Caelin Bragg
Advertising & Distribution Manager
Butler’s English department will remember former Professor of English Michael Cissell through a reading of his book of poetry at the L.W. Nixon Library.
Cissell published “The Cutting Songs of the Butcher Son” in July of this year, a month before his passing on Thursday, August 16, and it is a collection of poetry he wrote dating back to his graduate years. The reading is planned from 7:30 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 25.
“John Jenkinson [professor of English] is the person who is spearheading [the reading], but John has asked me to take part because I am a poet, and I’ve done poetry readings of my own before, so I have experience doing that,” Catherine Menefee, assistant professor of English, said. “So John has asked me to help. The two of us will be selecting some pieces from Michael’s book and reading those in a performative way like you do in a poetry reading.”
Whenever faculty members publish works, Butler’s English department likes to hold special readings with the author.
“We surely would have done this [regardless of Cissell’s passing],” English Department Chair Jim Buchhorn said. “I hadn’t been able to talk to Michael about it yet, but my plan was to talk to him that very day, because I would be seeing him that night. We have Faculty Development Day that day, and we do our big English department meeting, and he died that morning, so I was going to talk to him that night about the reading.”
“The Cuttings Songs of the Butcher Son” features poems of Cissell’s life told in a narrative fashion from his perspective as “The Butcher Son.”
“It’s a really great book,” Buchhorn said. “He’s a really good poet, and it’s a coherent narrative that all holds together, all the poems are connected. It’s a very nicely done book, and it’s sad to think about the work he would have produced had he lived long enough to produce some more.”
The organizers of the event hope that students and faculty take away Cissell’s passion for poetry and celebrate his accomplishments.
“I think that something that Michael really demonstrated and lived was that, if you have a passion, you should share it,” Menefee said. “I’m really passionate about poetry, I really am, but it’s always just been something I’ve done on my own and never really shared with anyone else or talked about, and I’m trying to do more of modeling the kind of sharing that joy and that passion that he did with me often.”