about denver {vita • pics • contact}

bio
U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins says that DENVER BUTSON’s “imagination unlocks for us the cells of reason and sets us loose in a world of dizzying possibilities.” Collins recently selected Butson’s poem “Tuesday 9:00 AM” to be included in Poetry 180, a grouping of 180 poems that will be read in U.S. high schools and published as an anthology, Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry by Random House in 2003.

Butson has published two books of poetry: triptych (The Commoner Press, 1999) and Mechanical Birds (St. Andrews College Press, 2000). His poems have also appeared in The Yale Review, Ontario Review, Quarterly West, Caliban, The Mid-American Review, tight, and Exquisite Corpse, among other journals. Late in 2000, three of his “drowning ghazals” were in Agha Shahid Ali’s anthology, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English on Wesleyan University Press. Butson has work forthcoming in numerous journals, including FIELD, Contemporary Ghazals, SOLO, Crux, la petite zine, and Ontario Review, and in The Brink: Contemporary American Poetry, 1965-present.

During the fall of 2000, Butson served as Ezra Pound Visiting Writer at Brunnenburg Castle (Pound’s daughter’s home in the Italian Alps). In 1999, he was the first Ronald H. Bayes Resident in Creative Writing at St. Andrews College and the first featured poet on FOX News Online’s “Book Page.” Also in 1999, Joyce Carol Oates nominated his poem “Beauty or Flight” for a Pushcart Prize.

A frequent collaborator with artists in other media, Butson has worked with filmmaker Rhonda Keyser on her film an unpredictable thing (Solange Productions, premiere screening at The Williamsburg Brooklyn International Film Festival in 2001), with visual artist Maria Mercedes on The Cigar Box Project, with painter/sculptor Pietro Costa on Blood Works, which premiered in New York in 2001, and with Costa and photographer Cedric Chatterley on grace: for all the children, to be published in a bilingual edition in Italy in 2003. Recently, several of his poems were adapted for the stage by Keyser and performed at The Little Theater in New York, and film director Kevin Doyle transformed Butson’s poem “The Effigy Café” into a short film, which first screened in Manhattan in the No Idea film series. The interactive CD, Denver Butson: Solo Works and Collaborations (Digitram Productions, 2000) has won awards throughout the South, including a “Merit Distinction” at the 2001 Richmond Show and the “Silver Award” in Atlanta's 2001ShowSouth.

Butson has read at St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Cornelia Street Café, the National Arts Club and KGB Bar (all in New York City), as an annually returning featured artist in St. Andrews College’s Writers’ Forum, and at other venues throughout the U.S. and Europe. In addition to Billy Collins, noted writers Jim Harrison, Edmund White, Agha Shahid Ali, W.S. Merwin, Thom Gunn, Ned Rorem, Forrest Gander, and Theodore Enslin have praised his work.

Butson earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from James Madison University and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University, where he held the Richard M. Devine Memorial Fellowship.