Dan Butterworth will not be traveling far to make an appearance in the first event in the 2014-15 Gonzaga University Visiting Writers Series on Wednesday.

Butterworth, writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, will just need to stroll across campus – he’s a professor in the GU English department.

When he’s not in the classroom, the Seattle native is writing. His book of creative nonfiction, “Waiting for Rain: A Farmer’s Story,” was published in 1992. His first collection of poetry, “The Radium Watch-Dial Painters,” came out in 2008 on Lost Horse Press and was a finalist for the Washington Book Award. His newest collection, “The Clouds of Lucca,” also on Lost Horse, came out in recent weeks.

Butterworth has taught oversees in Italy and Zambia, and those travels clearly informed the poems in “The Clouds of Lucca.” In poems such as “Sistine” and “A Kafue Woman Crosses the River,” he brings those experiences to life on the page.

In a five-question email interview, Butterworth talked about using poetry to process new experiences, the sense of discovery he conveys in his book and what’s next.

Q. I know you’ve taught in Africa and Italy, and it’s clear that those experiences left an impression on the poems in “The Clouds of Lucca.” Did you intend to write a poetic travelogue of sorts, or did it just happen?

A. This book wasn’t planned as a travelogue, but since poetry wants to wake people up to their experience and to what’s remarkable about the world, travel lends itself really well to this kind of writing. Travel is all about new experience and revelation of the world and culture. I find that writing accelerates my processing and understanding of new experiences, and poetry allows for the exploration of that experience without oversimplifying. Poetry encourages our respect for the sorts of complexity and paradox we often encounter in cultures foreign to us. The long poem “Off Wellfleet” examines the problem of memory as if it were an entering into a foreign situation, and so, even though it is not a travel poem, it is also about encountering a radically different kind of experience.

Q. Was there a particular emotion you were going for in this collection?

A. This collection aims to convey the wonder of discovery and what it’s like to be blown away by the variety and beauty of our world, its people and its landscapes. In examining what the world has to offer, these poems share disappointment at the human cruelties and joy at our generosity and the generosity of the real.

“We climb these paths not to haunt the lives

we would have lived but the selves we were

 

and can become again, present to the earth

and to the moment even as we’re passing through it.” (from “Vernazza”)

Q. Do you have a favorite here? Or at least one you like to read aloud?

A. “Off Wellfleet” is important to me because it tries to imagine itself into the experience of a teacher and mentor of mine who suffers from memory loss. It tries to consider the dismantling of memory through the figure of the beached whale, the landscape of Cape Cod and the precariousness of meaning in a postmodern world. It’s my most ambitious poem and I like the way it comes close to what I wanted to say.

Q. You’ve written nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Do you find those three styles cross-pollinate one another, influencing how they all turn out?

A. Definitely the genres of nonfiction, fiction and poetry influence each other in my writing. My poems often tell stories, my stories often have moments of lyrical observation, and nonfiction has elements of both fiction and poetry. I think I write more poetry because in poetry the way language makes meaning works, the way imagery and figurative language conjure up feeling for example, is always partly what a poem is about. And poetry changes the experience of the reader through all of its strange music, and I love that.

Q. What are you working on now?

A. I am working on a new poetry manuscript “Oronsay” – an oronsay is a peninsula that is an island at high tide and part of the mainland at low tide. This collection contains five longish, narrative poems about people being divided from and connected to each other.