STATIC STRUT by Bill Shute
KSE #421, 125 pages, 6″ x 9″ perfect bound, softcover, $6.95 cover price
published 2 January 2024
available for immediate order in the USA from https://amzn.to/48GeYC5
also available as a local purchase with local postage from Amazon in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Japan, and Australia…
Press Release: STATIC STRUT is a one hundred page open-field poem, extending the format/technique used in Shute’s previous poetry books NEUTRAL, TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (After Murillo), COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES, TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN, and RIVERSIDE FUGUE.
STATIC STRUT is an expansive work, presented on a large canvas, influenced by the minimal approach of poet Frank Samperi and composer Jürg Frey, along with the diptych paintings of Andy Warhol.
Shute’s work is rooted in the post-Projective Verse poetics of Blackburn, Berrigan, and Eigner, but completely his own. The poetry echoes his work with such avant-garde musician-composers as Rambutan, Derek Rogers, Mari Rubio (aka More Eaze), Fossils, and Alfred 23 Harth, while being steeped in the culture and particulars of the present-day Gulf Coast and South-Central Texas.
The book’s epigraph comes from composer Morton Feldman, “silence is my substitute for counterpoint.”
A career-spanning Selected Poems, Junk Sculpture From The New Gilded Age, was published by Moloko Print in Germany in late 2021.
In 2023, Shute and Albany-based musician RAMBUTAN released a collaborative music-and-poetry album BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, available on the Tape Drift label.
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I don’t want to repeat what was written here about my January 2023 poetry book NEUTRAL (you can read that write-up by clicking this link: https://kendrasteinereditions.wordpress.com/2023/01/14/new-poetry-book-for-2023-neutral-by-bill-shute-kse-420-available-now-for-immediate-shipment/ ), but STATIC STRUT was written immediately after NEUTRAL (Static Strut was composed between June 2022 and January 2023), and in many ways goes further out on the same limb as the previous work. Each physical page is a complete open-field poem, and as in NEUTRAL, each left-page/right-page combination functions as a diptych, although a number of the left-facing pages are blank (hence my reference to Warhol’s diptych paintings where one side is a monochrome canvas). The entire book works as ONE long-form poem, much like an exhibition of related visual works. Since 2018’s RIVERSIDE FUGUE, I have been working on a much larger canvas, the book-length poem, and in that work I began by using a fugue-like compositional logic, though I have been creating my own long-form structural designs, partially under the influence of composers Morton Feldman and Jürg Frey, whose works I was listening to during the creation of STATIC STRUT, and many of whose compositions could easily be described as a kind of static strut.
Unlike NEUTRAL, which was largely composed in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and contains a good amount of Vicksburg-specific detail, STATIC STRUT creates its own territory…and is both timeless and dealing with contemporary life in this toxic age in which we are situated. Take a 100-page open-field poetry STATIC STRUT for only $6.95.
As always, I thank you for your interest and support.
My poetry-and-music album with RAMBUTAN, ‘Bridge of the Bayou,’ which came out in 2023, is still available from Tape Drift Records: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou
You can sample a track here:
There will be another poetry book coming in the Summer of 2024, PROJECT BLUE, which is a collection of long-out-of-print poems from 2005-2009 KSE chapbooks, along with a brand-new forty-page open-field poem, ‘Project Blue’. The cover image is below:
Kendra Steiner Editions (Bill Shute) 
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