new pocket-sized Bill Shute poetry chapbook, STANZAS FOR KRISHNAMURTI (KSE #424), now available…only $3.95!

STANZAS FOR KRISHNAMURTI (KSE #424)

a newly-written 16-page open-field poem in a convenient 4″ x 6″ pocket format

KSE #424, perfect-bound paperback, only $3.95 from your local A-zon outlet, in whatever country

As a teenager in the Colorado of the 1970’s, I often had one of the City Lights “pocket poets” books in my shirt or pants pocket, to read in a city park, at a bus stop, etc. Now, here is an opportunity for YOU, for only $3.95, to have a pocket-sized volume of new poetry of mine to carry around, providing (I hope) entertainment and enlightenment while out and about. I’ve been doing longer pieces since 2017, the year (I think) I issued my last “chapbook” in the classic KSE format, but those old KSE ‘chapbooks’ WERE NOT something that would fit easily in the pocket or purse, being 8 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches–this new 4×6 form IS.

STANZAS FOR KRISHNAMURTI is a sample work from a series of STANZAS FOR poems, each 16 pages, which will eventually be collected in book form. A second work from this series, STANZAS FOR FLETCHER HENDERSON, will be issued a month after this one, on June 1st.

If you’re already buying something at A-zon that you paid postage on (or you bought enough to get free postage), why not slip this book into your order for only $3.95. I can assure you that it’s unlike anything else you’ll read this year.

Finally, do remember that the title uses the word FOR, not ABOUT. The poems in this series are inspired by the work of the people mentioned (J. Krishnamurti, Fletcher Henderson, Kate Chopin, etc.), though they are not meant to be any kind of paraphrase of or commentary upon that work. However, I took pains for the poems to be CONSISTENT WITH what the persons represented, and those who know the bodies of work of those persons will certainly find specifics/details from that work integrated into the mosaic of the poems. However, someone who’s never heard of the person the work is dedicated to will have no problem reading and understanding my poem–prior knowledge is not needed, although I’d hope that after reading my poem, you’d WANT to further explore the subject of Krishnamurti, Fletcher Henderson, Kate Chopin, etc.

You can order STANZAS FOR KRISHNAMURTI, and support your local working poet, here for only $3.95:

https://amzn.to/3Uk89At

This chapbook is actually my most recent poetry work, being composed in April 2024, and uses the recent lunar eclipse as one of its motifs! This short, accessible work is an excellent entryway into my longer works while still possessing the most essential qualities found in those longer works. Readers of poets such as Paul Blackburn or Ted Berrigan should enjoy STANZAS FOR KRISHNAMURTI (I would hope).

Keep an eye out for STANZAS FOR FLETCHER HENDERSON, the next chapbook in this series, which will be published June 1st.

April 2024 KSE/Bill Shute update

Greetings, everyone. I thought I would step back from daily activities for a moment and catch you all up on my recent and upcoming publications, writing projects, what’s up for this blog, etc.

Ugly Things #65 is out now and ready for purchase. I’ve got TEN (!!!) different pieces in it, covering a wide variety of subjects. Mike Stax’s article on the west coast group THE MOON and their various activities was very informative and well-written, connecting many dots for the reader/listener. I have always been a huge fan of Buzz Clifford’s 1969 Dot Records LP SEE YOUR WAY CLEAR, so it’s great to see that album championed and its backstory revealed (I actually contacted Mr. Clifford about it ten or fifteen years ago and got a friendly communication back from him). Presently, I’m working on another ten reviews for UT #66, and today I’ll be continuing on my coverage of JOHN MAYALL LIVE IN FRANCE 1967-73, a wonderful out-of-the-blue 2 CD/1 DVD set from Repertoire that will be a revelation to the Mayall fan and could surely win over people who’ve heard his name but don’t know his work.

I’m honored to have had a piece of mine published in the acclaimed Dutch ELVIS DAY BY DAY series of books, this time in the 2023 volume, on the recent FTD three-concert box AUGUST SEASON IN VEGAS. Though a Dutch publication, it’s now available easily in the United States via A-zon. Just do a search there for ELVIS DAY BY DAY 2023. You can always check out the daily updates on everything happening in the Elvis World by going to the Elvis Day by Day website (run by the indefatigable Kees Mouwen) at

https://elv75.blogspot.com

The music-and-poetry album I did last year with Rambutan, BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU (on the Tape Drift label) is still available, though physical copies are running low (get yours now). It’s available via Bandcamp: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

January saw the publication of my newest book-length poem STATIC STRUT (see post here in January about that book). Available for only $6.99…

The coming months will see two new poetry releases, a book and a chapbook.

++The chapbook is a brand-new piece (it even includes the Solar Eclipse the other day!) called STANZAS FOR KRISHNAMURTI, one section of a multi-part sequence of STANZAS FOR… poems (each 16 pages) which I’m working on in between other projects. Future poems in this sequence will be dedicated to/inspired by Kate Chopin and Fletcher Henderson (and others), but the one for J. Krishnamurti is done, and I wanted to get it out quickly as a taste of what’s to come. The poem is 16 pages and the book about 24 pages (perfect-bound paperback), in a new-for-KSE “Pocket” size of 4″ x 6″. It will be $3.95 US, as cheap as I can make it and still break even. That will be available on A-zon on May 1. If you are a local, I should have a few extra copies here, so look me up if you want a copy directly from me in the San Antonio area.

++The book is PROJECT BLUE, mostly consisting of pieces from old limited-run chapbooks from the 2006-2008 period in editions of 25 or so, only available briefly from Volcanic Tongue or if you caught me at a local reading in SA or in Austin. It also features a newly written 40-page open-field poem PROJECT BLUE, so the collection spans nearly 20 years of material. This collection of (mostly) older material should be more accessible to the general reader than some of my more-recent longer pieces, so I’ll be putting a bit more effort than usual into promoting PROJECT BLUE. Will let you know when that’s available…

Re: content on this blog in the coming months, I plan to publish here the introductory essay I did a few years back for the book collection WHEN THE TOPIC IS SEX of Ed Wood’s non-fiction prose writing from the early 1970s. Also, two pieces from the 80s and 90s that I still sometimes get requests for: the article about my dealings with Sky Sunlight Saxon in the 1980s, and the article about my conversation with John Cage when he visited SW Virginia circa 1989.

I was not able to take a summer “writing vacation” in 2023, but I will be this year (2024) in the very late summer, hitting SW Louisiana (of course) for 3 days and winding up in Natchez and Vicksburg, Mississippi for 11 days, staying one block from the river in the former, and right on the bank of the river in the latter. Should be the perfect environment to get some atmospheric work done!

Mary Anne and I spent two weeks in Oklahoma and SW Arkansas last month, finally getting to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, visiting my old alma mater and workplace Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, spending a long weekend in the unique mountain town of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and catching a few days of horse racing at Will Rogers Downs in Claremore, Oklahoma, a fine town on Rt. 66 where we stayed. The trip allowed me to push my personal “reset” button from everyday life, and also allowed the two of us to discover and rediscover together some of the wonderful things that the state of Oklahoma and the Ozarks have to offer.

Wishing you all an enjoyable late spring/early summer. Remember, new content is featured here EVERY WEDNESDAY as well as special/irregular pieces such as this one. See you soon…

Oh, a quick shout-out to the Hammett House restaurant in Claremore, Oklahoma, for the finest lamb fries I’ve ever tasted (see above).

new poetry book for 2024…STATIC STRUT by Bill Shute (KSE #421), available now for immediate shipment…

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.

================

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:

‘Bridge On The Bayou’–new poetry-and-music CD from Rambutan & Bill Shute on the Tape Drift label

NOW AVAILABLE: the sound sculpture of RAMBUTAN meets the poetry of BILL SHUTE on the new CD album on the Tape Drift label BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU, which you can order here: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

1.
Bridge On The Bayou 05:41
2.
Revelation in Slow Motion 05:47
3.
Reconditioning 04:57
4.
Satori in Opelousas 04:38
5.
Scrapple 06:20

Over a decade after meeting in upstate NY and performing together twice, San Antonio-based poet Bill Shute and Albany’s Eric Hardiman (aka Rambutan) team up for an official collaboration. “Bridge on the Bayou” features five masterful poems by Shute, written during the sweltering Summer of 2016 while staying on Bayou Teche in Arnaudville, Louisiana. The evocative words and imagery in Shute’s poems are set to music by Hardiman, using a combination of field recordings, random electronics, and guitars. The music and words merge together to create sonic portraits of a dark and murky Louisiana geography.

released April 1, 2023

Poems and readings by Bill Shute, recorded in San Antonio, Texas. Music by Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), recorded in Delmar, New York. Poems available in book form from Kendra Steiner Editions. Cover photo by Wyatt Doyle. 2023

You can sample the first track below via You Tube:

https://youtu.be/PzVyIlpyRlI

The five poems comprising BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU were written in the summer of 2016 and published in book form in 2017. Here are some excerpts from the original publication announcement:

The words, phrases, and stanzas float on the page; the insects, dirt, leaves, and broken twigs float downstream on Bayou Teche.

BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU….energized particles of language and consciousness with the taste of central Louisiana….five 6-page chapbooks, 30 pages, 30 fields, 30 assemblages, 30 “portholes of consciousness”…..thick pine smoke in our eyes, already moist with tears….husky patriots armed with dogwhistle jargon meet behind the rose hedges….her brother had become inattentive at his job at the meat processing plant, consumed with his quest to find a cache of treasure buried in a brass bucket by retreating French pirates two centuries past….detached, but not indifferent….manifestations of Siva on the horizon….hard trials & great tribulations….

The original paperback edition of the BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU collection can be ordered here:

https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-Bayou-Bill-Shute/dp/1979709084?ref_=ast_author_dp

I had the privilege of working with Eric Hardiman, aka Rambutan, on two poetry-and-music live performances in New York state in the summer of 2011, and at the time we agreed that we wanted to do an album together. Finally, 12 years later, the BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU album has been issued, a new creation Eric and I worked on in late 2022 and early 2023. He has truly captured the atmosphere of the poems, the Central Louisiana vibe, and ‘gets’ the form of the poems (that we are on the same wavelength was very clear from our live work together in NY state in 2011). I am very happy with this album and the response I’ve gotten from folks who have heard it has been very positive.

Grab your copy soon as there are only a few dozen copies left. It’s a professionally duplicated CD with an attractive picture disc. So far it has been featured on Mike Watt’s radio show and on WFMU.

Go to Bandcamp and order your copy now from Tape Drift Records: https://rambutan.bandcamp.com/album/bridge-on-the-bayou

I’m not selling this online myself–orders are handled by Tape Drift–but if you are a local here in San Antonio or a friend I will run into in-person, let me know in advance and I’ll get you a copy, as I have a few extras. I am devoting my energy toward long-form book length poems in recent years, as regular readers of this blog know, so I don’t anticipate doing another project like this in the next few years, meaning you should grab this one while you can. Thanks to Rambutan/Eric for such a wonderful job on this project…and thanks also to Wyatt Doyle of New Texture, who provided the perfect cover photo for the album.

coming in May 2022…’LOCKDOWN CORRESPONDENCES’ from BILL SHUTE (KSE #419)

LOCKDOWN CORRESPONDENCES

by Bill Shute

contains the book-length poems TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN, COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES, and TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (AFTER MURILLO), all written and originally published during the Covid lockdown (2020-2021).

154 pages, hardcover, 6″ x 9″

KSE #419

expected publication date: late Spring/early Summer 2022

$16.00 ISBN: 9798757742496

cover art by Wyatt Doyle (see image above)

Although the Covid-19 pandemic isn’t exactly over, the most dangerous periods in 2020 and 2021 have passed, the periods when businesses and schools were closed and/or gravitated to operating online, when hospitals were full of the dying, when people were kept apart from their loved ones.

I did continue to work remotely, so I had no time off, but with nowhere to go during my free time and with not having to commute to the workplace downtown, I had more time to dedicate to poetry writing, and I composed three long-form works in the 40-50 page range which further extended the poetic form I developed in RIVERSIDE FUGUE while capturing life during a pandemic and lockdown.

These three works were published independently in 2020 and 2021 and have been well-received, though I myself never thought of them as any kind of trilogy or any unified series of works. However, a number of readers (I’ve gotten at least a dozen e-mails and texts on this subject) have suggested to me that I should consider combining the three pieces into one book, presented as a document of the pandemic/lockdown, and they argued that there is a consistency within the images/content and form/structure which is perhaps clearer to the reader-consumer than it was to the writer-creator. They also suggested that readers looking for literary responses to the pandemic, now that it is more in the rearview mirror with each passing day, would locate these works more easily in the literary marketplace if they were marketed as “pandemic poems” in a more obvious manner.

I’m certainly happy to oblige, and thus LOCKDOWN CORRESPONDENCES was created…and will be published in HARDCOVER by KSE in late Spring/early Summer of 2022 (so as not to compete with the original softcover separate volumes, which are still available).

In terms of “new” poetry, I continue to work (when I have time) on a piece tentatively titled NEUTRAL, which is both more expansive than the recent poems but also more minimal (I learned a lot from my close study of Frank Samperi’s poetry as a teenager back in the 1970s and I often find myself returning to his work), or more accurately ‘pointillistic’ (I’ve been listening to a lot of Jürg Frey in the last year or two, often for entire days while composing/editing/formatting NEUTRAL, along with Webern at his most astringent and of course my regular companion the John Cage ‘Number Pieces’). I began work on NEUTRAL in March 2021, focused on it during my Summer 2021 writing vacation in Vicksburg, Mississippi (and what a wonderful time that was!), and Opelousas, Louisiana, and will return to it during this coming Summer’s writing vacation in Central Louisiana (never too far from Evangeline Downs). NEUTRAL is providing me with the largest canvas I’ve ever worked on in poetry, so it will continue to take time, and I would not expect a draft to be ready for publication before late 2022 or early 2023.

Until then, LOCKDOWN CORRESPONDENCES will be ready in a month or two, and I’ll let you know when it’s live and ready to order.

Oh, and if anyone asks, I’m using the term CORRESPONDENCES in the Swedenborgian manner….

Summer 2021 Writing Vacation in Mississippi/Louisiana

I’ll be heading out soon for a two-week poetry writing vacation, split between two beautiful and historic areas with atmosphere a-plenty. The first week will be spent in downtown Vicksburg, Mississippi, just a block and a half from the Yazoo River

Where the Yazoo River feeds into the Mississippi River in Vicksburg

and the second half will be spent in Opelousas, Louisiana, at Evangeline Downs racetrack.

I’m working on a new book-length poetic project, using Robert Lowell’s NOTEBOOK poems and the minimalist poems of Frank Samperi as my starting points, but also with the influence of long-form music constructions from Jurg Frey and John Cage.

Of course, how the end product winds up is anyone’s guess….new avenues and forms will open up, new connections will be made, and I hope to have the finished product ready by early 2022. The tentative title is NEUTRAL.

Until then, you can get a copy of my most recent poetry book, TWO SELF PORTRAITS (AFTER MURILLO),  for only $7.95 here: http://bit.ly/TWOSELF

There will continue to be regular new content here at the KSE blog every few days (which was loaded in the Spring) throughout July and into Summer/Fall, so keep checking back for interesting film and music offerings. Otherwise, see you back in-person in August…when I return to San Antonio, and it’s back to the salt mine…

And there’s also this collection of 2005-2017 poems coming out in Germany later this year:

new Bill Shute poetry book now available: TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (After Murillo), KSE #418

available for order (only $7.95) here: http://bit.ly/TWOSELF

This has been available for sale online for a while, and I’ve gotten some e-mails from readers who’ve already received and read their copies, so I needed to kick myself to get a release announcement up…and here it is.

My newest long-form poem TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (AFTER MURILLO), which is in a similar diptych format to my previous book COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES…this time a 42-page work, in two 21-page sections.

Only two self-portraits survive (see pic below) from the great Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), although he may well have painted others that do not survive. One of these dates from his 30s, the other from his 50s. I have used these two self-portraits, done in those two distinct periods in his life, as the inspiration for two fictionalized “self-portraits” set in the life of my present-day viewpoint character, in his 30s and then in his 50s, in the two halves of the diptych. As a teenager back in the 1970s, I read many times John Ashbery’s long poem SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR, inspired by the painting of the same name from the Italian painter Parmigianino (1503-1540), and in a way I feel that I’m using the Murillo works as a prompt/catalyst for poetic creation in a manner similar to what Ashbery did, though of course completely different in result, with mine being in the idiosyncratic Bill Shute style, and Ashbery being both a genius and a poet with a very different idiosyncratic style. Why not aim high!

It’s time to put the diptych form behind me, so I’ve moved on to a very different kind of poetic form for my next project, which I will continue work on during my Summer 2021 writing vacation in Mississippi and Louisiana. I’ve been a reader of Robert Lowell’s various “Notebook” collections (I prefer the more assemblage-based NOTEBOOK and NOTEBOOK 1967-68 to the more tamed and traditionally organized versions of that raw material found in HISTORY and FOR LIZZIE AND HARRIET) for many years/decades (and I have also been studying closely the recently published expanded version of Lowell’s THE DOLPHIN, with two complete and different versions, a work in a similar from to the NOTEBOOK works) , and I’m working on a longer-form piece that incorporates those influences along with the sublime minimalist poetry of the late Frank Samperi, which I’ve been a reader of since the 1970s. I should not say anymore about at this ongoing work (being superstitious). I should add that this present poetic wave I have been riding ever since RIVERSIDE FUGUE (2019), and it grew out of AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN (2018). The form and method of composition of every piece since AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN is rooted in the previous one but goes beyond it, and new hurdles are set for me to jump during the composing and editing, leading me to (IMHO) stretch myself and extend my reach. I hope you’ll agree.

If you’d like to read some of the older pieces from 5-10-15 years ago, my German selected poems collection JUNK SCULPTURE FROM THE NEW GILDED AGE will be appearing in mid-to-late 2021 from Moloko Print in Germany, and as that comes closer, I’ll let you know the details. This book was commissioned in 2018 and I sent the manuscript to the publisher in 2018, so at this point it seems like EARLY SELECTED POEMS, but it is a handy sampling of a number of pieces (90+ pages) from 2005-2017 which have only appeared in small-distribution chapbooks which are long out-of-print, none of which have ever appeared in a book-length collection, and it includes such popular pieces as LAMENT FOR THE LIVING, my poem about the final days of Chet Baker, which opens the new collection. I still get e-mails from people wanting copies of that, which was originally published in March 2010 (11 years ago!).

You can read about and order my recent poetry books published through KSE at the Bill Shute author page at Amazon: https://amzn.to/2XRNgjl

Please note that the new book, TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (After Murillo) is for sale at only $7.95, a dollar less than the previous book, which I hope will encourage more readers to take the plunge.

Murillo: The Self-Portraits October 30, 2017 though February 4, 2018

Those interested in learning more about the two surviving Murillo self-portraits are encouraged to find a copy of MURILLO: THE SELF PORTRAITS by Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, published in 2017 by the Frick Collection.

This thin and trim (just like Mr. Ashbery in that period!) edition of SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR is the one I used to carry around with me as a teenager (I actually spent more time overall back then with Ashbery’s THE TENNIS COURT OATH, but that would not fit in my back pocket).

As always, thank you for taking the time to read my various offerings, and I hope you find them interesting and worthwhile….and entertaining.

finishing draft of new poetry book TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (After Murillo)

from Murillo’s Prodigal Son sequence

Thankfully, I have a few days this coming week off-work where I can spend full-time finishing the draft of my newest long-form poem TWO SELF-PORTRAITS (AFTER MURILLO), which is in a similar diptych format to my previous book COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES…this time a 42-page work, in two 21-page sections.

Only two self-portraits survive (see pic below) from the great Spanish Baroque painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), although he may well have painted others that do not survive. One of these dates from his 30s, the other from his 50s. I have used these two self-portraits, done in those two distinct periods in his life, as the inspiration for two fictionalized “self-portraits” set in the life of my present-day viewpoint character, in his 30s and then in his 50s, in the two halves of the diptych. As a teenager back in the 1970s, I read many times John Ashbery’s long poem SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR, inspired by the painting of the same name from the Italian painter Parmigianino (1503-1540), and in a way I feel that I’m using the Murillo works as a prompt/catalyst for poetic creation in a manner similar to what Ashbery did, though of course completely different in result with mine being in the idiosyncratic Bill Shute style, and Ashbery being both a genius and a poet with a very different idiosyncratic style. Why not aim high!

I am hoping to have this new work finished and then edited by the end of May. Then I will move on to a very different kind of poetic form for my next project, which I will work on during my Summer 2021 writing vacation in Mississippi and Louisiana.

My German selected poems collection JUNK SCULPTURE FROM THE NEW GILDED AGE will, I hope, be appearing in mid-to-late 2021 from Moloko Print, and as that comes closer, I’ll let you know the details. This book was commissioned in 2018 and I sent the manuscript to the publisher in 2018, so at this point it seems like EARLY SELECTED POEMS, but it is a handy sampling of a number of pieces (100+pages) from 2005-2017 which have only appeared in small-distribution chapbooks which are long out-of-print, none of which have ever appeared in a book-length collection, and it includes such popular pieces as LAMENT FOR THE LIVING, my poem about the final days of Chet Baker, which opens the new collection. I still get e-mails from people wanting copies of that, which was originally published in March 2010 (11 years ago!).

Until then, if you have not yet read COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES, you can get it for only $8.95 from any international Amazon platform.

Here is a shortlink for ordering for North American readers (outside of North America, just enter BILL SHUTE, COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES into the Amazon search box and you can get it as a local purchase with local postage): http://amzn.to/3rH24iB

Although some of my poetry books for other presses are sold out and no longer in-print (such as TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY, POINT LOMA PURPLE, CULTURE OF COMPLIANCE, and APPROACHING THE APPARENT), the KSE books from 2016 on are still available and can be ordered along with COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES. Those include RIVERSIDE FUGUE; TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN; NO BRICKS, NO TEMPLES; AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN; SCULPTURE GARDEN IN THE SNOW; SATORI IN NATCHEZ; BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU; and DOWN AND OUT IN GULFPORT AND BILOXI.

As always, I hope you find these works interesting and worthwhile….

BILL SHUTE (San Antonio, Texas)

Murillo: The Self-Portraits

off to central Louisiana for 10 days of poetry work

 

Off soon to a cottage on the Atchafalaya River in South Central Louisiana for ten days of work on my new book-length poetry project, COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES.  I’ll have no internet there, but regular content (already uploaded) will still be appearing here at the KSE blog while I’m gone, so stay tuned. If you need me for anything, text me.

Due to the Covid-19 situation, I’m not making my customary stopover at one of the Louisiana racetracks, Delta Downs or Evangeline Downs, just going straight to my waterfront cottage and working full-time on this new two-section, 40-page open-field poem, inspired by Andy Warhol’s two-panel (diptych) paintings and Gertrude Stein’s spring-loaded incremental repetition.

Since moving back to long-form poems in 2016—-my first two poetry books, TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY (2005) and POINT LOMA PURPLE (2006) were both book-length works)—-I’ve been able to break through on to a new and higher plane and have composed and published a new long-form poetic work each year since. It’s not hard to understand the intoxicating appeal of the room-sized canvas to painters such as Twombly or Hockney or Warhol, or its musical equivalent to composers such as Feldman or LaMonte Young. I remember being in the presence of Warhol’s 25.5 feet wide CAMOUFLAGE LAST SUPPER and feeling that power. Of course, I am a lifelong student of Wordsworth’s THE PRELUDE and THE EXCURSION as well as Melvillle’s CLAREL, to bring our discussion back to poetry, although in the poems from AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN on, my compositional method and poetic super-structure are more along the lines of a Twombly or a Feldman, which has led to the feeling of self-liberation described above. I’m also playing for much higher stakes….and, to mix metaphors, working without a net at a much higher altitude!

All of these longer poems of mine from 2016 on are still available in attractive perfect-bound paperback editions:

DOWN AND OUT IN GULFPORT AND BILOXI (2016)

BRIDGE ON THE BAYOU (2017)

SATORI IN NATCHEZ (2018)

AMONG THE NEWLY FALLEN (2018)

RIVERSIDE FUGUE (2019)

TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN (2020)

Just click on the link below for direct ordering:

Bill Shute author page at Amazon

https://amzn.to/2YZFJRp

https://amzn.to/2YZFJRp

The new work, COMPLEMENTARY ANGLES, is in some ways a direct extension of the previous book, published a few months ago, TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN, so you might want to check that out. It was released in May 2020, right at the worst period of the publishing slowdown, when it took 4-6 weeks to get a copy from the publisher….in the periods when they were even accepting orders. That did not help the book’s visibility any in what should have been its ‘launch’. However, if you order it now, you should have it in-hand in 7-10 business days. Click below and it will be winging its way to you soon….

https://amzn.to/2YZFJRp

As always, thank you for your support and for your taking the time to read. Some people have been reading my various writings since the early 1980’s. As they say on Southwest Airlines, “we know you have a choice….”

https://amzn.to/2YZFJRp

Fossils & Bill Shute album “Florida Nocturne Poems” available for free at Bandcamp!

Happy to see that the 2017 version of the KSE music-and-poetry album combining the Hamilton, Ontario sound-art collective FOSSILS and my readings of the four FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS from 2012….an album that sold out in a few months when it came out…is now available to all via streaming or download at Fossils’s Bandcamp page.

Here is the original write-up on KSE #362:

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New interpretations of Bill Shute’s 2012 “Florida Nocturne Poems” with Canada’s free-improv/noise masters FOSSILS

FOSSILS & BILL SHUTE

FLORIDA NOCTURNE REVISITED (KSE #362, CDR album)

contains the pieces

SHADES OF NIGHT DESCENDING

MONDO DAYTONA

 PEACH COBBLER IN THE POKER ROOM

JUPITER IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR

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FOSSILS ARE

Daniel Farr and David Payne

Texts and vocal, Bill Shute

Music recorded in Hamilton, ON

Poetry tracks recorded in Austin, TX by Mari Rubio

issued March 2017

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Longtime readers will remember the four poetry chapbooks in the FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS sequence, composed during my Summer 2012 “writing vacation” in Central Florida. For a number of reasons, I will never forget that sojourn. First, it was very satisfying and covered a lot of territory–and much of my writing happened at dog-tracks. Second, I passed through Sanford, Florida, and it was soon after the tragic Trayvon Martin shooting there. Third, on the last day of that trip, in a Jacksonville (a city with more police presence than I’ve ever seen) motel across the street from a Bob Evans restaurant, I received a call telling me that my mother had passed away.

In 2014, FOSSILS and I created an album mixing their sound sculpture with my 2012 Florida poems, alternating music and poetry. That album was well-received and we were very happy with it. Now, we present a NEW interpretation of the Florida Nocturne Poems with FOSSILS sound sculpture woven into the poems themselves (or is it that the poem texts are woven into the FOSSILS sound fabric–probably both), not presented separately.

As I listen to these tracks, I feel that these poems perfectly capture what I was trying to do….and what I am still doing in my present works. The collage of image and incident is peppered with just the right amount of each element, and the shards are placed into suspension to create the perfect assemblage. If you are not familiar with my work, this would be a good place to start. The themes I dealt with in 2012, alas, are even more relevant today. And when you weave these readings into the rich and deeply-textured FOSSILS sound sculptures—-which are heavily percussive and also include found sounds and conversation—-you have a sensory experience rooted in the heat and humidity of Central Florida in the summer.

Whatever people may think of this product, I can assure you no one else is doing anything remotely like it. Fossils and I have tossed this message in a bottle on to the polluted ocean of 2017 society. Let it wash up on your shore, open the bottle, and give it a try….

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Free download or streaming of the album at

https://fossills.bandcamp.com/album/florida-nocturne-poems

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I was very happy with the four-chapbook FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS sequence, and I don’t think those pieces are included in any in-print collection, and they are not included in the selected poems book (Junk Sculpture From The New Gilded Age) of mine coming out from Moloko Print in Germany, so maybe I’ll look into putting them together as a stand-alone volume….if I ever get around to it.

coming in June 2020, the new book-length poem from Bill Shute, Tomorrow Won’t Bring The Rain (KSE #416)

BILL  SHUTE

TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN

KSE #416

54 pages, perfect-bound, ISBN 9798639051586

a new book-length open-field poem, in three sections

composed June 2019-April 2020 in Bexar County, Texas

I’m hoping that this will be available by June 2020, but that may not be in my power to control in the present Coronavirus environment, where poetry (and books of any kind) are considered non-essential.

This was begun immediately after the completion of RIVERSIDE FUGUE.

As always, I hope you find it interesting and worthwhile

More details in June, when it’s ready at the printers….

“Silence is my substitute for counterpoint”  –Morton Feldman

now available…”new” poetry book, NO BRICKS, NO TEMPLES, from Bill Shute

Since August, I’ve been working on a new book-length poem (TOMORROW WON’T BRING THE RAIN), which I hope to finish this coming June during my 2020 writing vacation in Louisiana. It is a  long-term project (as RIVERSIDE FUGUE was), which I work on every week, stanza by stanza, fitting each piece into its proper place within the 45-page mosaic.

In the non-poetry arena, I still have 6 to 8 reviews in every issue of UGLY THINGS (working on the reviews for #53 now, due in mid-Feb), the other-weekly column at BLOG TO COMM (which I need to get caught up on…I like to keep 3-4 months ahead of schedule there), and I’m doing the introductory essay for a volume of non-fiction magazine articles by the great Edward D. Wood, Jr., a kind of sequel to the BLOOD SPATTERS QUICKLY and ANGORA FEVER collections of fiction. That piece is due with the book’s editor the first of February. And let’s not forget the half-finished pieces on jazz and film and literature and art I have in the draft box here at the KSE blog, which I’d like to finish sometime this year!

Regarding the “new” poetry book mentioned in the title of this post, over the last two months, I’ve been slowly reading and savoring (and making notes in) the book LIKE ANDY WARHOL by Jonathan Flatley (University of Chicago Press, 2017), one of the most satisfying critical books about the arts I’ve read in the last few years. Although the book has a thousand worthwhile insights and makes many valuable connections, one minor section which got its hooks into me touched upon Warhol’s 1980’s re-appropriation of his own appropriated 1960’s images, which I read the same day that read about the restoration of JOHN THE DRUNKARD, Bud Pollard’s 1940’s re-editing of his early 30’s horror film THE HORROR into a temperance film, with some new framing footage shot that re-contextualizes the earlier footage as alcohol-inspired hallucinations. As a long-time admirer of the “patchwork” genre among exploitation films, I started to think about film-makers who’d cannibalized their own product to create new product, as Al Adamson took THE FAKERS and turned it into HELL’S BLOODY DEVILS….or took PSYCHO A-GO-GO and turned it into FIEND WITH THE ELECTRONIC BRAIN and then transformed it again into BLOOD OF GHASTLY HORROR.

Inspired by Warhol and Al Adamson (not to mention Godfrey Ho and Jerry Warren), I took sections and lines from some lesser-known chapbooks of mine (from 2008-2014), ones most of you reading this would not have encountered (such as ENVY and JAYWALKERS), and ones that have not been reprinted since and aren’t in my Selected Poems volume coming out (I hope!) from Moloko Print in Germany next year. It was interesting to revisit these earlier pieces, as they are not the kind of thing I’d write today, both in form (I was doing syllable counting in some of them, based on a mis-reading of mid-60’s Creeley), and in content (some images are clearly out of Theosophical readings)—-and in the case of what became the final two pages of Section Seven (of Eight) of NO BRICKS, NO TEMPLES, I clearly remember being on the main drag in Lawrence, Kansas, when the key image pattern came to me  (in 2014, so this would be the latest material in the book). However, those older stanzas and lines have been re-purposed (see the last stanza of last year’s RIVERSIDE FUGUE if you’re a fan of that word) with the structural and compositional approach I’ve been using for the last 2-3 years, which creates an interesting tension….

With a mix of older and newer on a number of levels, and a wide variety of verse forms and imagery, NO BRICKS, NO TEMPLES should be an interesting and worthwhile way to kill an hour or two, if you’re so inclined.

Since it was assembled from pre-existing materials, I’ve priced it a dollar lower than other recent book-length poems of mine…. so if someone gave you an Amazon gift card for the holidays, why not spend $8.95 of it on NO BRICKS, NO TEMPLES.

Here is the link for ordering: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1676404597

This is also available as a local purchase at the various European and Asian Amazon outlets, so search for it on your local platform, and it will be printed and mailed to you locally, wherever you are at!

NO BRICKS, NO TEMPLES

a poem in eight parts by BILL SHUTE

KSE #415

43 pages, perfect-bound paperback

$8.95

ISBN:  978-1676404590

published 16 December 2019

 

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Kendra Steiner Editions featured at Free Form Freakout–link to podcast

In early July 2013, I did an extensive interview w/ David Perron at KMSU-FM (Minnesota State University, Mankato) on the legendary Free From Freakout program, discussing my own poetry and background, the history of Kendra Steiner Editions, commentaries on many KSE artists, and a discussion of current and upcoming projects. There’s LOTS of music and a lot of interview—-the whole show runs 2 hrs. 15 min. Thanks to David for his long-time interest in KSE and the professional job he did w/ the show. Some of you will remember that I was interviewed by KMSU-FM last fall on two of the installments of their Jandek Study Group broadcasts (shows 4 and 5 out of the 7 total). Here is the link…happy listening!   http://fffreakout.blogspot.no/2013/07/fffoxy-podcast-21-kendra-steiner.html