Volcanic Tongue write-up for TELESMA CHARGING (KSE #63)

Volcanic Tongue has now listed KSE #63, TELESMA CHARGING (Sound Library Series, Volume 24), on its 9/30/07 new release list. Here’s the brief write-up:

“New work from Crutchfield and Shute with a single extended wave form of words/images/times/places all inspired by the benign rays of Axolotl’s amazing Telesma recording, a past VT Tip Of The Tongue. Hand-numbered edition of 37 copies and already sold-out at source.”

Volcanic Tongue has the last remaining copies of the first printing. However, we’ll have a cheaper second printing (four bucks, not five pounds!), with a slightly different cover, available soon. Let us know if you’re interested, and we’ll save you a copy from the second run.

We’re over 1000 visitors to this blog now. Thanks!

new chapbook OBJECTLESS (KSE #71) now available

Often I challenge myself, when studying an artwork in another medium (painting, sculpture, film, music, etc.), to understand its technique, the logic of its construction, and to find a way to adapt that logic to poetry. My modern retelling of the classical twelve labours of Hercules, TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY, was inspired by my understanding of Jean-Luc Godard’s amazing cinematic adaptation of KING LEAR. Among my recent poetry, LARKSPUR VARIATIONS was inspired by the technique of painter Francis Bacon, and NORWICH UNVEILED was inspired by the technique of painter Edward Hopper. The volumes in our “Creel Pone Sound Study Series” are influenced by the technique and structure of the electronic music compositions (released on the Creel Pone label) on which the particular volumes are based. As a longtime admirer of the ideas and work of Russian-Ukranian painter Kazimir Malevich, I thought about the challenge of creating a literary work that somehow reflected his aesthetic, rooted in color and form and texture, but not in representation, even abstract representation, of things. Of course, Gertrude Stein, Clark Coolidge, early Aram Saroyan, and others have investigated this in great depth in their own literary works, so I don’t claim that this is any original attempt–it’s only original for me, in the sense that I am using it as an aesthetic principle in my work, and my use of any aesthetic principle will create a different result from your use of it or anyone else’s use of it. That’s what makes life interesting!

I created a five-page work, each page with an evocative image (some are close-ups extracted from sections of the Berlin Wall, one is a close-up of a section of a late-night Berlin street during the cold war era, etc.), but not a picture of a discrete “thing.” I then tried to create on each page certain textures and moods, but limited myself by not using any nouns or pronouns (so you’ll know I’m using -ing words as participles, not as gerunds). And of course the way the image and the words are positioned on the page is also meant to function visually. Yet I feel that this work is still full of emotion and on some level it still has a “plot”, rising action, climax and resolution, etc. You be the judge.  Taking a word from Malevich, I call it OBJECTLESS. I hope readers find it interesting and worthwhile.

This will be a small-run edition (twenty-something copies), mostly distributed through Volcanic Tongue. I’ll have a few copies for sale here for the next week or two. I’d guess my copies will be sold out by October 10.

Our three regular releases for October, mentioned in the previous blog entry, are still planned for October 20. I’ll have some entries about those chapbooks over the next week or two, so please check back once or twice a week. As always, thank you for reading Kendra Steiner Editions chapbooks and this blog.

new chapbooks for October 2007

We will be issuing three poetry chapbooks in October, probably around the 20th.

They are

KSE #68  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, Lullabies for Jackson;

KSE #69  CHRISTOPHER CUNNINGHAM, Next Exit: Five;

KSE #70  BILL SHUTE, Bridge To Nowhere (Sound Library Series, Volume 25).

new e-mail address

Our lycos e-mail address—-the “steinergurl” address managed by Kendra—-is no longer reliable, so from here on out please use my yahoo address, which is django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com. It’s not good that we have over 1000 chapbooks circulating with the lycos address on them, or that the reviews we’ve received have mostly had the lycos address as our contact information. But an internet search for KSE will lead people either here or to Volcanic Tongue, so I guess anyone who really wants to get in touch will find us somehow.

django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com

We’ve got some exciting new chapbooks scheduled for October. More on that in a few days.

Bill Shute poetry books from Word Mechanics

Beyond the various Kendra Steiner chapbooks, I have two “real” poetry books available, both published by Word Mechanics of Palm Springs, California (wordmechanics “at” inbox “dot” com):

TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY: THE LABOURS OF HERCULES IN THE LONE STAR STATE. This 24-page suite of 12 poems is a modern re-telling of the classical Labours of Hercules, set in contemporary Texas. It was featured at the mythological conference “In The Tracks of Hercules” in 2005. A beautifully crafted letter-press edition made on 200-year-old equipment. $8.00 postpaid. Written in early 2005.

POINT LOMA PURPLE: THE LIFE AND WORK OF KATHERINE TINGLEY (1847-1929), An Imagined History in Mosaic Verse. A 3300+ line historical poem in 18 sections, paralleling the 18 sections of the Bhagavad Gita…unlike any other poem you’ll ever read. Inspired by the poetic ideas of Ed Sanders (”investigative poetry” and his America series) and Charles Reznikoff (”Testimony”, “Holocaust”). 96-page perfect-bound edition. As a bonus, includes two out-of-print KSE chapbooks on the last few pages: FOUR TEXAS STREAMS (the first KSE chapbook) and PROTOTYPE (the story of the fictional “Mara” from Uvalde, one of the most popular KSE chaps and also a highlight of my readings). $10.00 postpaid. Written June 2005-January 2006.

These can be purchased directly from me. Check (or well-concealed cash) payable to Bill Shute, 8200 Pat Booker Rd. #399, San Antonio, Texas, 78233.

SPIRIT adapted to music by composer Paul Marbach

I’m excited to announce that my 2006 chapbook SPIRIT (dedicated to Frank Samperi) has been adapted for a voice-piano musical piece by composer Paul Marbach of San Antonio, Texas (presently living in Austin). Earlier this year, Paul was visiting Kendra and was looking through the various Kendra Steiner Editions chapbooks on our fireplace (where I keep piles of the in-print ones for distribution—-we don’t use fireplaces in South Texas). He was very taken by COME ON, REACT and by SPIRIT, and he asked if he could adapt one of them to music. He has taken passages from SPIRIT (which was in 11 spare minimalist sections) and created this new (as yet incomplete) composition, “Spirit.” Kendra just sang some of it for me, accompanying herself on the piano, and I was blown away! Those who read music can take a look at the first eight pages of the sheet music in the file below…

draft of SPIRIT—-words by Bill Shute, music by Paul Marbach

upcoming KSE poetry chapbooks for late 2007

NEXT EXIT: FOUR is now available (see post below), and the next three volumes of that series are already scheduled. They should appear in the last few months of 2007 through the end of January 2008.

NEXT EXIT: FIVE. The first solo Next Exit volume, by Christopher Cunningham.

NEXT EXIT: SIX. Also a solo volume, but an all-Scotland collection, by Stuart Crutchfield.

NEXT EXIT: SEVEN. An all-England volume, featuring K.M. Dersley and Adrian Manning.

We also will have solo chapbooks coming from

MISTI RAINWATER-LITES (October)

DAVID KEENAN (late October or early November)

K. M. DERSLEY (November)

LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL (December)

MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH (late 2007 or early 200

and GLENN W. COOPER (late 2007 or early 2008).

In addition, I will have some material of my own surfacing here and there, and Doug Draime and I have a long-term goal of producing a joint chapbook on spiritual themes. And I will try to coax Doug to do another solo chapbook for early 2008!

Also, I will donate some copies of Christopher’s Next Exit volume and both of Luis’s chapbooks to the Guerilla Poetics Project, so later this year you could purchase those books from the GPP, and ALL the proceeds would go straight into funding the GPP’s important work of getting independent poetry directly from author to reader, bypassing the established order and the established distribution chains. The GPP and all of us in the small-press-poetry community are basically fighting the same battle. We’re in the midst of a poetic renaissance right now, and there’s a lot of fine work being done out there under the radar. The GPP, Kendra Steiner Editions, and hundreds of other like-minded individuals and independent presses are trying to document and distribute this important work in new and different ways. Let’s face it, Small Press Distribution has had little if anything to do with authentic under-the-counter-culture publishing for many many years. The 70’s and early 80’s are long gone. SPD is about small presses in the same sense that Dimension or Mirimax or Fox Searchlight or Sony Classic Pictures are “independents.”

Many reading this will already be supporters or operatives of the GPP, but if you aren’t, check them out at  http://www.guerillapoetics.org/   .

Thanks to all for your support and encouragement in 2007! Best wishes and positive vibrations from South Texas…

NEXT EXIT: FOUR now available!

NEXT EXIT: FOUR (KSE #66) , a new ten-poem collection by ZACHARY C. BUSH and BRAD  KOHLER, rooted in the small towns of the South and the Rust Belt, is now available from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cost is $4.00 postpaid in North America. Check (or well-concealed cash) payable to Bill Shute, 8200 Pat Booker Rd. #399, San Antonio, Texas, 78233. Three previous Next Exit volumes have been published by Kendra Steiner Editions:

NEXT EXIT: ONE (Doug Draime and Bill Shute)

NEXT EXIT: TWO (Thomas Michael McDade and Bill Shute)

NEXT EXIT: THREE (Doug Draime and Misti Rainwater-Lites)

Three more volumes will be coming out over the next four months. I’ll soon post a message about those. Zachary C. Bush, still in his early 20’s, is one of America’s fastest rising poetic dynamos with two superb chapbooks under his belt so far. Working from Georgia, he reminds us once again that the South continues to create fascinating writers who manage to combine deep roots and bold experimentation. Brad Kohler has been publishing fiction, poetry, and music criticism for nearly two decades. He has published two chapbooks through Backwash Press and two chapbooks through Kendra Steiner Editions. No poet captures working-class life in the decayed steel and coal towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio more memorably than Brad–a man who does not own a computer or a car and who types his poems on the back of racing tip sheets, meat market flyers, and med charts from the healthcare facility where he works. These two poets offer a vital and unexpected poetic experience, and for a short ten-poem book, NEXT EXIT: FOUR packs a wallop and will not be soon forgotten. Get your copy now. Volume One came out in June and is nearly sold out. These will NOT be reprinted, so buy one now or pay collectors’ prices in the future.

Available now directly from KSE for immediate shipment. NEXT EXIT: FOUR will be available in Europe, through Volcanic Tongue in Glasgow, in about a month.

NEXT EXIT: FOUR almost ready; NORWICH UNVEILED ready!

Zachary C. Bush and I have finished our final proofing of NEXT EXIT: FOUR (where ZCB is paired with Brad Kohler), so that one should be out by September 25th as promised.

My own new chap is now available, a five-poem suite called NORWICH UNVEILED   (KSE #67). As with the most recent two—-IN PERSPECTIVE and LARKSPUR VARIATIONS—-this one grows out of my interest in the visual arts, this time the paintings of Edward Hopper. Everyone knows the common view of Hopper—-paintings of diners at 3 a.m., of women or couples seen through hotel or living room windows, of urban buildings, etc. Once I began to study his work and especially his technique, however, I saw how shallow that common view was. First, his work is completely UN-realistic. He seizes upon a few minor seemingly-unimportant details and exaggerates them until they almost become expressionistic. Also, the way he frames his compositions, one is rarely presented with anything complete. Important sections of the “Scene” are off the canvas–we usually find ourselves inferring and imagining important parts of the “scene”! And the people in his work…well, they are almost as if they’ve walked off the pages of something by Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter…ciphers with vacant expressions.  Finally, when one looks closely at a typical Hopper painting, it seems to dissolve in front of the eyes…there’s a kind of blur.   It’s an incredibly rich body of work.    As Hopper would take a few details from different settings and use them as seeds for a painting, I used a rainy afternoon I spent in Norwich, Connecticut last month as my “seed” image. I also used a kind of “low angle” perspective, as Hopper often does, and I wove in some allusions to Kerouac’s TRISTESSA….the result is NORWICH UNVEILED, which I hope you enjoy. If anyone’s counting, this is my fourth chapbook set in New England (I think), along with SONNETS FOR BILL DOGGETT (one of the pieces there is set in New Jersey, but what the heck!), FANTASMATA 2007 (set in an abandoned building in Brockton, Massachusetts) and LARKSPUR VARIATIONS (set in Massaschusetts). 75% of my poetry is still set here in Texas (and most of the rest is, as they say about Poe, set “in the mind”), but New England is such a fascinating place, I am sure I will return to it here and there.

Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal back for second KSE chapbook!

L.A. poet Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, author of RAW MATERIALS and of the KSE chapbook WITHOUT PEACE, will be coming back for a second chapbook, probably in December, a sequence of poems inspired by and dedicated to one of his mentors, poet Luis Omar Salinas ( http://www.thehypertexts.com/Luis_Omar_Salinas_Poetry_Picture_Bio.htm ). As always for Luis, this is a powerful collection full of heart and soul. I was floored by these pieces–you will be too. You all can save up four dollars by December, right?