bakersfield after I infiltrated the John Birch Society (the western equivalent of the Klu Klux Klan); and because I was convicted of treason and given a five-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine for helping people desert from the army and finding them safe homes in Europe. I was living in Paris at the time – 1967 – at the height of the Vietnam war. The peace group was based at Shakespeare & Son on the Left Bank, where we printed anti-war flyers and posters. And because I never went to prison and never paid up. Instead, an English woman agreed to marry me which prevented the US government from extraditing me. Because I burned my passport. Because I burned the American flag.

Over a twelve-year period I became really black – or maybe red – in the eyes of the FBI, who visited my parents every six months. And because I’ve never had a proper job. Because I’ve been divorced twice. And blacker now because I’m living with a German woman with a Sanskrit name (or is it Pali?) and have a British passport.

But when we visited Uncle CC in South Pekin in 1949, he took me and my sister (she’s the white sheep, a certified public accountant) to a big department store like Macy’s, and he said “Ya can have anything ya want.” He was my hero then, and my horse when I was geared up in my Roy Rogers cowboy suit, hat and spurs – the very suit I wore when I started thieving at Dick’s Supermarket on the corner of 4th and Orchard in San Jose. I never got caught, but I slowly turned black from inside out.

An interview with Larry Butler

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I didn’t learn to read, not properly, until I was 19. Before that I skimmed thru comic books following pictures. One Summer vacation I was failing most subjects in high school, I sold encyclopaedias door to door, was even top salesman for a few weeks – but I hadn’t a clue what was inside them. I probably learned to write before I could read. My first real writings were slogans on placards & banners for protest marches, and then editing a journal for the Kern County Council for Civil Liberties when secretary of my then local branch of Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) – interviewing migrant workers & afro-americans about racial prejudice. What really inspired me was Martin Luther King: “I’ve got a dream”, and Dylan of course: Hard Rain. Baez too, marching thru San Francisco in ’64 shouting LBJ UpSideDown. In Bakersfield, I lived with my political science professor, Sam McCall, who introduced me to Marx. We shared a house with pinko DJ George Davis, a six foot seven inch honey-tongued giant who fancied me and read poetry to me as if it really mattered: Vachel Lindsay, ee cummings, WC Williams, Pound, Sandburg... My grandfather taught English to Carl Sandburg who babysat my mother and she claims to be the great grand-daughter of Walter Scott:

Do I belong to Glasgow?

I left Scotland 200 years ago
thereabout ? I was cleared out ?
then came back in 1981. My sons
grew-up smelling the Kelvin.
My great-great grandad was
Walter Scott, my great great gran
was his servant, so my mother says
but I don’t believe her. Now I eat
chips & crisps, not fries & chips,
I say tomato not tomaeta ?
my body not my baody belongs
here by the Clyde till I die.

Back in Bakersfield 1963, there were all-night jams in our front room with visiting bands, crosses burned on our lawn by the John Birch Society (western equivalent of the KluKluxklan) – I wrote to survive. One day while observing the process of mitosis in a microscope, I suddenly understood – or thought I understood – how the world works. I could see the macrocosm in the microcosm. That’s when I wrote my first poem – about artichokes. And that’s when my parents decided I was mad. They signed the papers for the police to escort me to Agnew State Mental Hospital where I stayed for three months writing furiously in a locked ward. My first 10 days were in a small dark cell with only a sliver of sky seen thru bars – I had no clothes, food shoved under the door, escorted to the toilet. Eventually I got out by pretending to be “normal”. Apart from short stays in prison for political activities and mistaken identity, I’ve managed to avoid incarceration ever since. Writing gives me the freedom to be wholly who I am.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

When first selected, there were over 350 poems to choose from, so I divided them into three broad categories: Relationships, Landscapes, & Urban Dialogues. Each poem I write is a world unto herself. The Butterfly Bones collection was inspired by relationships with people, animals, places, processes, including short narratives, accidents and dreams about what it means to me to be human – in love, in hate, in hope, in fear. To live to die to live again in a scattering of a few words, as few as possible. I’m not sure what I was trying to achieve, perhaps a celebration of life as it is.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

Each poem has a different voice, different tone, different pitch – sometimes slow sometimes quick – with pauses for silence. Space between words & stanzas are like gaps in conversations. I write out loud playing with the sounds and rhythms until they feel right. I draft & redraft, share with a friend and other writers I trust, then redraft again. I think all the poems in this collection have been read by several writers along the way. There are many ways of writing. For me a poem often begins as a bodily experience such as an accident:

How poetry comes to me

by accident

tripping over a dead branch
soft landing on a pile of leaves

falling from a stone dyke wall
ankles caught in barbed wire

banging your nose on a rock
splashing thru a bog on the moor

knocked off your bike
by a hit & run taxi
shattering two back molars

pretending to be an anteater
sliding forehead along a wood floor
a splinter enters between brows

leaving the mark of Hindu
opening his third eye

poetry grips the pain
reeling in lost words

for healing

After the experience, the first writing is usually in pencil in a notebook – very rough & messy with too many words, too many ideas spilling all over the page, squabbling with each other.

How and when do you write?

On rare occasions a poem arrives almost complete – from a dream, a conversation, an observation. I usually have a notebook with me: always ready – the same as tai-chi, you never know when an attack will come. Most Wednesdays I go to a friend’s hut by the West Highland Way. No electricity. No phone. No computer. Collecting wood for the stove & fetching water for coffee prepares me for writing. I take a completed notebook with me extracting & re-drafting what I consider the good bits, burning the rest. After a couple of hours, I go for a walk around the loch collecting whatever wild food is in season – leaves, mushrooms, berries, nuts – stopping to write whenever I feel like it, sometimes sitting under an oak waiting, noting what is happening moment by moment – the weather, smelling the air, insects, plants... Some mornings at home in Glasgow, I walk over the river to the arboretum for a few wake-up exercises under the big ash tree by the allotments. Sometimes a poem comes to me:

The Offer

stepping aside
for a mass of children
in white shirts and blue shorts
running downhill to the bridge over the river ?

a girl stumbles
falls at my feet
and a boy collides over her
but manages to keep going ?

I hesitate to help,
she holds her breath ?
frightened I’ll be misunderstood,
I hold my breath as her eyes fill with tears

she scraped her knee,
there’s a little blood
I ask “are you alright” and offer her my hand,
she nods but two girls stop between us

panting “Lydia Lydia
are you all right are you all right”
they help her up then run on as she hobbles
to her teacher ? I feel invisible ?

the grass seems greener
and birdsong more insistent,
the river whispers caution in my ears
as I walk uphill like a fox avoiding human contact.

The first two drafts come along easily – it’s the third, fourth, fifth, sixth draft that gets progressively more difficult – the crafting, the teasing of language, releasing unnecessary words, making space on the page for the reader: that’s when I seek feedback from other writers.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

As a member of the Scottish Poetry Library I take out 6 books at a time, often choosing randomly authors I’ve never read. I look first at the display of new acquisitions and usually take home a couple of these. I also enjoy reading writers I know personally and have heard them read their own work, and writing reviews of their latest book: Tom Leonard – Being a Human Being; Gerrie Fellows – Window for a Small Blue Child; Gerry Loose – Printed on Water; Alexander Hutchison – Scale’s Dog; Sheena Blackhall – The Gods of Grayfriars Lane; Sally Evans – Bewick walks to Scotland; Mandy Haggith – Castings; Linda Chase – Extended Family; Thomas A Clark – The Path to the Sea... and many more. I am also passionate about how we can create a sustainable future & turn the tide on our path to global suicide. Recent books that have inspired me include: David Abrams’ Spell of the Sensuous; Graham Burnett, Permaculture – a Beginner’s Guide; Rob Hopkins, the Transition Handbook; Diana Leafe Christian, Creating a Life Together. The book I’m reading at the moment is Steal my Art by Stuart Alve Olson, about the life and time of the Tai Chi Master T.T. Liang. And I’ve just dipped into Broken Voices – ‘Untouchable’ Women Speak Out by Valerie Mason-John.

An extract from Butterfly Bones

When You’ve Been Away

When you’ve been away
for a weekend, a week or longer
and I hear the keys in the lock
and I know that you are home
I pretend not to notice
or it could be me coming home
and you pretend not to notice
but this time it’s you. I sit
quietly in the front room
facing the bay window overlooking
the Kelvin – the setting sun glows
across the carpet. I quietly read
aloud a poem by Ian or Tom
or Mary or Elizabeth or Bill.
I hear your rucksack clunk to the floor,
the hall cupboard door opens and closes.
Not long now I’m thinking
and there’s a tingling in my spine.
I feel you looking at me, your eyes
on the back of my neck. I don’t move
and I continue reading silently. You step
into the room, sit at the piano and begin
to play Mozart. I stop reading. Stand.
Turn and look at the back of your neck
admire your perfect posture. I part the air
with my arms and roll along the carpet
until I am looking up into your face. You
concentrate on the music until the end. I roll away
and you follow me, I follow you, you follow me
mirroring and mocking with shocks of recognition
we re-fashion our segregated lives.