Broken Hallelujah: New and Selected Poems

Preface

Preface I first discovered Jack Butler in Leon Stokesbury’s The Made Thing: A Contemporary Anthology of Southern Poetry, the text that forced me into the realization that I wanted to write poetry. I stole the book from the S.C. Governor’s School for the Arts in 1996, not out of malice or mischief or even absentmindedness. I took it out of simple necessity, and I felt entitled to it. In retrospect, I’m somewhat ashamed of my lack of shame, but I think of what might have been had I not succumbed to thievery, for the poems in this book became invitations into the writing life, a literary summons, a justification for literary pursuit. They were works of art that validated my experience as a thinking and loving human being, my living-in-the-world—though childish and untutored—out in rural South Carolina, where I walked nights through peach orchards and tried to come to terms with poetic notions, feelings, needs, and cravings, even though I knew my ground untenable, unremarkable. I didn’t yet have the words. Jack Butler’s “Preserves” and “One Reason for Stars,” included in this volume, were also in The Made Thing, and I read these pieces so many times that the pages literally unlatched from the book spine so that I had to fold them in half and lodge them in sideways. Thus, Jack Butler remained with me for years in the form of these few poems until finally I wrote to him one day, asking him to submit work for an anthology I was editing. This solicitation catalyzed one of the most fruitful conversations I’ve had with a writer, a dialogue that continues to this day. Butler has proven to be one of the kindest, most giving, most intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure of knowing, and I’ve never met him: It’s through his writing that this man continues to brighten my life. Jack Butler’s Broken Hallelujah: New and Selected Poems is long overdue. These poems reflect a keen intelligence, formal grace, verbal play, and a musicality lacking in most contemporary poetry. Poem after poem reflects a curious mind brimming with giftedness, an artist capable of deep humor and stark seriousness. Though these hallelujahs are fractured, they are no less beautiful, no less praise: They are the doxologies of a man dedicated to knowing the world in all its darkness and all its joy. —William Wright There's a blaze of light in every word, it doesn’t matter which you heard, the holy or the broken hallelujah. —Leonard Cohen ...