Monday, October 29, 2012

White Hat Down



art by frank mccarthy


White Hat Down



“As a kid, whenever a guy got killed
in a Western movie, I always wondered
what happened to his horse.”
--George Carlin



Quite the journey, that juxtaposition
of the buttoned up Miss Kitty being visited
slyly and regularly by Matt Dillon,
to the more realistic cum-stained raunchy
cleavage-revealing saloon whores
of Deadwood and Hell on Wheels;

from the pig-tailed two-gunned Gail Davis
wearing her drugstore white leather frilled finery
to the mercurial Robin Weigert vomiting rot gut
onto the chest of her sweat encrusted leather blouse;

from the days of Duncan Renaldo giving
The Cisco Kid perfectly pressed black vaquero
Hollywood Latin accent and charm,
to Eli Wallach’s gold-toothed cringing ugliness
in that Sergio Leone spaghetti epic;

from Hugh O’Brien’s tight-lipped prancing dude
marshall, always fingering his Buntline barrel,
to Kurt Russell’s blue-eyed mustached killer titan
riding down and blowing away his adversaries
while just seeming to step out of several
Remington canvases--much like laconic Lee
Marvin did in that battered hat as Monte Walsh;

from the skinny kid Cheyenne with the painted chest
that Anthony Quinn played in The Plainsman, 
standing rigid in front of a De Mille diorama, 
to the huge Will Sampson as Ten Bears saying,
“then it will be life” to Clint in Outlaw Josey Wales,
or the believability of Graham Greene’s Kicking Bird
as patriarch to Costner in Dancing with Wolves;

From Roy Rogers as William Bonny in Billy the Kid Returns,
sidekicking with Smiley Burnette to those flawed sociopaths
played later by Paul Newman, Kristofferson, Kilmer, 
& Michael J. Pollard, mixing in 
the politics of the roughshod cattle barons
and the ragtag squatters and small ranchers;

from the Depression dignity in handsome Tyrone Power’s
Jesse James, passing by Robert Duvall’s raging
raving Jesse in The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid
to the naked preening arrogance of
Brad Pitt’s complex unsympathetic version;

from the sweet natured Paul Newman’s 
Robert Leroy Parker riding a bicycle
to the silly strains of raindrops dropping
awkwardly from the Bacharach score,
to the taciturn aging Butch Cassidy
that the brilliant Sam Shepard played
in Bolivia in Blackthorn;

From John Wayne lip-synching Singing Sandy,
to his bloated brilliant departure Rooster Cogburn, 
to the wiry bearded lethal hooligan 
bounty hunter that Jeff Bridges
played for the Coen Brothers.

Personally,
I preferred Keith Carradine’s Will Bill Hickok
to the silliness of Guy Madison’s,
Ellen Barkin’s lusty Calamity Jane
to Doris Day’s scrubbed songbird,
and I do enjoy the full nudity
and the proliferation of the F-word
in modern Westerns. I am pleased to acknowledge
the powerful presence of black cowboys & Indians,

but, 
we definitely have lost the joy
of those long Saturday matinees
at the Orpheum cheering Tex Ritter,
Audie Murphy and Randolph Scott,
resigning one’s self to their remastered
flicker on Encore’s TWC, lost the cleanliness
of American pioneer white hat charm,
seeing it vanish into parody, nostalgia,
and frantic internet image searches;

some mornings I just want Jay Silverheels
to awaken me to the oder of kemo sabe coffee,
or have Dale bang the Double R Bar triangle
for some happy trail pancakes and eggs
as old Roy strums an expensive guitar
while harmonizing with the Sons of the Pioneers
who always seem to be out in the front yard,
take a ride in Nelly Belle,
throw a real bone for Bullet,
being genuinely sad that I never
had a son to give my Davy Crockett
coonskin cap to.


Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets OLN

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Saturday, October 27, 2012

Me Time



image taken by adrian sparks


Me Time

“Retirement: It’s nice to get out of the rat race,
but you have to learn to get along with less
cheese.”--Gene Perret

I am closing in
on becoming a septuagenerian poet
like a barn cat stalking a field mouse,
mostly healed up now
from that horrendous leg wound
I received after falling through
a rotten place on my former deck,
forever the road tripper
haunting blue highways,

while snapping precious photos
of waterfalls, old cars, silos, mountains,
cemeteries, flags, storm drains, and flowers;
creating digital albums of nearly countless images,
when not browsing my gargantuan cinema library
that is stacked floor to ceiling throughout
my spacious daylight basement, holding together
fifty of my friends as a film club,

while expanding my social awareness ten fold,
becoming 
prince of Facebook,
a titan of Twitter, 
still unpublished
but writing more than ever before,
seeking out poets in pubs,
writers in wreaths,
authors in America
and Japan, Germany, France, England,
Canada & Australia
for starters;

remaining forever the dreamer,
a wrinkled obese version of that kid
who wanted to own a small island in Puget Sound,
and create an artist’s community,
a writer’s refuge, 
a poet’s paradise--
still dreaming
even though “reality”  will always fall as short
as an accidental bunt substituting for the slam,

but remembering one dream that did become
reality; the mantle of professional actor,
carving out less than a career from a lost decade, 
always bristling at the raw necessity
of needing to create a separate vocation
in order to pay the bills, angry at being both
classically trained and underemployed,

before staggering hungry into an agency
in Hollywood that was a huge school
for the blind, and blithely bullshitting
my way into a company car, 
an expense account, and
an itinerant position that kept me
out on the righteous road most of the time,

as my plan for a one year hiatus
from the onerous negative energies
that are analogous to an artist’s career,
morphed into the subtle rewards of life 
as an educator, stretching into 35 years 
of service to others, embarking

on a magical mixture of new meaning,
where my theatricality contributed
to becoming a better teacher, lucky
to work with those without sight,
dousing myself in sumptuous decades
while being energized daily
by the palpable and measurable impact
I had on the life of others--

before pouncing on retirement
like a voracious catamount,
tearing open the seals
on my several caches of creativity,
reaping the carefully planned rewards
of finite but limitless Me-Time,

discovering my halcyon days to be
a cuddly cornucopia of thirty flavors
of naked joy,
all poetry, cinema, captured imagery,
and a burgeoning nest of grandchildren.

Glenn Buttkus

October 2012


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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Day Must Follow Night



image borrowed from bing


Day Must Follow Night

Will America ever awaken from Republican Night?
Could we bask in the warmth of Democratic Day?
As a voter, I hope to God my choice is right!

The Bush Crusades thrust us into the fight,
crushing our joy into twelve shades of gray.
Will America ever awaken from Republican Night?

The 1% always seem to take the biggest bite,
laughing at our insistence that they too pay.
As a voter, I hope to God my choice is right!

We’re consumed by corporate greed and might.
Our monstrous National Debt will just not go away.
Will America ever awaken from Republican Night?

Robo-calls interrupt us without an invite;
Sneering and scowling, we’ve forgotten to be gay.
As a voter, I hope to God my choice is right!

Tell the damn GOP to go fly a kite!
We must preserve democracy I say!
Will America ever awaken from Republican Night?
As a voter, I hope to God my choice is right!


Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poets FFA

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Monday, October 22, 2012

Bloodstock



image borrowed from bing


Bloodstock

Poets run
like treacle arteries through
brown sugar coffee cakes,
like those exotic spice flavors
we search for when we travel.

Poets are
the architects of interchange,
the thoroughbreds of theory, of recall,
at once emollient and scorched crust,
inventors of petulant proud phrases,
purveyors of linguistic ingredients,

found to be both pariah and muckraker
one moment, then prophet and sensei
the next--the odd person in the kissing booth
and the helmeted sentinel atop the great gate
of our collective emotional burhs,

serving up both sweetmeats as well as crow
at the busy corner of Silver Street & Doncaster,
mostly amateurs who do not seek recompense
for their world views, joyful for limited readerships,

grinding out iambic grist on their perpetual mind-mills,
strident & melodious voices rising above the din,
perceptive guides through the delicacies and mazes
of history, and alacritists for the dark throbs of a future
still hidden just below the lip of the horizon that is
moving toward us like a runaway freight train;

jocular, wise, smarmy, erotic, barbed, impatient,
prickly, affectionate, maniacal, and sentimental,

damned rights,
the poets are permanent equipment,
built to last, here to stay,
get used to it.


Glenn Buttkus

October 2012


Posted over on flipside records
Posted over on dVerse Poets OLN

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

As I Like It



image borrowed from bing


As I Like It

“A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man
knows himself to be a fool.”--William Shakespeare

I am, perhaps
have forever been
since I was attracted to Bardolatry as George B.
Shaw dubbed 
that free-floating need some of us
developed in the 50’s, trying so very hard
to escape the greasy duck tails, aviator sunglasses,
leather jackets, rolled
jeans cuffs, and those jaunty motorcycle
hats like Elvis and Brando
wore playing at being Wild Ones by desperately
trying to acquire hardcore Stratfordian
“cultural status”, putting out there in that Eisenhower
world the illusion, possibly even misnomer 
that we had full understanding of
iambic pentameter, legends
of antiquity and Shakespeare’s
38 plays, even the bizarre and minor
ones like Troilus & Cressida, 154
sonnets, 2 long narrative and several short
poems all credited to an illiterate drunken second-rate
actor, a patsy, a front-man for some more 
cultured nobleman who actually had a classical
education, whereas young Will could barely
sign his own name, spelling it four
different ways in odd scrawl, when it appeared
at all, was not opposed to crediting several
of the early plays to Anonymous, as was
the custom of the times not wanting to run
afoul of the political mandates against
the “stigma of print”, or certainly I have become
a convert to Oxfordism even though it thrusts
me into the elitist ranks of Gielgud,
Welles, Jacobi, Chaplin, Freud, Whitman, & Twain
as someone willingly accepting the doctrine
of “argumentum exsilentis” because there does not
seem to be a shred of evidence in any extant
document written in Will’s handwriting of his traveling
outside the limits of London or studying
the Classics, that Shakespeare might actually
have been as Ben Johnson described,
that “literary thief Poet Ape” and god damn it,
it should be obvious to any person with one iota
of common sense, as Tom Paine pandered to,
that Shakespeare’s first statue atop his funeral
monument in 1656, dying as he did in 1616, was
a man holding a sack of grain for he was in fact
a farmer & merchant whom we are to believe
somehow found time between harvests and auctions
to write his masterpieces, and it was not until later
that the statue was recast and the man was
holding a quill and paper, so I believe, am comfortable
with the fact that Oxfordian theories, like Darwinism,
are rife with logic and a healthy smattering of dredged
up facts and are certainly not, have never been,
arguments constructed from silence or omission,
that clearly for some, and certainly for me, the true
author of the Shakespearean canon was not
Francis Bacon or Christopher Marlowe, but rather
the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere, portrayed
recently brilliantly by Rhys Ifans in ANONYMOUS, 
who in actual documented history did bed Young Bess
and did continue to write plays and poetry despite
the consternation it caused the courtiers, and how delicious
it is to rationally consider that Edward might have been
one of the earliest of Elizabeth’s bastard sons himself,
twisting all that passion into poetic irony and Oeudipul 
synchronicity, since she gave up all those boys immediately
after their birth and did not want to know their true
identities and yes, I unequivocally agree as poet
myself as Edward was so very fond of saying,

“All art is political--otherwise
it is just decoration.”

Glenn But--t--kus

October 2012

Posted over on dVerse Poet MTB

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Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Performing Poetry



       Performing Poetry 


On Sunday morning I read poetry at the Union with Wystan Auden. He read a great deal of his own poetry including his poems to Coghill and MacNeice. Both very fine conversation pieces I thought but read in that peculiar sing-song tonelessness colourless way that most poets have. I remember Yeats and Eliot and MacLeish, who read their most evocative poems with such monotony as to stun the brain. Only Dylan could read his own stuff.

Auden has a remarkable face and an equally remarkable intelligence but I fancy, though his poetry like all true poetry is all embracingly and astringently universal, his private conceit is monumental. The standing ovation I got with the ‘Boast of Dai’ of D. Jones In Parenthesis left a look on his seamed face, riven with a ghastly smile, that was compact of surprise, malice and envy. Afterwards he said to me ‘How can you, where did you, how did you learn to speak with a Cockney accent?’ In the whole piece of some 300 lines only about 5 are in Cockney. He is not a nice man but then only one poet have I ever met was—Archie Macleish. Dylan was uncomfortable unless he was semi-drunk and ‘on.’ MacNeice was no longer a poet when I got to know him and was permanently drunk. Eliot was clerically cut with a vengeance.

The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets and a bad poet is not a poet at all—ergo I’ve never met a nice poet. That may include Macleish. For instance R. S. Thomas is a true minor poet but I’d rather share my journey to the other life with somebody more congenial. I think the last tight smile that he allowed to grimace his features was at the age of six when he realized with delight that death was inevitable. He has consigned his wife to hell for a long time. She will recognize it when she goes there.
From The Richard Burton Diariesedited by Chris Williams, Yale University Press, 2012. Copyright © 2012 Swansea University.

Monday, October 15, 2012

Harbor Lights



engraving by unknown artist


Harbor Lights

“There is nothing either good or bad,
that thinking makes it so.”
--Hamlet, Act II, scene ii

During the autumn of 1863
when Edwin Booth played Hamlet
at the Charleston Dock Street Theatre,
during his preview tour of the play,

he stood midday on the shores
of the Battery, near where residents
once sat comfortably on their balconies
in the early spring of 1861, applauding
and drinking, saluting the Confederate’s
34 hour bombardment of Fort Sumter,
their bourgeois cheers flattened by 
bellicose cannon that assaulted their ears;

the actor staring at the majesty of buried pride,
Sumter, the masonry sea fortification
standing quiet guard out in the harbor,
its fifty foot stone walls and three tiers
of gun emplacements strongly reminiscent 
of Kronsborg castle near Elsinore, tying 
history, legend and Shakespeare
to the dreary dead hours that lay
like spectral warlike forms, oppressive,
malevolent, blanching the former beauty
of that Southern gem on the coast of Carolina,

hearing the husky voices of a hundred slaves,
their raucous singing pounding out the beats,
one after another, their promised freedom
being raised to the skies as they labored
to rebuild the fort,

thinking “tis strange” how that sea castle
seemed to resonate luck and rebellion
in equal measure, marveling at how earlier
that year Lincoln had sent Admiral Du Pont
with an impressive Union armada
of ironclads, frigates, and monitors,
that sailed in strongly and fired 154 rapid rounds
at the battlements, 
answered by an angry parle
of Confederate powder, a serious smote
of over 2,000 rounds illuming that part
of rebel heaven, quickly forcing the Union Navy
to entreat the Southern forces to allow them
to paddle wounded and burning back out to sea.

Without being a Civil War scholar, Booth
was keenly aware of the September 1863
Union Naval assault on Fort Sumter,
that unfolded itself into a complete fiasco,
where 400 sailors in 35 boats were
easily repulsed by fewer Southern liegemen,
high above them, killing sailors at will,
while not suffering any casualties themselves,

making him stand in awe of this military fort
named after a Revolutionary War general,
now in the shadow of the Citadel, shining,
rebellious, a clenched fist thrust effectively
into the underbelly of every Union force 
sent against it.

His large British pocket watch struck twelve,
breaking the military magic of the moment,
and as he strode tall toward Dock Street
and an afternoon repast, Hamlet’s speeches
were beginning to resurface, readying him 
for the play’s matinee that day.

Years later, in 1865, while Booth played Hamlet
to great success at the Winter Garden Theatre
in New York City, he found out that Fort Sumter
had never surrendered, that only after
General Sherman had conquered Charleston
did the defenders depart their Jutland keep. 


Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over on Shawna's flipside records
Posted as well over on dVerse Poets, OLN

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Sunday, October 14, 2012

Slumber Interruptus



painting by curtis wilson cost


Slumber Interruptus 

“All is well, tho’ faith and form
be sunder’d in the night of fear.”
--Alfred, Lord Tennyson


What the hell was it
that woke you at 2 a.m.,
a growl, a howl, a cough,
a distant scream
like a lost infant 
in the velvet folds of the forest,
something alien prowling beneath
the bedroom window?

Only one sure cure,
flip on the lamp light,
slippers shuffling, flooding
the kitchen with brightness,
shattering the hypnogogia,
a tentative peek out the window
over the sink, that damned dripping
faucet joining the melee, followed
by the welcome electric whirring
of the regenerative refrigerator motor,

then rather than facing the maybe-phantoms
who might appear red-eyed at some pane,
you just pop open the fridge door
and reach for that last fat piece of cheesecake,
accompanied by a cold glass of whole milk
and a handful of red seedless grapes
and three chilled chocolate kisses.

At the sink rinsing the dishes,
your busy tongue digging out
the last morsel of grape peeling
from craggy molars, enjoying
a lustrous cheesecake burp,
your lids suddenly grow heavy,

and you habitually stagger back
to the bedroom, bravely flipping
off lights as you crawl into the safety
of grandmother’s quilt, soon eradicating
both the chill off your bare feet
and the noises of the night,

finding yourself on that familiar beach,
holding one of those silly umbrella drinks,
wearing oversize sunglasses, hearing
only the sweet surf
and children’s laughter.


Glenn Buttkus

October 2012

Posted over at Magpie Tales 139

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