Raegan Butcher's Blog - Posts Tagged "influences"

I have a hard time separating my interest in writing from my interest in movies. I was always into sci fi and fantasy films, ever since I was very young, about 5yrs old. Ray Harryhausen films, those Amicus Edgar Rice Burroughs flicks with Doug McClure, and Godzilla movies were favorites of mine when I was growing up. I always found my life to be very dull. I much preferred these fantasy worlds to my rather drab existence.

I started reading Dr Who novelizations when I was around nine or ten yrs old in the late 70s and I also began reading Stephen King at that age. I read The Terminal Man by Michael Crichton in the 5th grade. Later, I was lucky enough to have a teacher in jr high for creative writing, Patty Wade, who showed me three things that really had a formative influence upon me as far as sending me gravitating toward writing: The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe, “A Coney island of the Mind” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and “Born of Man and Woman” by Richard Matheson. The two short stories and the book of poems sparked my imagination in the right way, and I was off and running. I started writing weird short stories at about this time, early ‘81, ‘82.

Punk rock found me at thirteen and within weeks I was writing Ramones-style songs such as “Outta My Head", "Abusive Usage" and things like that.
I wrote a ton of songs very quickly in a couple of years, most of which have never seen the light of day, but it wasn’t until I was seventeen and Patty Schemel introduced me to the works of Leonard Cohen that the poetry bug really bit me.

I still recall very clearly that moment when Patty was perusing the shelves at this funky old bookstore in Everett, WA called Don Quixote, which, of course, is no longer there, and her eyes lit up and she grabbed this little black book. It was like she'd found a huge nugget of gold, and of course, she had found something more precious than gold (well, at least to me, but I am a poet, and therefore not quite right in the head, to quote Edna St. Vincent Millay) and it was The Spice Box Of Earth. And then she noticed another Cohen book, Parasites of Heaven, and she grabbed that too. She was stoked and so I was curious. She told me a great story of Cohen staying at the Chelsea Hotel and tossing his typer out the window and then having to go and get it and take it back to his room. I was intrigued. Then she loaned me the books and the rest is history. After that there was only Cohen and Charles Baudelaire's Flowers Of Evil as far as poetry that interested me. And with Flowers Of Evil, if you do not happen to speak French, which I don't, sadly, it really does depend upon the translator.

But I found an old, old copy of Flowers of Evil which had been translated by Edna St. Vincent Millay which I found quite good. Perhaps it is because it's my first exposure to that book, but I still prefer her translation more than any other I have read.

My earliest collection of poems, End of the World Graffiti, which includes many of my songs as well, (available on kindle for 99¢!) is full of poems where I am trying to write like Leonard Cohen and Charles Baudelaire. (I was very pleased when an artist from Belgium, Vagabundos, described my poetry as "Caught somewhere between Punk and Romanticism", which I thought was pretty good description of my influences.)

Then of course, right after I graduated from high school, I discovered Bukowski, and he was like the punk rocker of literature, with his no-frills, no bullshit style. He inspired me to stop writing like Cohen, without the filigree, so to speak, and just write simply and plainly.