Text by Alec Coiro
Photos by Mirabelle Marden, Adrea Longacre-White and Konstantin Trubkovich
I visited Alex Butler in the writing room at her home. The light was streaming in through the tree by the window, and it seemed like an odd context to talk about a book of poems about grief. But of course, to think of Alex’s book as a sad book about grief is to miss the point. Yes, it deals with the death of both of her parents, but Alex describes her motivation as “to communicate that I think I’m really lucky, and that my experiences have made me a better person because I’ve developed so much in response to the loss of my parents, I want to communicate that to people because that’s what I needed to hear when I was flailing around, going through these experiences.”
Living through the passing of her parents just as she entered adulthood is the theme of both Circling The Same, the book of poetry published by OHWOW, and her upcoming memoir that will be published in Spring 2015, by Columbia University Press. Alex’s father, Robert Butler, won the Pulitzer Prize for Why Survive? Being Old in America, the foundational book in his career battling ageism and pioneering geriatric studies. Dr. Robert Butler co-wrote Love and Sex After Sixty with Alex’s mother Dr. Myrna Lewis, who was social worker. The memoir and the book of poetry are really twin projects, Alex describes them as “The same book written two different ways.”
Alex wrote the memoir first, as she was going through the experience; “Written in real time” is how she describes it. Entitled Walking the Night Road: Coming of Age in Grief, the memoir “Originally was a snapshot of the traumatic 17 months of my mom’s brain cancer and death, and the following few months of intense grief. Columbia suggested that my father should be worked more fully into the
book. Now it’s become basically a coming of age book because it trails me from 23 to now, and it includes the loss of both my parents, my father’s grief about my mother, and our family dynamic.”
The book of poetry is split into six sections that Alex says parallel “my own stages of grief as I observed them.” In addition to the events that comprise the memoir, the poems also touch on Alex’s sojourn back into a failed relationship.
Circling the Same’s publisher, OHWOW, is a publishing house and art gallery founded by Aaron Bondaroff and Al Moran, which has published a number of art books as well as books of poetry. Fittingly, Alex’s book incorporates artwork from two of her closest friends, Mirabelle Marden
and Andrea Longacre-White. This writer thinks that it is proper to encounter contemporary poetry in the same way that we encounter contemporary art. In much the same way that older poetry was lyrical and derived from and related to song, contemporary poetry — and I think Alex’s poetry
is a great example of this — shares much with contemporary art in so far as they both involve abstractions that evoke a very personal feeling that the reader or viewer then experiences in their own emotional way. Although, Alex is very clear about what her poetry is and isn’t, “It’s not conceptual poetry; I’m talking about my real life, and I’m always talking about my real life, and I’m always afraid of slipping into navel gazing. My motivation with both my poetry and memoir is to connect with people.”
