Australian poet Glenn W. Cooper has posted three beautiful new poems related to Bob Dylan at his myspace blog. You need to read them! The link is below. Glenn published the much-acclaimed RIMBAUD IN THE CITY: 10 SNAPSHOTS through KSE in January, which just sold out within the last week. He is also the author of PLANET ALI and SOME NATURAL THINGS.
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=34003506&blogID=403503033
Thanks to all who sent e-mails and messages while I was down after surgery—-all very much appreciated! While I could not DO much, I could still think and plan…and it also allowed me to watch a number of films, particularly silent films, which demand total concentration.
We’ve been moving a lot of the recent books this week, so act now for any that interest you. I have very little free time in June and July due to the nature of my job, so although I’ll be writing and editing during that period, there probably won’t be many (or any) new chapbooks until mid-July, and in the July-August period we may well have five or six appearing. New solo chaps from Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal and Debbie Kirk and Christopher Cunningham, some collabs, my solo FACE TO FACE, and a collaboration I’m doing with the legendary Ronald Baatz called THE COMPANIONSHIP OF THE PLUM. It’s an honor to work with Mr. Baatz, and this new duo-chap (which is about 1/2 done) will be awesome…I can already feel it. It’s also forcing me, here in South Texas, to work in a setting of East Coast Winter, which is certainly a challenge. But challenge is good and forces us to evolve and to change. That’s why I’ve thrown myself into three different collaborations for this summer—-the one mentioned above, another one with Zachary C. Bush, and a third with Stuart Crutchfield. Collaboration involves having to meet those poets halfway and on a turf neither mine nor theirs (kind of like two teams playing neither a home or away game, but a game at a third location), according to rules/formats/prosodies/image patterns/etc. that we establish in advance through negotiation. Artistically it’s a challenge, but is very rewarding.
I’ve also been reading and would like to champion three fine books that you can order easily online…and should.
First, I just re-read for the fifth or sixth time the amazing THE FILMS OF LARRY BUCHANAN: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION by film archivist/scholar/critic Rob Craig. Maverick Texas director Buchanan has always been a huge influence on my own work, with his unique vision of Texas as a wasteland of sprawl and suburbs and stripmalls and a shadowy military presence. Also, his films have such a distinctive look and feel and construction—-for instance, no one who has seen the first five minutes of IT’S ALIVE, with its stark minimalism worthy of a Warhol or an Antonioni but done on a Texas exploitation film level, ever forgets it. Surely many change the channel when confronted by an unhappy couple sitting rigidly in the front seat of a car driving in a rural area with the camera focussed on windshield wipers going back and forth and back and forth over a dirty windshield, smearing the dirt and producing an annoying “squeak” with each pass, but it’s an amazing image and totally sets the tone for the work we are about to see. Rob’s book covers Buchanan’s fascinating personal history and also features a detailed chapter on each extant film. Highly recommended to anyone interested in regional and independent film-making! Order from the publisher, McFarland, at www.mcfarlandpub.com .
Next is the new one from New Mexico’s great poet HOSHO McCREESH, author of two KSE chapbooks, 37 PSALMS FROM THE BADLANDS and NEXT EXIT: EIGHT (w/ Caleb Puckett), both now out-of-print, which is even more reason for grabbing this new 100-copy edition from Bottle of Smoke Press (http://www.bospress.net/order.html). MARCHING UNABASHED THROUGH THE WEEPING, SEARING SUN… is a series of poetic reports-from-the-frontlines from a man who has been to the edge, stared into the void, and come back to depict it in verse. The painterly style of his KSE chaps mixes here with a more epigrammatic style (as seen in his recent GPP broadside “Crux”), creating precisely chiseled miniatures burning with both New Mexico heat and with righteous anger. There’s also an undercurrent of violence running through the pieces, but McCreesh knows that from violence comes change, comes creation. For only six dollars plus postage, MARCHING UNABASHED is a necessary purchase from one of America’s most essential poets. And while you are at the Bottle of Smoke ordering page, why not also purchase a copy of Adrian Manning’s REPEATING THE MANTRA, another essential poetic work.
Last but not least (and I can’t imagine any book following this one!) is the recent anthology SIRENS: FIVE FEMME FATALE POETS, available from http://www.sirens5.com/ . With a society built around the needs/wants of males and with so many laughable male tough-guy-posers in the small-press poetry world, who can blame these ladies for letting out a howl of indignation, but it’s also a howl of liberation, of self-identity, of creation. A sexual howl, a siren song calling us…into a vortex…a 300 page vortex. SIRENS collects the poetry, art, interviews, and prose of five major femme poets:
Debbie Kirk’s poems are charged with concentrated energy, formed on the page like open wounds…vivid, precise, searing, not a word wasted. Debbie takes us on a guided tour of the parts of life we often choose to look away from out of cowardice while they are happening to us. I feel revived after reading Debbie Kirk’s poetry, as if I’d just seen James Brown or Stiv Bators in their respective primes. She’s also got a great acid wit. This is a dynamite selection, a fine intro to Debbie’s work. “Not even serpents/ will keep me company / and this gun / is my four leaf clover.” Be sure to check out her website, http://www.tntkirk.com/ . Debbie will have a chapbook of all-new work coming out from KSE this summer!
Iris Berry offers a number of extended pieces with a great flow through a world of binge drinking and dysfunctional families and children whose dreams are shot down and characters who are their own worst enemies. Well-known for her spoken-word work and her acting as well as for her fiction, poetry, and non-fiction prose and columns, Iris Berry is yet another L.A.-based artist who has not yet gotten her due. Her nine-page ”Greetings from Branford Park” is a modern classic, as are a number of her other pieces here. I’m drained after taking this ride with Iris, but I want more.
Each of Cynthia Ruth Lewis’s poems taunts the reader, challenges us to question our assumptions, to look at the arbitrary nature of our “reality.” She also takes the reader into, very much into, personal and intimate sides of the speaker’s life. It’s a combination of hard and soft, just like sex or art or life. Lewis probes into the psychology of her characters, masterfully assembling the daily-life details about what f**ks us up, thus offering us a way to take a step outside of our selves and do the same analysis on our fears and phobias and obsessions. After reading Ms. Lewis, I feel as though I just downed a bottle of scotch over six hours of intimate talk from the heart and from the gut with some passing ship in the night whom I’ll never see again but who will change my perspective on everything. However, I hope I see her again in print…soon!
Misti Rainwater-Lites is no stranger to KSE, having done two chaps for us, with a third coming in November/December. Nobody nails the pain and cheap thrills and existential nausea of American (and, more specifically, Texas) life better than Misti. Reading the poems here, many of which I’d read before but are always welcome back again, I’m struck at how clearly this lady weaves statements of her poetic aesthetic into everything she writes, alongside the empty sex to which we are drawn like moths to a flame, and the images from dollar stores, strip bars, and trash culture, in between the TV-dinner trays and cockroach corpses. Misti is the poet laureate of beaten-down working-class America.
SIRENS closes with the poetry and prose of Jude Lynn, a Guinness-drinker (I’ll raise a glass in her honor!) working out of Kent, Ohio. In her two-page prose piece “Swell and Hatch Into The Fold,” she captures the development of a three-year relationship totally, instead of wasting our time with a full book as some novelist would do. Images such as the beer-pi*s golden sh*wer will not go away…as much as I may want them to! And the M&M image in “All The World Wants An*l”—-well, you’ll just have to read that one for yourself. The scalding “Tough Guy: A Three-Part Observation in Reverse” should be required reading for all us guys if we really want to know how we are viewed by the women we hang out and/or sleep with. There’s more useful wisdom about why the world’s the way it is in the three paragraphs of “O, We’re All In Trouble” than there would be in 15 years of Oprah shows and all the pop psychology books and CDs in the world. It’s there for the taking—-Jude Lynn has offered it to us, and it’s up to us whether we’re gonna learn anything from it or continue to be self-absorbed a-holes. I wasn’t familiar with Ms. Lynn’s work prior to this book, but a good anthology always presents writers unfamiliar to us whom we NEEDED to know about but just didn’t know it.
This anthology is 300 pages of raw power for only $7.99 and $2.99 postage ($10.98 total), and you can pay via paypal at the website or send a check to Sisyphus Press, P.O. Box 10495, State College, Pa. 16805-0495. It’s only June, but I can surely say that this is one of the best anthologies of the year, an essential and primal blast of supercharged girl power that will strip the paint from your safe assumptions. Bravo to editor Victor Thorn and to these five poets—-KIRK, BERRY, LEWIS, RAINWATER-LITES, and LYNN—-for producing a work of real substance. I have a feeling that this SIRENS anthology will be a defining work of this age, the way films such as RIVER’S EDGE, BLUE VELVET, NATURAL BORN KILLERS, or SERIAL MOM were defining works of the 80s and 90s. There was a seminal anthology put out in 1962 by Totem/Corinth called FOUR YOUNG LADY POETS, best known today for introducing Diane Wakoski (and the ladies in SIRENS are certainly daughters of Wakoski’s MOTORCYCLE BETRAYAL POEMS-period) and the late Carol Berge to the general poetry world—-maybe SIRENS is the 2008 energy-drink fueled answer to that classic work.
Back to the business of KSE—-sending out orders, working on editing the upcoming collections, writing pieces for the Baatz/Shute collaboration. Have a great weekend. I’ll also give Brad Kohler a call for his “tips” on tomorrow’s Belmont Stakes…will Big Brown continue to dominate, or will Casino Drive or Ichabod Crane show Brown to be over-rated?
Wonderful, insightful review of Jim D. Deuchars’s KSE chapbook PIECES OF EIGHT by poet Courtney J. Campbell in the new ORANGES & SARDINES magazine, an exciting journal with lots of superb poetry and art. Kudos to publisher Didi Menendez for a job well done.
I don’t want to copy the review here—-it’s the property of O&A. However, they have generously offered the entire magazine for free as a PDF file, so download the file, and then scroll down to page 30 and read the review. Better yet, pour yourself a cold beer and read the entire magazine!
Here’s the link to the PDF file:
The following chapbooks are now sold out:
#91, BILL SHUTE, afterglow (sound library series, volume 30);
#90, MK CHAVEZ, visitation;
#89, HOSHO McCREESH/CALEB PUCKETT, next exit: eight (New Mexico and Oklahoma);
#88, BILL SHUTE, luna americana (creel pone sound study #8 );
#80, K.M. DERSLEY/ADRIAN MANNING, NEXT EXIT: SIX (all-England volume);
#87, DOUG DRAIME, last may (1968 );
#83, GLENN W. COOPER, rimbaud in the city: 10 snapshots;
#82, LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, keepers of silence;
#75, K. M. DERSLEY, blue velour;
#68, MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, lullabies for jackson;
#59, LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, without peace .
The following two are running low. Order now if you’d like these:
#93, BILL SHUTE, transparency (sound library series, volume 32);
#92, BILL SHUTE, shore access (sound library series, volume 31).
I’m recovering from surgery and will be out of action for a few more days, but Kendra will take care of most orders rec’d recently and get them out Monday. I should be able to get the overseas orders and JH’s large order out myself on Tuesday.
We’ve got a lot of fine recent releases available, including our 100th chapbook NEXT EXIT: SEVEN. Check them out:
#100, RONALD BAATZ / LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, next exit: seven; *NEW !!!*
#99, ALEATHIA DREHMER, thickets of mayapple: letters for edward; *NEW !!!*
#98, ADRIAN MANNING, wide asleep, fast awake (sound library series, volume 33);
#97, STUART CRUTCHFIELD, ozzified; *NEW!!!*
#96, JIM D. DEUCHARS, pieces of eight;
#95, BILL SHUTE, quartet: improvisations on the mandukya upanishad; *NEW !!!*
#94, DOUG DRAIME, love & blues in oregon;
In addition, my three sound library volumes
#93, BILL SHUTE, transparency (sound library series, volume 32);
#92, BILL SHUTE, shore access (sound library series, volume 31);
#91, BILL SHUTE, afterglow (sound library series, volume 30);
are almost gone, and a number of the other chaps such as MK Chavez’s VISITATION and Next Exit: Eight and all the other ones with numbers in the 80’s are almost gone. Act now. Our earlier volumes are already going for $10 and up on the collector’s market. Why pay some scavenger too much LATER when you can get them for $4 each postpaid now?
I’ll be working on a few exciting collaborative pieces this summer after I finish my present project FACE TO FACE (sound library series, volume 34). One will be with my longtime collaborator Stuart Crutchfield (who is settled back in Scotland now), and the other will be with Zachary C. Bush (who did Next Exit: Four with Brad Kohler, and who did an earlier collab with me, INTERVALS (Creel Pone Sound Study #6) ). ZCB is coming back into the KSE fold after moving to NYC and pursuing graduate work full time. It’s great to have these two gentlemen back. Both collabs will be entries in the Creel Pone Sound Study series, volumes 9 and 10, and we will end that series at 10 volumes, the way we did with Next Exit.
And through the rest of 2008 we’ll have at least one if not two new chapbooks a month, leading up to the KSE POETRY YEAR 2009 Project, beginning in January. Keep checking the blog, and thanks for your support (and also for the birthday wishes).
Beauty is everywhere, if we take off our blinders, and change perspective, and see what is around us as if it is new, and we do not label it and we do not compare it to the known and we do not put it into a convenient compartment. Poetry, as an artform, can help us see the beauty and the depths of meaning in what is around us, what we might walk past without noticing, what we might take for granted.
I suppose the ultimate goal of the poet might be to lead us to the point where all readers can have THE POET’S EYE themselves, and art becomes unnecessary. However, before we reach that goal, there are certainly so many artworks that are things of beauty themselves. A broken-hearted trumpet solo from Chet Baker; a vision of the New Mexico desert from Georgia O’Keeffe; or any one of the poems included in Aleathia Drehmer’s new chapbook, THICKETS OF MAYAPPLE: LETTERS FROM EDWARD (KSE #99). Not only does Ms. Drehmer—-who, I might add, is also a fine photographer with an amazing eye for detail and perspective—-find the beautiful in every scene she depicts, whether it be a rainstorm, or a parent and child resting together near a creek, or a Spring wind, but her writing itself is so evocative, so musical, so richly sketched, so full of unexpected sense impressions, so textured. The beauty of the content and of the artifact mirror each other, and the result is a chapbook that I cannot live without.
A little backstory about this collection is in order. A few months ago, I approached Aleathia about taking a month for our KSE POETRY YEAR 2009 project. She graciously agreed, chose May as her month, and began work on her collection. By mid-May of 2008 (a year in advance!), she finished her Poetry Year 2009 chapbook and sent it to me. I was so taken by it that I did not want to sit on it for a year–it needed to come out NOW. So I offered Aleathia another month in 2009 (she chose November), and we agreed to issue Thickets of MAYapple (get it?) right now, as a kind of preview or teaser for the Poetry Year series that will be coming out in 2009. The passion and seriousness and craft that Aleathia brings to her poetry is no surprise to the many who have enjoyed her work online and in anthologies and periodicals, and let’s not forget that she is also a much-respected editor and champion-for-poetry.
THICKETS OF MAYAPPLE: LETTERS FOR EDWARD is a change-of-pace for KSE, but we try to stay unpredictable here, and I’m proud to offer this beautiful collection. I have read it aloud to friends and family members, savoring its musicality, and Aleathia will be reading it next week at the Connecticut Beat Poetry Festival. Check her out if you are within driving distance of Connecticut! Also, don’t miss another fine KSE poet there, Jim D. Deuchars, who will be reading from and selling his recent chapbook PIECES OF EIGHT (KSE #95).
Only $4 postpaid in the USA—check payable to Bill Shute, 8141-B Pat Booker Rd. #399, San Antonio, Texas, 78233. Or get any three of our chapbooks for $10 postpaid in the USA–check the “available KSE chapbooks” page to your right to see our many recent offerings.
Thanks to Aleathia for sharing this beautiful work with us, and thanks to YOU all for your attention and support!
One of the jobs of the poet is to express the inexpressible. If we’re not consistently trying to do this, then we should be writing prose (and indeed, so many poets today are writing prose broken into lines). In my own humble offerings, I try to find that unique combination of particulars and spacing and juxtaposition and allusion and tone and rhythm that will break the reader through to the universal and the transcendent. That’s a tall order, I’ll admit, but if we are not trying to achieve the seemingly impossible in our works, if each of our pages, each of our lines is not charged, then we should not be imposing on others by asking them to read our work.
I have always had the greatest respect for the American colonial poet Edward Taylor (1642-1729). A physician and minister from Western Massachusetts, Taylor was disconnected from much of the larger world, but he had a fine library, a creative mind, a friendly demeanor, and a passion as a writer such as I described above. He would often write what he called “meditations”, where he basically took a scriptural text (often, one he was going to use in the next week’s sermon), and did a poetic “improvisation” on it, the way a jazz player can take a standard or show tune and use it as a springboard for musical investigation, extending it, re-thinking it, taking it into the stratosphere, but never forgetting the original melodic line and chord progression…and in the long run, finding new meaning within the original, and applying it and embodying it on a new and different level.
For about six months, I have been studying and taking notes and meditating upon The Mandukya Upanishad in preparation for a poetic work that would do to it what Taylor did to Biblical texts. The MU is the shortest Upanishad, and many Vedantic scholars have observed that if one could only have access to ONE of the Upanishads, this would be the one because it contains the entire system in miniature. So I offer to you my Texas-based improvisations upon the Mandukya Upanishad.
Too much spiritual writing tends to wade in platitudes or jargon or abstractions. Perhaps this represents many people’s inability to integrate the spiritual into the everyday, or to APPLY spiritual concepts to life as it is lived hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. Taylor’s meditations used plain, home-spun images such as spinning wheels, dinner plates, and change purses; similarly, in this new work you’ll find references to trendy dope combinations used by the idle rich, tacky bank buildings, Brill Building 45 rpm records, stepmothers with denture breath, after-school jobs at Burger King, and Chinese bureaucrats.
The piece begins with a meditation upon the concept of OM/A-U-M (and the original Upanishad is essentially an explanation of OM/A-U-M), and then treats each of the four levels of consciousness: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and the fourth and final transcedent level, turiya. Four levels, four sections= quartet.
KSE #95. Available NOW.
Nice to see NEXT EXIT: SIX—-our all-England volume featuring K.M. Dersley and Adrian Manning—-and the NEXT EXIT series as a whole featured at Orange Alert this week. SIX is one of my personal favorites, and for me sums up the essential qualities of the series while being an exciting read packed with rich, evocative details. NE6 is still available but we’re running low.
http://wearduringorangealert.blogspot.com/2008/05/orange-spotlight_19.html
NEXT EXIT: SEVEN (KSE #100), featuring Ronald Baatz and Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, was just issued two days ago, and it’s an exciting trip through Southern California, Mexico, and upstate New York from two of the most distinctive poets writing today.
Also, my own QUARTET: IMPROVISATIONS ON THE MANDUKYA UPANISHAD (KSE #95) is being printed today, so feel free to order that one while you’re at it. More on NE7 and QUARTET later. Also, don’t forget that Aleathia Drehmer’s THICKETS OF MAYAPPLE, which is quite different from anything KSE has ever issued, came out last week. Again, a blog post on that book will be appearing soon. I’ve already distributed 20 copies of it (out of 77) and have more going out tomorrow, so don’t miss THICKETS OF MAYAPPLE.
With ten previous poetry chapbooks and an album (”The Old Toll” by Smoke Jaguar) under his belt, Glasgow’s STUART CRUTCHFIELD has made quite an impression over the last few years, his work ranging from the rural pastoral (SHACK SIMPLE) to the gnostic visionary (TELESMA CHARGING) to the naturalistic workplace-based (STREAM) to the day-glo whitenoise horror-comic vein (MARCH) and beyond.
Stu left Glasgow for about four months of work in Canberra, Australia (which must have come as a shock to this man from rural Western Scotland!), only returning to Scotland last week. Near the end of his Australian sojourn, he took his experiences in OZ as source material, and blasted through a searing, shredding poetic free-jazz solo, much in the manner of how an Ellery Eskelin or a Noah Howard or a Steve Potts or a Sam Rivers might take a standard as his source material and rip it to shreds while re-constructing it.
Poetic journals can often be tedious–for every John Wieners who can turn dross to gold, there are 1000 poets who have not yet learned that “it doesn’t matter that the content is meaningful to YOU—-do YOU make it meaningful to the reader, who DID NOT live through it?” Usually, the answer is a resounding NO! Fortunately, Stu did not work in the over-used “journal” vein. In a way, it’s his goodbye note to Canberra, with its man-made lakes and silver bark and white birds and sour yellows and half-sunk wooden boats, all studded like garish costume jewelry into the mental-skronk-flow transcribed onto the page.
Stu’s latest chap previous to this, PITH, sold out quickly, so grab OZZIFIED while you can. It’s Stu’s 9th (!!!) chap for KSE (5 solos, 4 collabs with yours truly).
We’ve put out a lot of fine material recently, and I haven’t even gotten around to promoting it much. Adrian Manning’s WIDE ASLEEP, FAST AWAKE … then, and in a completely different direction, Aleathia Drehmer’s beautiful THICKETS OF MAYAPPLE, and let’s not forget Jim D. Deuchars’ mind-blowing PIECES OF EIGHT (best wishes to Jim for the reading in Milwaukee) or Doug Draime’s rural meditations LOVE & BLUES IN OREGON or MK Chavez’s haunting VISITATION. And don’t forget my own study of small-town Texas restaurant work and class difference SHORE ACCESS—-or the San Antonio-set investigation of the poet’s function in society TRANSPARENCY.
KSE #100, NEXT EXIT: SEVEN featuring Ronald Baatz and Luis Cuauhtemoc Berriozabal, is all ready for release–expect it sometime in June. Also, poetic dynamo Debbie Kirk (http://tntkirk.com/), who brings the energy and anger of old-school punk to her craft as a poet for the ultimate charged high-energy poetic experience, is presently working on an all-new collection for KSE which we hope to have out sometime in the summer. And I have now completed my QUARTET: IMPROVISATIONS ON THE MANDUKYA UPANISHAD, and after a final edit and tweaking and feedback from fellow poets, I hope to have that ready by my birthday, May 28th, if not before.
Remember, whatever you are doing in the arts, stay free, stay independent, stay D.I.Y., stay primitive, produce work that will NEVER be accepted by the mainstream, which is always looking to co-opt and seduce the alternative. Once you attempt to compete with the established order on ITS playing field in terms of format and appearance, and talk about “competing with the mainstream,” you’ve already sold out and it’s time to send you to the glue factory—-oh, excuse me, I guess you’ve already sent yourself there!
Just got back from some time spent in Denton, Texas, and KSE is back up and running again.
This month’s reprint is KSE #12, my chap SONNETS FOR BILL DOGGETT, a sequence of six blank verse Petrarchan sonnets written during a visit to New England and the Northeast in May and early June of 2006. While Volcanic Tongue stocked this for a while, most copies were sold at the San Antonio College Bookfair and at my readings for TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY during the summer of 2006, so I doubt if many of you have seen or heard of this one. I still do a few of these at readings, and I think you’ll enjoy these six poems: a young man sits in a seedy lounge waiting for a mob hit; a single mom walks home from work through the snow to share of bowl of steaming clam chowder with her daughter; a selfless nun helps Brazilian immigrant workers in Brockton, Massachusetts; yours truly contemplates the Super 8 Motel and Rt. 53 in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, with a painting crew on a rainy day before a Red Sox game; a woman tries online dating six times and then throws in the towel; and, someone experiences a nightmare and either does or does not wake up from it—-you decide! Only 18 copies of this reprint are available, and I had a few orders come in late April before it was even available, so order now.
On some level, I feel that KSE (and yours truly) is to poetry what the late great Bill Doggett was to music. Listening to the many KING-label albums of this soul-jazz keyboard master, I found myself in a seedy New Jersey lounge (where the first poem is set) in a maroon Naugahyde booth, and the rest of the poems flowed from that seed of inspiration. Check out the Verve-label reissue a few years back of WOW!, an album originally released on ABC-Paramount circa 1964-65—-it’s been deleted, but many cheap copies can be found at the Amazon Marketplace (and I get no kickback from this link):
