Denver Butson

I do know that what I am particularly drawn to in anybody’s poems is a sense that the poem has its own life — its own music and image and story, if that’s what makes the poem’s engine run — and the chance that anything could happen in the poem that needs to happen. I also like to feel at the end that what has happened in the poem (the music, the images, the story) had to happen the way it did, that it was inevitable, to borrow and perhaps pervert Aristotle.
-Denver Butson

I like to think about what my teacher and friend Michael Mott (another teacher who had a tremendous impact on me) told me after I had my first poem accepted by a major literary journal, Quarterly West, when I was in graduate school. He asked me how it felt to see my poem in the magazine, and I told him it was kind of oddly disappointing, like I expected it to be more exciting. And he said that the real time to celebrate writing is after you write a good poem, not after someone publishes it, that when that stops, you’re writing for the wrong reasons.
-Denver Butson

That said, I do feel most successful as a writer when I have a good writing morning - though it’s usually not until much later, weeks and months, that I know if anything I wrote that morning was any good. And, I feel that my career as a poet is going the best when I have several good mornings in a row. I guess it’s then when I’ve made it, when I go into my studio and emerge a few hours later, having made a few things in the meantime.
-Denver Butson

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