Lunch With Bobby Byrd

To my joy, I received my copy of this fabulous book of poetry, and since Bobby Byrd has consented to sign it for me, I am sending it off to his Cinco Puntos Press in El Paso today. It will be my first book with an author's signature in it. Maybe it will start a trend for me, who knows? The article below is posted on Bobby's blog, or actually the Cinco Puntos blog, and it illustrates a lot about the book and the man.

Glenn Buttkus



What’s Up magazine
Lunch With Poet Bobby Byrd

I was first introduced to Bobby Byrd's poetry 25 years ago, when I collaborated with him, sax player Art Lewis and bassist Manny Flores on an improvisational performance aired on KTEP. Bobby read his poetry as we musicians reacted to the images and emotions shaped by his rich words.

He's published a new book of poetry, “White Panties, Dead Friends and Other Bits and Pieces of Love.” As he sat across the table from me answering my questions, giving life to ideas by reading lines from his poems, I felt special - like I was getting a private audience.

“The angels are fluttering overhead.
Their wings are idyllic, their voices perfect, their harps golden,
but they have no sex between their legs
and those fancy harps are innocent of mistakes
thus, no jazz is allowed.” *

Picture this being read in a lyrical drawl that rings of Beale Street in Memphis, only you're at The Pike Street Market in Downtown El Paso. Hear it for yourself Friday, when he celebrates the book's release at La Norteña Cafe. The event also highlights “How We Will Know When We're Dead,” a spoken word / music collaboration with Sparta frontman Jim Ward.

Dan - What got you started writing poetry?

Bobby - When I was a kid, I thought it was weird to write poetry. To be a poet, not the manly profession, no? So I hid my poetry for a long time until a friend, Harvey Goldner, started showing me his work. It was weird and berserk. I enjoyed that. We started hanging out at the library listening to records of Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Harvey started telling me books to read. My God, Camus' “The Stranger” changed my life.

Dan - You've said that your work is narrative, in plain language, with a spirituality to it.

Bobby - If I had to build an American family tree of my poetry, then I'd start with Walt Whitman, followed by William Carlos Williams, the New American Generation, who are my immediate predecessors - especially, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Paul Blackburn, Philip Whalen, et cetera - all of whom really emphasize the American idiom and the importance of place in defining their poetry. My idea of plainspeak comes from this and my growing up in Memphis in the '50s where plainspeak was epitomized in the music I listened to - the blues, rhythm and blues, and the beginnings of rock-and-roll. And then spirituality - you don't come out of the South easily without a sense of the religious. But for me, Christianity didn't work. Ginsberg and Snyder especially were writing about Zen Buddhism in the '50s. That made a lot of sense to me, appreciating that basic religious experience that we all have; those special times when we look at something or someone - a flower, a mountain, a homeless man, a woman - and we lose ourselves in that experience. We lose our ego. We and the other person or thing are simply one.

Dan - So music is important to your work.

Bobby - Cadence especially, how everything flows. I love music, I love my poetry to be musical. I pay attention to that a lot. When Jim Ward was working out music for my poems, he told me that my reading had a musical structure to it, that it fit nicely into measures.

Dan - Tell me more about the CD you recorded with Jim.

Bobby - I recorded the poems and he listened to them and jammed with my voice, laying over various tracks that felt right to him. The thing I like, however, is that this young guy is interested in my work. It makes sense to him, and he's come forward to do this. It's his money, his time, his energy. I'm honored.

Dan - We haven't talked about the El Paso influence; you've lived here almost 30 years.

Bobby - El Paso has been very important to me. Especially our neighborhood, the Five Points area, and Downtown and Juárez. Lee [Bobby's wife] and I felt like we had come home in some odd way when we moved here. There's a certain romance about El Paso, its funkiness in the American psyche, a place where the imagination and so-called reality can live next door to each other like good neighbors, sort of. They can speak Spanish or English, they don't care. So El Paso has entered my poems as subtext, a place where Jesus Christ and Pancho Villa can walk around and get to know one another.

*From “Ode for 60 Years on the Planet.” Copyright 2006 by Bobby Byrd. Used by permission.

- Dan Lambert,