Zachary C. Bush, “Spin” (KSE #144), now available!

  KSE  #144

ZACHARY   C.   BUSH,       “SPIN”

SPIN is Zachary C. Bush’s fourth chapbook for KSE, but his first solo chap for us, and it’s a powerful work that launches a new and exciting phase in ZCB’s writing. Zachary’s past work has been both experimental (in the best sense of that word, as in flexibility and open-mindedness) and rooted in some of the more painful aspects of life, but often viewed with a surrealist eye and  told with a sharp verbal wit. And we cannot forget that, wherever Zachary is living, he is a child of the American South. As a Southern experimentalist with a great sense of craft, Zachary has always had an instantly recognizable style.

Now that he has been living in Jersey City, New Jersey, and he has absorbed the greater NYC experience—-working and going to school in NYC, and getting to know the New York arts and culture scene along with his partner, acclaimed photographer Krista Schlueter—-he’s gained a sense of detachment from the Southern experience, and he is able to write about it in a way that is rich, full of piquant particulars, dense yet supple, and dripping with atmosphere.

Zachary has always been a master of poetic form—-when we worked on our two collaborative chapbooks, SHANTI and INTERVALS—-we would each toss the other stanzas of different numbers of lines, line length, rhythms, densities, and image clusters, and Zachary could always manuever whatever was tossed at him with the finesse of a tennis pro. Also, he is a poet who creates a new and different verse form for each new work. This is not the place to rehash the old  “form is never more than an extension of content” debate; let’s just say that Zachary treats each page, each stanza as a blank canvas that can be filled, or not filled or partially filled, in an infinite number of ways, and with his deep study of poets as diverse as Charles Bernstein and John Milton, he has a poetic bag of tricks that’s more full of different techniques and structures and stances than we could ever imagine.

SPIN also contains serious and thoughful analysis of family dynamics, of the nature of society and what constitutes “sanity” in an insane world. He even takes on the nature of God here!  ZCB often uses a long, rich, densely packed line that he described to me as “chunky” when he read these poems aloud to me in May at his Jersey City apartment, the window open and the poetry existing in a space shared with the sounds and smells and texture of the city. The poems in SPIN are part of a larger suite of related work, and KSE plans to issue a second chapbook in this series in early 2010 or late 2009.

These poems are unlike anything Zachary C. Bush has ever published and also unlike anything KSE has previously issued. I consider this a major work, and if you’ve ever appreciated ZCB’s previous large-and-diverse body of work, you’ll definitely want to grab this while you still can.

In the US, books are $4 each postpaid, or you can get any three KSE chaps for $10 postpaid.  Send a check (or well-concealed cash) made payable to Bill Shute, 14080 Nacogdoches Rd. #350, San Antonio, Texas, 78247.  Outside the US, you can get any book for $5 postpaid, payable via paypal. Just write to django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com and request a paypal invoice. For your 3-for-$10 deal, you can choose from any of these other in-print chapbooks:

#143, A. J. KAUFMANN, “symbolisme psychédélique” (sound library series, volume 47). In memory of Sky Sunlight Saxon, issued simultaneously with KSE #142 ;

#142, BILL SHUTE, “plink, plonk & scratch” (sound library series, volume 46). In memory of Sky Sunlight Saxon, issued simultaneously with KSE #143.

#141, LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL & CYNTHIA ETHERIDGE, overcome ;

#140, BILL SHUTE, subtraction ;

#139, A. J. KAUFMANN, antiquewhite rain (sound library series, volume 45) ;

#138, BILL SHUTE, the stumble (sound library series, volume 44) ;

#134, RONALD BAATZ, headlights from the otherside of the world ;

#132,  DOUG DRAIME, knox county (photographs by Lena Ozuna) ;

#135,  BILL SHUTE, stereo action (sound library series, volume 42) ;

#130,  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, odd years ;

#126,  MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH, grey rage (dyed) .

August 2009 also brings ANOTHER new poetry book from Zachary, this one a full-length collection from a well-distributed press (unlike KSE!): ANGLES OF DISORDER, published by BlazeVOX  Books, a haunting collection that blurs the line between poetry and prose and that takes the reader into any number of disquieting and hyper-real landscapes and mental environments. I’d read and appreciated some of these pieces in various periodicals and in the all-ZCB edition of Misti Rainwater-Lites’ Instant Pussy (my wife and I read the entire Instant Pussy ZCB volume aloud one night to fully savor its richness and its sound), but a full-length collection documenting about a year of Zachary’s varied poetic output is too good to be true. He is working in so many poetic forms here, wearing so many masks of persona, touching upon so many areas of experience and of consciousness that if I were banished to a desert island for a year and all I had to read was ANGLES OF DISORDER, I’d never be bored AND I’d probably be a better poet myself because of it. Don’t miss it. You can order it direct through Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/Angles-Disorder-Zachary-Bush/dp/1935402161/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251646073&sr=1-1

new KSE promo cards

More KSE swag is now available! We have two new postcards, and you’ll get one free with each order. All KSE promo cards are done in editions of either 50 or 100, and once those are gone, we use a new design for the next set.

The blue card with the van on it is an oversized postcard; the brown card is a standard-sized postcard. I also slip some of the standard-sized cards into poetry and art books at bookstores in other cities when I travel, so who knows where you’ll find one. We often get orders from people out of the blue, and I have no way of knowing how they find the blog and read about the books unless they tell me, but I’m sure some of our sales come from people who discover the cards. At minimum, the cards must generate some blog hits, which is fine too. Get the word out!  Hope you like the two new cards…

 

in praise of El Paso…

deletions from the KSE catalogue, 25 August 2009

 

The following chapbooks are no longer available. I kept some of them that had a continued appeal (ACRES, STILL HUMAN, and NEXT EXIT: TEN,  for instance) available after they sold out by silently upping the print runs, but the time has come to move on and focus on the latest works. Hope you got the ones you wanted while they were available.

#137, ALEATHIA DREHMER, circles ;

#136, BILL SHUTE, more (sound library series, volume 43) ;

#127,  BRAD KOHLER, dog nights, dog days ;

#133,  BILL SHUTE, this day without (sound library series, volume 41) ;

#131,  BILL SHUTE, acres (sound library series, volume 40) ;

#129,  MIRA HORVICH / BILL  SHUTE, suspension ;

#128,  BILL SHUTE, hours past sunset (sound library series, volume 39) ;

#119,  A. J. KAUFMANN, satori in berlin (x-berg songs) ;

#122,  LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, still human ;

 #118,  BILL SHUTE, venetian sage ;

#125,  BILL SHUTE, marking time ;

#116,  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, next exit: ten ;

#34,  STUART CRUTCHFIELD, shack simple (reprint).

Three Faces of Kendra

 

Kendra spent most of the summer here in San Antonio, but she went back to Lubbock today, where she has an exciting and challenging life in the world of music theory and musicology and vocal performance. We miss her and wish her well…see you at Thanksgiving, Ken!

KSE #143, A. J. Kaufmann, SYMBOLISME PSYCHEDELIQUE, now available

KSE #143,    A. J. KAUFMANN,    SYMBOLISME PSYCHEDELIQUE

(sound library series, volume 47)

One of two paired chapbooks for August 2009, both dedicated to the late SKY SUNLIGHT SAXON, this eight-poem, eight-page suite of poems is Volume 47 in KSE’s “Sound Library Series,” inspired by the incredible “symbolisme psychedelique” sound library album from early 70s France by Gerardo Iacoucci, a combination psychedelic-lounge-electronic series of film-score cues that is legendary among library music collectors/beatheads. I sent AJ a copy of this album in the spring of 2009, during a period when we were both also listening a lot to the further-out 70s/80s music of Sky Sunlight Saxon and Ya Ho Wha, so with Sky’s visions of “Universal Stars” in his mind, and fueled by the SYMBOLISME album, A. J. produced a work that, like an abstract painting made up of recognizable pieces, is both familiar and disquieting, and which can be re-constructed by the reader in a number of different ways. Using a shorter line than in his previous KSE chapbooks, and using lines that can be connected with their neighboring lines in multiple ways, all of which make “sense,” A. J. is taking his poetry to a new and more profound level…the only comparisons I can make are to the poetry of Piero Heliczer, some of Jack Spicer, or the visionary private writings of John Wieners that have come out after JW’s death, but of course AJK has created his own poetic aesthetic independent of any outside influences. Each poem contains a series of whirpools and spirals of poetic lines/phrases that reminds me of taking the back off a pocket watch and studying the different wheels and springs and balances spinning and connecting and stopping and starting. Imagine being inside that watch, lurching forward and pulling back, through a series of funhouse mirrors containing alternating blurry and overly-sharp images of hairy hands, muddy sheets, echoes of rust, London stones, intimate sails, and side-table whispers. Shoot a monkey, grab a place to stand at the Taint Funeral, and score a copy of SYMBOLISME PSYCHEDELIQUE as soon as you can.

In the US, you can get any three KSE chaps for $10 postpaid. Might I suggest this one, accompanied by its partner chapbook, Bill Shute’s PLINK,PLONK & SCRATCH, and Zachary C. Bush’s new and awesome SPIN. Send a check (or well-concealed cash) made payable to Bill Shute, 14080 Nacogdoches Rd. #350, San Antonio, Texas, 78247.  Outside the US, you can get any book for $5 postpaid, payable via paypal. Just write to django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com and request a paypal invoice.

We have a number of other chaps still available, although about half of these are down to the last few copies so I’ll be deleting a number of them in a few weeks…act now!

#141, LUIS CUAUHTEMOC & CYNTHIA ETHERIDGE, overcome ;

#139, A. J. KAUFMANN, antiquewhite rain (sound library series, volume 45) ;

#140, BILL SHUTE, subtraction ;

#137, ALEATHIA DREHMER, circles ;

#134, RONALD BAATZ, headlights from the otherside of the world ;

#138, BILL SHUTE, the stumble (sound library series, volume 44) ;

#132, DOUG DRAIME, knox county (photographs by Lena Ozuna) ;

#135,  BILL SHUTE, stereo action (sound library series, volume 42) ;

#130,  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, odd years ;

#126,  MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH, grey rage (dyed) ;

#127,  BRAD KOHLER, dog nights, dog days ;

#129,  MIRA HORVICH / BILL  SHUTE, suspension ;

#119,  A. J. KAUFMANN, satori in berlin (x-berg songs) ;

#133,  BILL SHUTE, this day without (sound library series, volume 41) ;

#131,  BILL SHUTE, acres (sound library series, volume 40) ;

#122,  LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, still human ;

#116,  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, next exit: ten .

As always, thanks for your support of contemporary poetry, small presses, and KSE, now in our FOURTH calendar year of operation, having issued 144 chapbooks in that time by nearly FORTY poets.

—————————————————————————————–

How about a taste of AJK’s “RARE LUNCH”:

RARE  LUNCH

A story beyond rehearsal
outshone the blood-stains
thoughts blowing
slices of fact
caught broken

a heavy kick
pushing and pulling the world
foreign faces
jury of scarecrows
passed defense

heathens laughing
ragged hole in moments
grab your flutes
lifted dreams
sound of restaurants

the rare lunch awake
makes the night laugh

Kaufmann and Shute meet Twombly

CY  TWOMBLY  GALLERY             Houston, Texas

Although we are still finishing up our BLUES FOR DUFFY POWER collaboration, A. J. Kaufmann and I have been putting together another collaborative work we hope to have done by the end of 2009: a long-form poem that is both inspired by the work of American painter/sculptor  CY TWOMBLY and that attempts to transpose the techniques and themes and aesthetic of his work to the poetic page. Yes, that’s a tall order, but we have a tendency to set ambitious goals for ourselves….otherwise, why bother?

I mention this because I’ll be passing through Houston next weekend on the way to Galveston, and I’m going to take the opportunity to once again visit the CY TWOMBLY GALLERY while there. It’s an amazing place in that it is certainly one of the few galleries dedicated solely to a living artist, and each room is “themed” featuring related works and often multi-part works, so each room is an “environment” where one can truly feel Twombly’s work and experience his vision. Talk about someone who has created his own unique aesthetic!!! A. J. and I are excited about this venture, and I look forward to spending some time taking in the vision of the master next weekend in Houston…

 CY TWOMBLY, On Returning from Tonnicoda (1973)

KSE #142, PLINK, PLONK & SCRATCH, now available!

             KSE #142,     BILL  SHUTE,     PLINK ,  PLONK  &  SCRATCH         

      (Sound Library Series, Volume 46)

One of two paired chapbooks for August 2009, both dedicated to the late SKY SUNLIGHT SAXON. This six-page, six-section poem began as a Sound Library volume inspired by the pointillistic free-improv of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble and was going to be my poetic attempt to echo that technique in words. It still is to some extent, at least sections 2-5.  However, as Sky Sunlight Saxon became a presence in Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2009, he somehow entered my consciousness and found his way into my thoughts for this piece. Then when Sky passed away suddenly in June 2009, I felt that I needed to dedicate this work to his memory AND to make him a physical presence in it, which I did in the sixth section. So what you have is a work framed with the specifics of Texas life circa 2009—-the gaybashing incident at Chico’s in El Paso, Dylan’s Never Ending Tour’s recent stops in Lubbock and Corpus Christi, Governor Rick Perry’s strange comments about Texas seceding from the United States, the ignorant comments of so many Texans on the subject of health care reform, the hunger among Texans for college football to start again in the Fall—-and building up to Sky Sunlight Saxon’s appearance in Austin in the Spring of 2009 and how that affected those of us who noticed it (and those who did not notice it) and how it fit into the overall picture. In between is a series of closely observed, pointillistic studies, animated by Sky’s spirit, that grow out of the hundred-degree-plus summer heat. The epigraph this time is from Keith Waldrop:

I begin now to write down all the places I have not been—-

 starting with the most distant.                              

I build houses that I will not inhabit.

                                                           (from “Poet”, 1997)

Another word about the unique free-improv aesthetic of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, the aesthetic that animates this work. SME founder-mainman John Stevens always emphasized a LISTENING-based improvisational model. At the time of FACE TO FACE, the SME had been pared down to a duo, John Stevens on percussion (and occasional cornet, used in a coloristic manner), and Trevor Watts on soprano saxophone, an incredibly terse and elliptical soprano saxophone. In his liner notes to the album, John Stevens  wrote:  Face to Face means exactly that. When Trevor and I perform it, we are seated to enable the drums and the saxophone to be approximately on the same level. We face each other and play at each other, allowing the music to take place somewhere in the middle. This is very much an outward process. We are trying to be a total ear to the other player, allowing our own playing to be of secondary importance, apart from something that enables the other player to follow the same process—-the main priority being to hear the other player totally. I feel that as a poet, particularly in THIS piece, I am engaged in a similar process, although my partners are both my immediate environment and the blank open-field poetic page, the three of us comprising a SPONTANEOUS POETRY TRIO.  Or not…

I owned a copy of the original Emanem Records vinyl LP back in the 70s, when I was in highschool, and played the grooves off it. Emanem has reissued the album now on CD, with extra material from the same period. You can purchase one at  http://www.emanemdisc.com/E4003.html  .

In the US, you can get any three KSE chaps for $10 postpaid. Might I suggest this one, accompanied by its partner chapbook, A. J. Kaufmann’s SYMBOLISME PSYCHEDELIQUE, and Zachary C. Bush’s new and awesome SPIN. Send a check (or well-concealed cash) made payable to Bill Shute, 14080 Nacogdoches Rd. #350, San Antonio, Texas, 78247.  Outside the US, you can get any book for $5 postpaid, payable via paypal. Just write to django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com and request a paypal invoice.

We have a number of other chaps still available, although about half of these are down to the last few copies so I’ll be deleting a number of them in a few weeks…act now!

#139, A. J. KAUFMANN, antiquewhite rain (sound library series, volume 45) ;

#140, BILL SHUTE, subtraction ;

#137, ALEATHIA DREHMER, circles ;

#134, RONALD BAATZ, headlights from the otherside of the world ;

#138, BILL SHUTE, the stumble (sound library series, volume 44) ;

#132, DOUG DRAIME, knox county (photographs by Lena Ozuna) ;

#135,  BILL SHUTE, stereo action (sound library series, volume 42) ;

#130,  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, odd years ;

#126,  MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH, grey rage (dyed) ;

#127,  BRAD KOHLER, dog nights, dog days ;

#129,  MIRA HORVICH / BILL  SHUTE, suspension ;

#119,  A. J. KAUFMANN, satori in berlin (x-berg songs) ;

#133,  BILL SHUTE, this day without (sound library series, volume 41) ;

#131,  BILL SHUTE, acres (sound library series, volume 40) ;

#122,  LUIS CUAUHTEMOC BERRIOZABAL, still human ;

#116,  MISTI RAINWATER-LITES, next exit: ten .

As always, thanks for your support of contemporary poetry, small presses, and KSE, now in our FOURTH calendar year of operation, having issued 144 chapbooks in that time by nearly FORTY poets. Stay tuned for write-ups on the other two August releases, A. J. Kaufmann’s SYMBOLISME PSYCHEDELIQUE and Zachary C. Bush’s SPIN.

sipping tawny port and eating Tripas à Moda do Porto, gazing onto the Douro River, listening to Duffy Power play the blues…in another dimension…

 working on section 4 (of 5) of BLUES FOR DUFFY POWER today, set in Porto, Portugal…you just close your eyes and you’re floating

August 2009 reflections

 

Gustave Dore, “Daniel in the Lion’s Den”

Back now from my third and final trip of the last 4 months, this time to Denton and Galveston to help my son Eric move. I picked up some kind of bug at the tail end of the trip (perhaps from the polluted brown Gulf of Mexico water I swam in?), and after returning to San Antonio on Monday to a tedious eleven-hour day of jury duty, I’m now resting at home and nursing this cough/cold, which is giving me a much-needed break from my job, my writing and KSE editing/publishing, etc.

Just yesterday Zachary C. Bush sent me the final edit of his new SPIN chapbook, which is actually part one of a two-book sequence. ZCB read me these poems aloud when I visited him and Krista in Jersey City in May, and I was blown away by them. I don’t feel that articulate today, so I won’t attempt to describe them…wait for the blurb when the book is released in a week or two. All I can say is that these poems represent a new level in Zachary’s writing which is, paradoxically, both more complex and more accessible than some of his earlier work. It’s deeply rooted in his Southern background, which he seems to have adequate distance from (now that he’s in NY/NJ) to write about in a detached yet rich manner. I love these poems, and I will be proud to share them—-and the second volume, which will follow in a few months—-with the KSE readers.

Working with A. J. Kaufmann is always a joy, and I have three things to discuss about that. First, A. J. and I have just issued our two chapbooks dedicated to the late Sky Sunlight Saxon: A. J.’s SYMBOLISME PSYCHEDELIQUE (KSE #143), and my own PLINK, PLONK & SCRATCH (KSE #142). I’ll have a post about each one soon. Here they are:

Second, I’m in the middle of our collaboration BLUES FOR DUFFY POWER, which you can expect in September, I hope.

One of the images I’m using throughout is that of bluesman as prophet, as the shaman-Jeremiah in the wilderness truth-telling to a people who aren’t listening. With that in mind, I’ve been re-visiting a number of Old Testament prophets, starting with the 12 “minor” prophets (I got an excellent book on that subject while in Ruidoso, NM), and also Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, which I’ve been working my way through recently (thus the Dore artwork above). Page five of DUFFY POWER, the mid-point or “pivot” in the piece,  will echo the dreams/visions found in Daniel. Like yours truly, A. J. Kaufmann is interested in the formalistic aspects of poetry, and I must say we have devised a unique structure for this chapbook, which will probably be a nine-page work. I won’t give the structure away at this point.

Thirdly, A. J. and I have another long-term collaborative project that we’ve begun work on, a chapbook inspired by the painting of CY TWOMBLY, and which attempts to mirror in poetic form the structural and thematic aspects of Twombly’s artwork. When I visited the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston earlier this year, I just knew I had to attempt something like this, as Twombly’s work—-collected in a beautiful museum devoted ENTIRELY to this one artist and organized into thematic rooms each of which presents multiple related artworks—-took my breath away. A. J. was familiar with CT’s work and was excited to join me on this project. This is a long-term project and I doubt you’ll be seeing it until late 2009 or early 2010, but projects of this type require a lot of preparation and background study. I hope the end result will be worth it.

In other KSE news, I have the completed manuscript now for MK Chavez and Mira Horvich’s PINNACLE chap

which will be out in September, and also Misti Rainwater-Lites’ new VEGAS THE HARD WAY chap that will be out in October. Both of these are newly written multi-poem suites, composed especially for the KSE format. They are important new works from two of the nation’s finest working poets. And only $4 each in the US ($5 elsewhere). How can you go wrong with that?

Well, in honor of the late, great, one-time El Paso resident Raymond Carver (who was a friend of my first wife Kathleen when he lived in EP…read her excellent article about him in an old issue of the Hollins Critic), I think I’ll take a swig of Ny-Quil, and then get back to Daniel, who just survived that night in the lion’s den and is back having dreams and visions again. Maybe if I take a second swig of the Ny-Quil I’ll have some of my own…

…………………………………………………………………………………………….

ps, there’s a new review of my FACE TO FACE (KSE #101) chapbook over at Michael Aaron Casares’  “Over Your Radar”  blog. You can read it here: http://overyourradar.blogspot.com/2009/08/bill-shute-face-to-face.html

4 recent KSE reviews at Orange Alert

Thanks to Jason and crew at Orange Alert for highlighting 4 of the recent KSE poetry chapbooks in the last few months. Check out the interesting write-ups and don’t forget to bookmark OA for regular updates on the arts and culture.

ALEATHIA DREHMER, “Circles”

http://orangealert.net/node/360

 

RONALD BAATZ, “Headlights from the Otherside of the World”

http://orangealert.net/baatzheadlights

 

DOUG DRAIME, “Knox County”

http://orangealert.net/draimeminor

 

BILL SHUTE, “Marking Time”

http://orangealert.net/node/140