I Have Been a Writer

I have been a writer for over fifty
years, and I remember one of my
better English professor's early on
in college complaining that he was
having difficulty grading my work,
for it was obvious to him that my
free-wheeling style in progress was
developing from my reading of others,
from film, from life, but he was sad
that it progressed thus without the
benefit of my studying or regurgitating
rules of grammar or parameters of
poetry. Rhyme schemes for me have
always felt like attempting to sprint
while stuck in an iron lung. It bored me;
still does. My ignorance and arrogance
astonishes me, but has never held
back my pen as I continue to emerge
as an American primitive, self-taught,
a loose poetic cannon, shifting styles
like changing socks.

Still I must say that my prose has been
very influenced by those magnificent
and complex William Faulkner and
Cormac McCarthy sentences that run
more than a full page, piling clause
upon clause like a great stack of
bleached driftwood, every shape
and several types, floated in from
diverse corners of the globe, and
aping the pure complexity of life,
illustrating that tidy theories like
original Darwinism and the infamous
Boar Atom are now seen as shaggy,
primitive, and barely touch the truth
of us. I believe we are in lesson
throughout each lifetime. I feel that
I lived several lifetimes in Scotland.

When I finished the first draft of
my existential Western, BLACKTHORN,
in 1965, and I showed to several
English professors at the U of W,
they were amazed but confused.
"It is like Vonnegut wrote a Western.
You have broken every convention of
the genre with explicit sex, free verse,
metaphysical aspects, spiritualism,
and excessive violence. The Western
Writers of America cringe in their
Larado boots." I considered this high
praise at the time.

Glenn Buttkus

April 2011