available Bill Shute poetry books (as of May 2019)

I should spend more time promoting my in-print poetry books, but I tend to put my efforts into composing NEW poems and dashing off reviews and columns for BTC, Ugly Things, and the KSE blog (or in the last few months, reading lesser-known works by Washington Irving, Gertrude Stein, and Oliver Goldsmith). Thus, the time is right to list the six poetry books of mine presently in-print. Any or all of them can be ordered online easily. I hope you find them interesting and worthwhile—-a number of people seem to, for which I’m thankful!

As of 2018 and AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN, I’ve moved into long-form, book-length works. This year, 2019, I am working on a 60-page piece called RIVERSIDE FUGUE, which I will complete and edit this summer during two weeks in Tulsa, across the street from the Arkansas River. My 2006 POINT LOMA PURPLE (published by Word Mechanics, out of print) was a book-length poem, 3300+ lines, in 18 chapters, but it was a narrative poem, and a historical poem, nothing like these recent open-field works painted on a larger canvas, but not a teletype roll.

With the responsibility of the KSE label and its many music releases now in the rear-view mirror, I’m finally able to give the large blocks of time, the months of brick-by-brick and stanza-by-stanza construction, the nights of reading and thought and note-taking, and the drudgery of daily life experience (and the resulting existential epiphanies!)  needed for such more-ambitious projects. I am not getting any younger (trust me, I may be “younger than that now,”  but only metaphorically), and as someone who has admired and studied long-form works such as CLAREL or STANZAS IN MEDITATION or THE BRIDGE or PATERSON or Diane Wakoski’s tetralogy THE ARCHEOLOGY OF MOVIES AND BOOKS, or Warhol’s SHADOWS sequence or Jandek’s THE SONG OF MORGAN or GHOST PASSING or Jackson MacLow’s STANZAS FOR IRIS LEZAK, it’s inevitable that I too would take aim at the target at the farthest end of the shooting gallery, plan a hike up a mountain four times higher than what I’d previously climbed.

Tentatively, there will be a collection of selected poems (JUNK SCULPTURE FROM THE NEW GILDED AGE) spanning the last 15 years coming out in Germany next year–more on that later. Also, I hope to have RIVERSIDE FUGUE in print by the end of 2019 (in time for your holiday gift giving!). The collection of previously published essays and reviews which people keep asking about, NERO’S MOTHER MEETS THE PHANTOM GUNSLINGER, will probably come out in 2020—-I don’t want it to steal any thunder from the poetry books (because, by nature, essays and reviews get more readers than poems)

Why not try one or more of the books below. You should not regret it….and if you do, there’s always RE-GIFTING!

Thanks to those readers who have hung on with me, with gaps and breaks as they or I have to re-adjust and get our acts back together, since the early 1980’s (you know who you are, and I’m glad we are still in touch after 30+ years of life grinding us down)

AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN

44-page book-length poem, composed in Oklahoma City in 2018

perfect-bound paperback available from Amazon at https://amzn.to/2SNdmiV

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SCULPTURE GARDEN IN THE SNOW

selected 2015 poems from long-out-of-print chapbooks, including

SATORI IN LAKE CHARLES
FLAGS NO LONGER AT HALF MAST
INVENTING ONE’S OWN LAND
MANIPULATING AMBIGUITY
SCULPTURE GARDEN IN THE SNOW
MONUMENTAL MOVEMENTS
LIARS IN A STRANGE RAINY WORLD

44-page perfect-bound paperback, available from all international Amazon outlets

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SATORI IN NATCHEZ

contains 7 six-page open-field poems composed in Natchez, Mississippi, in 2016, previously available in long-out-of-print chapbooks:

GUEST REGISTER
NEW JERUSALEM
MELTDOWN
TIME CRYSTALS
THE DIFFICULTIES, THE IMPOSSIBILITIES
SATORI IN NATCHEZ
ARISING, ABIDING, AND DECAY

60-page perfect-bound paperback, available from all international Amazon outlets

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BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU

contains the five six-page poems I composed in St. Landry, Louisiana, staying on the banks of Bayou Teche, during May of 2016, which initially appeared as five separate 41-copy-edition KSE chapbooks, all of which are out of print:
Bridge On The Bayou
Revelation In Slow Motion
Reconditioning
Satori In Opelousas
Scrapple

8″ x 10″ perfect-bound paperback, a size that allows these open-field poems to fully breathe…available from all international Amazon outlets

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DOWN AND OUT IN GULFPORT AND BILOXI

contains three six-page poems composed on the Gulf Coast in 2015, previously available as separate KSE chapbooks:

DOWN AND OUT IN GULFPORT AND BILOXI 

THIRTY SECONDS OVER PENSACOLA 

PANAMA CITY BLUES

8″ x 10″ perfect-bound paperback….available from all international Amazon outlets

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and still available from The Ruminant Press, in Massachusetts (though they are down to their last dozen copies), the shared book with Michael Casey, published to commemorate our joint reading in Hadley, Massachusetts, in June 2018, CULTURE OF COMPLIANCE….half poems of mine, half poems of Michael Casey’s….the link to order that is below

order from The Ruminant

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Michael Casey and I hold each other’s books, June 2018

13 Links to Recent Posts at BTC

BILL SHUTE COLUMN EVERY OTHER TUESDAY AT BLOG TO COMM!

I’ve been writing for two punk-rooted magazines for over 30 years, BLACK TO COMM (now known as BLOG TO COMM in its online form) and UGLY THINGS. I went on hiatus from both in the late 1990’s and the early 2000’s as life events got in the way, but I’ve been back on board with both for many years now.

At BTC, I now have a column that runs on alternate Tuesdays. If you subscribe to the Kendra Steiner Editions Facebook page (and if you don’t, you should!), I send a link to each BTC piece when it appears online. For those who don’t do FB, here are links to some of the recent pieces, going back to mid-December. The schedule presently is APRIL 9, APRIL 23, MAY 7, and then every other Tuesday after that. Hundreds of people read these every week they are out, and I wind up getting more immediate feedback about these pieces more often than about anything else I write. UGLY THINGS comes out only three times a year, so I get feedback for the 6-8 week period after each issue comes out, and when I issue a new poetry book, people find those gradually, so response is spread over 12-18 months….and also prose sells better than poetry in the current environment.

Some of these pieces are not just reviews but have a faux-memoir element to them (I announce upfront that these are somewhat fictionalized in case I am ever on Oprah—-as if that would ever happen in this lifetime!—-and someone calls me out, saying “that didn’t really happen”), and those tend to get even more of a reaction than the straight reviews (though even those, in the tradition of one of my literary heroes, Washington Irving, are written in the voice of a persona who is a character–think about how someone like Roy Rogers would “play himself” in a film–he was playing his public persona). I should point out that the BTC pieces generally appear about 4 months after they are written.

Chris should be commended for keeping true to the punk spirit, which was always more of an attitude and stance than anything doctrinaire and certainly never about a specific musical form….not even exclusively about music. From pub-rock bands like Eddie and The Hot Rods or the Count Bishops through Throbbing Gristle and Metal Machine Music and Z’ev. Casting the net wider, as was always the intention, Andy Warhol and William Burroughs were totally punk. Was there ever anything more punk than films such as BLOOD FEAST or PINK FLAMINGOS? Literary figures from the past such as Gertrude Stein and Wyndham Lewis were certainly role models for any aspiring punk….as were LaMonte Young and Harry Partch and John Cage and Sun Ra. As were Johnny Carroll or The Swamp Rats or Chet Baker. Chris “gets” that. Those of us who lived through that era “get” it. The period was kind of like a boot camp that you lived through, it toughened you and deepened you and extended you beyond what you’d ever have imagined, and then you were released to go your own way and APPLY what you learned in whatever way you felt was true. If you are trying to re-live 1977 or 1979, you didn’t learn a thing. Each of us had our own unique trajectory out of those years and into the future and into everyday life. The beauty is in the diversity, the multiplicity of trajectories. Every generation has its own analogous cultural experience and its own analogous set of epiphanies, and some presently in their teens and twenties are in the midst of that now, and I wish them well and look forward to the ways in which they will grow and evolve and deepen and extend their range, building their foundation from the flotsam and jetsam of previous generations. I have faith in the future….they certain can’t screw things up as badly as most of my generation and the one before it did!

So check out where I’ve landed, via these prose-blasts. I hope you all find these BTC pieces entertaining and informative and enjoyable reading! And check back there every other Tuesday.

PRAIRIE PALS (1942), PRC western with the Frontier Marshals (Bill “Cowboy Rambler” Boyd, Art Davis, and Lee Powell)

prairie pals

DOCTOR BLOODBATH (1987), slasher film from director Nick Millard

Doctor Bloodbath

MY CASINO CAPER (2014), audiobook written and performed by Edd “Kookie” Byrnes

My Casino Caper

WANTED: SABATA (1970), Italian western starring Brad Harris

Wanted: Sabata

I WANT TO BE ALONE….AT THE GAS PUMP, essay

I Want To Be Alone

WYATT EARP FRONTIER MARSHAL, VOLUME FOUR, Gwandanaland reprint of Charlton “Wyatt Earp” comic books from 1960-1961

Wyatt Earp 4

THE RINGO KID #24, early 70’s Marvel western comic, reprinting 1950’s material

Ringo Kid

GUNFIGHTERS #72, 1982 Charlton western comic, reprinting older material

Gunfighters

THE WHISTLER, VOLUME 10, Radio Archives CD set of 1945-46 west coast radio mysteries

Whistler

MR. EDISON’S CHRISTMAS, special Christmas column, reflecting upon a Document Records collection of holiday recordings from the Thomas Edison Archives, 1906-1927

Mr. Edison’s Christmas

SPEED SPAULDING COLLECTION FROM ‘FAMOUS FUNNIES’, Golden Age Reprints collection of vintage 1940-41 comics

Speed Spaulding

OUTLAWS OF THE WEST #82, 1979 Charlton comic reprinting earlier material, most of this piece is devoted to my one-time room-mate who went to Vegas for the weekend and came back with a new wife

Outlaws Of The West

PATTI’S GOOD LIFE SWEET POTATO PIE, comments on Patti LaBelle’s fifty-cent sweet potato pie and Bob Dylan’s October 2018 show in Sugar Land, Texas

Sweet Potato Pie

Jack Kerouac in the Public Domain???? Hmmm….

It’s hard to believe that ANY of Jack Kerouac’s published works would have fallen into the public domain, and when they eventually do, I’d assume that THE TOWN AND THE CITY would be the first one to assume PD status, as it was the first one published.

Recently, I saw two of my favorite Kerouac works offered in low-priced reprints, billed as a “facsimile of the original 1960 edition,” available from both Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as other online book retailers. I had a feeling that “these won’t be available for very long,”  so I took the plunge and bought both, SCRIPTURE only $4.95, and TRISTESSA only $7.50. There is also a low-priced “facsimile” of MAGGIE CASSIDY available, though I did not purchase that.

The texts of each certainly are exact reproductions of the 1960 versions of TRISTESSA (published by Avon) and SCRIPTURE (published by Totem/Corinth). The TRISTESSA one I know very well as it is clearly taken from the same printing used for the 1970’s version of the novel published by McGraw-Hill, which I owned as a teenager and carried around with me and read probably 15 times and almost memorized.

TRISTESSA is presently in print from Penguin, available everywhere. SCRIPTURE is in print from City Lights, available everywhere where quality Beat literature is sold.

These two new “facsimile” books are clearly print-on-demand editions. Does anyone know what’s going on here? Is there some loophole that allows these publications–some kind of domestic protection-gap? Or were they licensed from the rights-holder? SCRIPTURE is a relatively short book of 66 aphorisms and will never have wide appeal. TRISTESSA, though, is a novel, and this is a handsome edition, selling for about half of Penguin’s. It will surely cut into their market. I’d be tempted to order a dozen copies and give them to friends….

One wonders what the backstory is here….I’m sure the Kerouac estate would be interested….I will not name the publisher here, in case these are proper and legal (you can easily Google them and find out for yourself), because I do not intend to cast any aspersions….just wondering….

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NOTE: Above is the 1970’s McGraw-Hill edition of TRISTESSA. The new “facsimile” printing uses the same text layout of the book.

ANGORA FEVER: THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF EDWARD D. WOOD, JR. (Bear Manor Media, 2019)

ANGORA FEVER: THE COLLECTED SHORT STORIES OF EDWARD D. WOOD, JR.

Edited and with a foreword by Bob Blackburn

available in both softcover and hardcover, 451 pages

published by Bear Manor Media, issued 15 March 2019

Stop the presses! Those who enjoyed the OR BOOKS collection of Ed Wood’s short fiction from a few years ago, BLOOD SPATTERS QUICKLY, will be very excited to learn that the film and popular culture press Bear Manor Media has just issued a new 450-page collection with even more Wood short pieces, 60 of them, with NO repetition from the OR volume.

I’m reading a story a day (they are often just 5-7 pages), and after the first eight of them, I’m quite impressed. The shorter format allows Wood to basically riff on a theme in a unified way—-it would not be surprising to learn that these pieces were each written in one surge of work, fueled by coffee and/or bourbon/vodka/whatever Wood drank. Wood was fortunate in that he was a known quantity to the people who paid him to write these stories for porn or fetish or soft-porn magazines, and that if the stories managed to strike certain publisher-requested chords somewhere in them, the rest of the story’s content did not matter, as long as it fit into a generally sleazy or fever-dream-like kind of mood (for instance, one early story was published in a garter-oriented magazine, so Wood grafted some details about garters onto a story he was probably planning to write anyway). The publishers knew the man would deliver the goods.

Wood loved crime stories–not only were some of his films explicitly crime films (JAIL BAIT and THE SINISTER URGE), but others had a strong crime element (GLEN OR GLENDA’s police investigator, the police in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE or in NIGHT OF THE GHOULS), and his novels often relied on the conventions of paperback-original crime novels or pulp crime stories as a frame on which to hang the sexual content. That feel is present here too, as is his other favorite field, horror.

Quickly written fiction or magazine pieces have a kind of flow and dynamism to them—-think of Jack Kerouac’s THE SUBTERRANEANS or TRISTESSA—-and one often finds this quality in the pulp-magazine genre fiction that Wood so clearly loved reading when he was growing up (its influence is all over his films and writings). The pace of the writing picks up and carries along the reader as if the reader is caught in a flood-water and carried downstream–you go with the flow, a dynamic flow that pulls the reader along, almost like a surfer riding a wave until it crashes. The writer has a central motif, and he works it at a pace beyond rational thought until the piece is over.

To use the surfer riding a wave until it crashes analogy for Wood, the stories I’ve read so far tend to “crash” with twist endings, or violent endings, or depressing fatalistic endings. Wood would have liked the end of EASY RIDER, where the heroes get blown away, or the various Al Adamson films where the nominal “heroes” get killed in the last 15 minutes of the film. They deliver a cheap thrill, and these stories are all about cheap thrills.

I generally do not review something I have not finished reading or watching or listening to yet, but I wanted to alert you to this existence of this book. It’s extremely un-PC in pretty much every way, but it’s a window into a world that no longer exists the way it once did (the attitudes linger, though), and of most value, a window into the amazing mind of Edward D. Wood, Jr.

It’s a shame that Wood did not live until the advent of the SOV slasher films of the 80’s and 90’s, as some of these stories are cut (no pun intended) from that cloth, and of course Wood’s 1960 feature film THE SINISTER URGE is a forerunner of those….and the first two stories in this collection could be adaptations of gruesome, fatalistic slasher films, one with a male slasher who hates women, one with a female slasher who hates men. I could see Wood perhaps getting some regional financing (were he still alive in the mid-to-late 80’s) to shoot 3 or 4 SOV horror-tinged slasher films (with some police procedural elements and a Kelton-esque local cop investigating) back to back in three weeks, and going to, say, Texas or New Mexico or Wisconsin and having a late-career revival, not unlike Andy Milligan did with the made-in-Los-Angeles-films he finished his career with. There would have been a feature story about the films in CULT MOVIES or some similar magazine, and Ed Wood would have been back in the driver’s seat, where he belonged.

With the publication of the earlier Wood collection from OR Books and now this massive collection from Bear Manor, neither of which has been taken off the market the way some of the reprintings of Wood’s novels were a number of years ago (and I was told by someone close to that situation that they were ordered off the market by legal entities representing Wood’s estate), perhaps we can see something like a comprehensive republication program of Wood’s books, the way the now-defunct Woodpile Press attempted to do it. These red-hot, grungy, vodka-fueled prose-blasts are the literary equivalent of some lo-fi home-made 1977 punk 45, whose sole raison d’etre is to offend, but which is catchy in an abrasive way and makes you want to play it over and over.

Though today they’d be offending different people for different reasons (how ironic!), I’m sure Wood’s prose writings still would have that effect today. Wood was proud of his these pieces and listed them on his resume (those listings are cited in this book, where available). I hope that wherever he is today (and wherever that is, let’s hope he’s having dinner at a celestial version of the Brown Derby with Lyle Talbot, John Agar, and Reed Howes), he somehow is aware that his old banged-out-quickly-for-a-deadline-and-pocket-money stories are back in print from legitimate presses and are being enjoyed by new generations today. I can just imagine him offering to write some more for you and asking when you need them by….THAT is the Ed Wood spirit!