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.

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:

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.

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

late 2014 Bill Shute poetry chapbooks

Welcome to the new year—-Time to watch last year retreat into the rear-view mirror, time to make this year better and more productive and more enjoyable and more kind and tolerant than last year. Time to live on a deeper level in 2015….so we need to move on at KSE. Last year was productive for me, poetry-wise, so we’ve got six different poetry (and poetry-and-photography) chapbooks from the second half of 2014 still available. The lower-numbered ones are down to a handful of copies left, so grab these now if you are so inclined….and if you are not, then please move out of your comfort zone and GET so inclined. Many of these pieces are set in particular locales (Texas, Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, Kansas, etc.) and have a very strong sense of place—-they are funny, they can be tragic, the use of language is fresh, the form/structure is untypical, and they work as barometers for contemporary society and culture. What more could you ask for $6. Also, four of them are poetry-and-photography chapbooks—in those,  my photographs dialogue with the poems on the same page. These cost more to print, but the end result is well worth it. I’m moving away from that in 2015 with the projects I have on the drawing board, so take advantage of these while you can. Because of the nature of printing chapbooks with photographs, I’m fairly sure these will not be reprinted this way in the future. The poetry half may be extracted for republication, but the photos won’t.

I grew up with and learned my craft from study of mentors such as Blackburn, Wieners, Berrigan, Reznikoff, Eigner, and Dorn, and I’d like to think that I took the baton offered by those folks’ work and ran with it in directions different from the way others have….

There are a lot of new poetry events coming your way from KSE….I have a new poetry-and-music album (just finished recordings the vocal tracks yesterday in Austin) with the Hamilton, Ontario-based free-improv sound sculptors FOSSILS coming out in March, THE FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS, pictured here:

 

I completed two new chapbooks during my week in Louisiana (see previous post). A few of KSE’s finest poets will be back for new chapbooks in 2015 (details later), AND we will be compiling an anthology chapbook in late 2015 to celebrate KSE’s TENTH ANNIVERSARY, featuring a number of different poets such as Adrian Manning and Michael Layne Heath.

And there are more poetry-and-music collaborations planned….

UNTIL THEN, please take a minute and score a few of the latest round of Bill Shute poetry chapbooks. Response has been great on these–many e-mails and text messages and notes have been rec’d from readers who enjoyed and appreciated these. All are editions of around 50, home-made, hand-cut…and once they are gone, they are gone. Ordering is easy….HERE THEY ARE:

NEWEST POETRY CHAPBOOKS:

($6 US ppd/$7 elsewhere ppd)

KSE #295 (poetry-and-photography chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Caged Heat”

KSE #278 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Life Goes To A Party, sound library series, volume 76″

 

KSE #290 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Jaywalkers: ducal poems, three”

KSE #287 (poetry-and-photography chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “The Fellowship of the Frog”  

KSE #282 (poetry-and-photography chapbook),  BILL SHUTE, “Hot Combination” 

 

KSE #280 (poetry and photography chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Guide Dogs and Bartenders on the Gulf Coast”

 

payment via paypal to    django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com

Please include a note with your paypal order including the items ordered AND your mailing address (which Paypal often fails to provide me)….thanks!

Questions? Write to  django5722 (at) yahoo (dot) com   . Thanks for your support!

We have a lot planned for 2015….a new round of releases will begin in early March with an exciting new album from DEREK ROGERS!

JAYWALKERS: ducal poems, three (KSE #290), new poetry chapbook from BILL SHUTE

BILL  SHUTE

JAYWALKERS: Ducal Poems, Three

KSE #290 (poetry chapbook)

$6 ppd. in USA / $7 ppd. elsewhere

payment via paypal to   DJANGO5722(at)YAHOO(dot)COM

please include a note with your order telling us what are ordering and providing mailing address…thanks!

The “Ducal Poems” series is an open-ended poetry chapbook series of works inspired by the compositions of Duke Ellington. JAYWALKERS  is my third chapbook in the DUCAL POEMS series, although I have not chosen to publish the first two yet (however, CIRCLE OF FOURTHS, the first of the Ducal volumes, appears on the soon-to-be-released spoken-word poetry album WORRIED MEN AND WOODEN SOLDIERS). They should come out within the next year.

One of the dirty little secrets of the adult world, one that most of us have to learn by experience since we tend to be a bit naive as we are developing, is that those who proclaim themselves to be an “alternative” to the mainstream or the status quo are just as flawed, just as corrupt, just as dishonest, just as vain, and just as power-hungry as those on the “inside.” They set up just as many hierarchies, they play just as many (if not more) games, and they are just as elitist, although in a different way. The irony is that they view themselves as “progressive” or “radical” and superior to the mainstream, which makes them often EVEN MORE pretentious and insufferable than their mainstream counterparts. They don’t realize (or maybe they do and hate themselves because of it) that they are in the same game, played on the same gameboard, as those in the mainstream whom they feel superior to. If you refuse to validate their game or if you refuse to fall into their hierarchy in the place they have assigned to you, they will crush you and your work as fast as they’d step on a roach. One sees this in politics, in the arts (the poetry “alternative” establishment is a perfect example), in many other areas of society. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, etc. Those who want to be in power are a mirror image of those who ARE in power. How can someone be a “kingmaker” of the underground when the underground is supposed to be opposed to the concept of kings and hierarchies….

Those who seek a “third way” are forever marginalized as JAYWALKERS.

That’s what this new six-part poem is about….and also what it embodies.

This is a poetry chapbook that walks down the street looking into the windows of cafes and bistros that it can’t afford to enter…or that it is not well-enough dressed to enter.

I began this in July but wrote most of it while on the road in Kansas, western Missouri, and Oklahoma in early August. I remember standing with Mary Anne on the sidewalk of the main drag in Lawrence, Kansas,  and looking across Massachusetts St., from one side to the other, as Saturday night cruising-traffic drove by—suddenly, the image patterns for this chapbook crystallized in my brain, and finishing the work was just a matter of connecting the dots. Lawrence is a great town, by the way…..we also found William Burroughs’ old house while there, it’s a beautiful area with an interesting history (Langston Hughes lived there), and there’s a great used bookstore (The Dusty Bookshelf)…among many other things. However, this piece is NOT set in Kansas the way some of my recent pieces have been set in specific geographical areas. As in a Harold Pinter play, it’s immediate and full of real-world specifics, but given a surface universality.

It’s the same post-Blackburn, post-Berrigan open-field poetry, full of particulars to chew on like VERY chunky peanut butter, you’ve come to expect, but each piece chooses its own form, its own voice, its own speaker/persona, its own tone. It’s a piece that cries the same primal howl that the Jandeks or the Harry Partches or the Andy Milligans or the DA Levy’s of the world have cried through both their works and their example. If you are out there  masked and anonymous but feeling the same thing, it’s for you.

Hand-assembled, hand-numbered, imprecisely-cut DIY edition of 39 copies. Get yours now.

$6 US / $7 elsewhere

OTHER  available poetry chapbooks ($6 each, ppd. in the US, $7 elsewhere…):

KSE #287 (poetry and photography chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “The Fellowship of the Frog”

KSE #282 (poetry and photography chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Hot Combination”

KSE #276 (art-and-poetry chapbook), DAVID PAYNE & BILL SHUTE, “Blues With A Bridge”

KSE #280 (poetry and photography chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Guide Dogs and Bartenders on the Gulf Coast”

KSE #273  (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Someplace on Anywhere Road” (Sound Library Series, Volume 75)

We also have an excellent catalog of NEW experimental music from cutting-edge artists from four continents, but KSE began as a poetry press, so I’ll stick to promoting poetry in this post.

As always, thank you for supporting independent, non-aligned arts collectives such as Kendra Steiner Editions…..such organizations are the tortoises that will eventually win the race.

That Eccentric Rag (Sound Library Series, Volume 74), new Pittsburgh-set/Pittsburgh-written poetry chapbook from Bill Shute

THAT ECCENTRIC RAG (KSE #269)

Volume 74 in the Sound Library Series

a new poetry chapbook from BILL SHUTE

composed in Pittsburgh, PA, in late July 2013

$6 postpaid anywhere….paypal to django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com…please include note w/ order and include address…thanks

When I travel (to Louisiana, to New England, to New Mexico, wherever), I always try to soak up as much of the local texture and culture as possible, and I usually take that raw material and that fresh environment and assemble poetry from the sounds and smells and details and concrete surface reality of the area. In late July 2013, I was able to do that while visiting the greater Pittsburgh area, ranging from Hermitage PA to the north and Wheeling WVA to the southwest. This was my 4th trip to Pittsburgh in the last 10 years, and it’s one of my favorite cities for many reasons. It seemed like the perfect place to create another poetic cluster of images and perspectives and situations and voices and flotsam and jetsam and fictionalized-but-likely experiences. In other words, another Bill Shute poetry chapbook.

Blinded before sunrise in a sea of camouflage…the money’s good for those collecting tolls, those servicing the permanent war, & those connecting us to the cloud……………planting fear in strangers, for a profit……………lost individuals bump into each other and grab for a brass ring that was stolen months ago and sold for scrap………aces in the hole, melting the ice until we fall through………if you accept the job, you accept the marching orders………… With pierogies and a bottle of Yuengling on the side. As claimed in an ad for a lowbrow wrestling movie back in the 1980’s, “it’s disgustingly real.”  Unpolished, jagged clusters of energy, literary junk sculpture from the new gilded age….composed in the belly of the beast that was the original Gilded Age, but now one of the most livable American cities….PITTSBURGH.

THAT ECCENTRIC RAG.   Hand-assembled, imperfectly-cut edition of 49 copies. Get yours now. Read it, so you won’t have to live it…

Other recent poetry chapbooks from Bill Shute, available from KSE for $6 postpaid anywhere (only a handful of most of these remain, all are editions of fewer than 70 copies each):

KSE #265 (art-and-poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, ‘The Language of Construction”

KSE #263 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Worried Men and Wooden Soldiers”

KSE #252 (poetry chapbook) BILL SHUTE, “Throwaway B-Side”

KSE #261 (art-and-poetry chapbook), DANIEL HIPOLITO & BILL SHUTE, “Meditations on a One-Way Trail”

KSE #256 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Led Along”

KSE #253 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Dream Static”

———————————————————————————————————————

other chapbooks available from KSE’s top-shelf stable of contemporary poets, also $6 each postpaid anywhere

KSE #250 (poetry chapbook), DOUG DRAIME, “Dusk With Carol” (cover art by Wyatt Doyle)

KSE #251 (poetry chapbook) A. J. KAUFMANN, “Hosannah Honeypots” (Sound Library Series, Volume 72)

KSE #236 (poetry chapbook)  JIM  D.  DEUCHARS, “Thelonious Fakebook”  (Sound Library Series, Volume 71)

KSE #244 (poetry chapbook), MICHAEL LAYNE HEATH, “Unbroadcast Reruns” (original cover art by Carl Smith)

——————————————————————————————————————-

and we’re down to the last two dozen copies of two special-edition poetry chapbooks by two men who are masters of many disciplines, GRAHAM LAMBKIN and MATT KREFTING…..these are $7 each postpaid in the US, $8 each postpaid anywhere else:

KSE #258, GRAHAM LAMBKIN, “SLIMERS VERB”

KSE #259, MATT KREFTING, “THE PRINCESS OF KNIGHT AVENUE”

 

thanks to my friends Brad, Jim, Michael, Chris, Jennifer, and Greg for making the Pittsburgh stay so enjoyable….also thanks to the Motel 6 in Coraopolis and to Jerry’s Records…

“Worried Men and Wooden Soldiers” (KSE #263), new poetry chapbook from Bill Shute

BILL SHUTE

“WORRIED MEN AND WOODEN SOLDIERS” (KSE #263)

poetry chapbook

$6 US / $7 elsewhere, postpaid

“Worried Men & Wooden Soldiers is brilliant in its execution; it pulls no punches, and no doubt is the most important and

vital subject in literature (or in any art) today. Few of us have the balls or moxie to even venture into the arena.” –Doug Draime

As most of us stumble through life, trying to keep our act together with multiple part-time jobs and inadequate or no health-care, and people keep themselves occupied by  posting cat videos on Facebook, we’re often too consumed with the small details of day-to-day survival to step back and look at the big picture:  the massive expansion of the military-industrial complex and the massive expansion of the surveillance and “domestic intelligence” communities. We can barely afford to pay the federal taxes that support the drone strikes on civilians in other countries and prop up an international military presence of the sort that bankrupted the Roman Empire or the Spaniards back in their colonial expansion days. HIGH ON INCONTINENT FEVER DREAMS OF EXCEPTIONALISM AND EMPIRE.

That’s what is embodied in WORRIED MEN AND WOODEN SOLDIERS.  In my usual open-field form, with energized clusters of language floating on the page like mosquitoes on the edge of a swamp, it’s my poetic-construct which seeks to present a core-sample of 2013 America, also dealing with the experience of being a poet/artist in these times.

This was composed in May-June 2013, both here in San Antonio and also in Western Louisiana, during the week we spent there.

I premiered this piece (In a slightly edited form—some things work well on the page, but not in a live reading) at my reading in Pittsburgh this summer, at Amazing Books, with Jim D. Deuchars…and it is one of the four poetry chapbooks Jim and I made videos for. You can watch the video of WORRIED MEN AND WOODEN SOLDIERS here:  http://youtu.be/Yu5cNq3dXlM

It’s a rare occasion when one can create a work that is both formalistically sound AND containing an explicit political message. Falling into the trap of agit-prop is always a concern, but I don’t think that has happened here (as it has in other political pieces I’ve written and discarded).

Governor Ultrasound is drunk on Alabama Feeling, our flaws and bruises are airbrushed away with a coat of baconnaise, too many travelers are breaking down or wiping out on Great Gatsby Curve….they inflate you with images of possessions but execute you when you rob the Goodie Train—-kept in place by Worried Men and Wooden Soldiers.

WORRIED MEN AND WOODEN SOLDIERS. KSE #263. Hand-made, irregular-cut, hand-numbered DIY edition of 72 copies.

$6 US postpaid / $7 elsewhere postpaid.

payment via paypal to   DJANGO5722(at)YAHOO(dot)COM

please include a note with your paypal order that lists what you are ordering and provides your mailing address…thanks!

You can also get the following recent chapbooks for the same price, most limited editions of 50 or fewer copies, and in most copies, with about 2/3 of the print run already gone:

KSE #265 (art-and-poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, ‘The Language of Construction”

KSE #252 (poetry chapbook) BILL SHUTE, “Throwaway B-Side”

KSE #261 (art-and-poetry chapbook), DANIEL HIPOLITO & BILL SHUTE, “Meditations on a One-Way Trail”

KSE #256 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Led Along”

KSE #253 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Dream Static”

KSE #248 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Jupiter In The Rearview Mirror: Florida Nocturne Poems, Book Four,”

KSE #245 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Peach Cobbler In The Poker Room: Florida Nocturne Poems, Book Three,”

KSE #232 , BILL SHUTE, “Tonalist Fury,” Volume 70 in the Sound Library Series

As always, thank you for your support of KSE (now in our 8th year) and your support of independent, non-aligned artists. You do not have to suck up to a clique or play along with the “alternative arts” powers that be, for whom you have no respect!  DO IT YOURSELF. PRODUCE IT YOURSELF. DISTRIBUTE IT YOURSELF. FORM ALLIANCES WITH FELLOW CREATORS AND WITH YOUR AUDIENCE (WITHOUT MIDDLEMEN GETTING BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR AUDIENCE) AND DO NOT CEDE ANY POWER TO POWER-HUNGRY PRETENTIOUS ARTS ORGANIZATIONS OR CROOKED “ALTERNATIVE” DISTRIBUTORS. Let the parasites and the gatekeepers starve.

…

THE LANGUAGE OF CONSTRUCTION (KSE #265), new art-and-poetry chapbook from BILL SHUTE

BILL  SHUTE,   THE LANGUAGE OF CONSTRUCTION

KSE #265   poetry and photography chapbook

$6 US postpaid / $7 outside US postpaid

payment via paypal  to   django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com

Often, upon finishing what I consider a more “important” work,  I will feel as though I need to explore more fully aspects of that piece  and extend those aspects into new areas before I move onto another larger work (some of my friends who are painters and composers tell me they do the same thing). THE LANGUAGE OF CONSTRUCTION does that on a few levels.

The title phrase is, of course, Picasso’s. After working on my Picasso-inspired chapbook WORRIED MEN AND WOODEN SOLDIERS (which will be released later this summer…I’ll be premiering it at my reading at Amazing Books in Pittsburgh on July 28 and will have some pre-release copies available there…hope to see you!), I wanted get more into some of  the structural aspects of Picasso that I was investigating/playing with in WORRIED MEN. I was also still on a high from doing the art-and-poetry chapbook with Daniel Hipolito (MEDITATIONS ON A ONE-WAY TRAIL, KSE #261, still available for $6/$7, same price as this one), and wanted to continue poetic dialoguing with artworks. I had a suite of photographs I’d taken recently in New Braunfels, Texas; I’d been making some poetic notes recently in New Braunfels, Texas; thus, it seemed a natural to combine the two and produce a new art-and-poetry chapbook, and that’s THE LANGUAGE OF CONSTRUCTION.

The political concerns of WORRIED MEN are continued here, but in a more indirect and reflective manner, with a focus on how politics has “trickled down” to the individuals who, in this piece, wash dishes and wait on tables in New Braunfels, Texas, trying to find or to create small epiphanies in their/our lives. For me (and I never intend to tell anyone else how to write or how to live life, just report on what works for me), poetry loses value when it becomes divorced from life as it is lived—-that does NOT mean that I am producing a flat naturalistic recording of events or a direct transcription of interior monologue. When one uses the things of everyday life as the pieces with which he/she constructs his poetic word-sculpture, those “things” become part of a new “thing,” the poetry construct. That’s why I took the title JUNK SCULPTURE FROM THE NEW GILDED AGE for one of my spoken word cdr’s.

In a conversation a few days ago with an artist friend with whom I’m working on a project, I described my FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS as “rough-cut energized clusters of phrases, placed on the page as if it’s a canvas (post-Charles Olson “projective verse,” open-field poetry, though Paul Blackburn or Ted Berrigan are much more touchstones for me than Olson’s own poetry),”  and I suppose that is an adequate description of what’s going on here, though with a twist of the casual voice one finds in early Lewis MacAdams (I’ve been reading a lot of his 60’s/70’s works recently…his modern work is superb also, check him out), and of course, let’s not forget that the poems grow out of the artworks.

So come with me to contemporary Texas, to the restaurant/bar workplace, with its chatty customers, fidgety toddlers, a-hole bosses, after-work trysts, unrealized dreams, dust and desserts….waiting for rain, but afraid of rain…

Limited hand-numbered edition of 49 copies…get yours now. Because of the cost of printing, I hardly ever reprint the art-and-poetry chapbooks (I did a number of these in the 2008-2009 period), and also for logistical reasons, it’s unlikely that they will appear in future “selected poems” volumes, since the poems are inseparable from the artwork, and the artwork is too expensive to reproduce…so grab this now or you won’t get one….

I also want to announce two new and exciting poetry chapbooks that will be out in August…you can order them beginning the first week in August and they’ll be officially released later in that month:

MATT KREFTING, “THE PRINCESS OF KNIGHT AVENUE” (KSE #259)

and

GRAHAM LAMBKIN, “SLIMMERS VERB” (KSE #258)

as always, thanks for your support of independent non-aligned DIY arts organizations such as KSE that circumvent the established “underground” hierarchy and connect person-to-person…

Bill Shute, collected FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS coming in Fall 2013 from Word Mechanics

Excited to announce that a book-length collection of my four FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS chapbooks will be issued in Fall 2013 by Word Mechanics of Palm Springs, California, publishers of my previous book-length poetry works TWELVE GATES TO THE CITY (2006) and POINT LOMA PURPLE (2007).

I’m presently re-formatting the four chapbooks—-SHADES OF NIGHT DESCENDING, MONDO DAYTONA, PEACH COBBLER IN THE POKER ROOM, and JUPITER IN THE REARVIEW MIRROR—-and making some minor editorial changes to have the pieces better meet the needs and expectations of the book’s readers, who will be of a somewhat different nature than the readers of the original KSE chapbooks. I’m also changing two of the four epigraphs to better fit the new context of the works.

By the way, if you want the original versions of these four chapbooks, I still have a few dozen of each left (the originals were in handmade, hand-numbered editions running between 60 and 80 copies each, and most are now gone). They are $5 each in the US postpaid, $6 each postpaid outside the US:

KSE #248 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Jupiter In The Rearview Mirror: Florida Nocturne Poems, Book Four”

KSE #245 (poetry chapbook), BILL SHUTE, “Peach Cobbler In The Poker Room: Florida Nocturne Poems, Book Three”

KSE #241, BILL SHUTE, “Mondo Daytona: Florida Nocturne Poems, Book Two”

KSE #234 BILL  SHUTE, “Shades of Night Descending: Florida Nocturne  Poems, Book One”

payment via paypal to django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com     please include a note w/ your paypal order listing what items you want

This will be the final opportunity to get the FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS chapbooks in their original context. Act now…

That said, I’m very happy about presenting these pieces in a recontextualized format with a new artwork by MP Landis (not pictured below…he’s still working on it) on the front cover. It’s ironic that a poet so associated with Texas whose works are usually set in Texas is having a quartet of Florida-based pieces issued in book form (as opposed to the steady stream of DIY chapbooks I issue through KSE, which emerge under the radar to regular readers and friends of KSE), but the Florida pieces deserve to be considered as a unit and to get the wider consideration that a perfect-bound book will provide. There is considerable discrimination in the “alternative” marketplace, which gives the lie to it being an “alternative” marketplace in any way, against the homemade DIY chapbook, but as KSE is an outsider arts organization, we’re used to dealing with that…mostly by circumventing the restrictions and ignoring them.

I hope you will take a chance on this volume when it’s out. If you have thought about getting some KSE chapbooks but did not know which among the many would interest you most…or if you have enjoyed my spoken-word poetry CDR’s…or the poetry-and-music CDR’s I have done (SUBTRACTION with Anthony Guerra; ONLY THE IMPRINT OF AN ECHO REMAINS with Marcus Rubio; FASCINATION with Eva Kelly and Daniel Hipolito; and FOUR TEXAS STREAMS with Derek Rogers), then you should try the perfect-bound paperback edition of THE FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS, coming out from Word Mechanics this fall.

Each of the four stand-alone multi-section poems is an assemblage (a “junk sculpture from the new gilded age,” to steal the title of one of my spoken-word cdr’s) created from shards of Florida experience with the taste and texture of Florida life. Each piece features a different viewpoint character/narrative persona/controlling intelligence, as you’ll discover upon reading, though I do feel that they also hang together (as most of my dozens of various poetry chapbooks do) as a “serial poem” in the Jack Spicer sense, which is one reason why they are being published together here. The hand of the maker is evident in all four. Whatever their value as contemporary poetry,  THE FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS capture where this country’s head and heart are at circa 2012 (when the pieces were composed), and although it’s not a pretty picture, the beauty of individuals struggling and achieving and finding joy amid the scorched-earth policies of late-period capitalism and the barrage of corporate culture and the intrusive and abrasive screech of reactionary fundamentalism is always worth championing and documenting. “They endured.”

Also, as an “open field ” poet, I use the page as my canvas, my field of construction, and as the 6×9 page I’m working with in the paperback book format is different from the usual KSE format, I have had to re-harmonize each piece, re-cast each piece in poetic space, so the form on the page has been altered somewhat, the way musicians might alter the nature of a piece to accommodate the room or the audience.

As I have been fine-tuning my aesthetic and working method over the years/decades, the spirits of Paul Blackburn, Ted Berrigan, Larry Eigner, Frank Samperi, Gertrude Stein, and Herman Melville (not to mention Steve Lacy, Jandek, Cy Twombly, Andy Milligan, Paul Bley, Alfred 23 Harth, and countless others) have always been walking alongside of me…I have tried to take the baton they have given me and to run with it through the present and into tomorrow, taking core samples along the way, and creating my poetic junk sculptures…

Grab your copies of the original Florida chapbooks while you can…and then be sure to get the FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS paperback this fall from Word Mechanics. We’ll be selling them right here at the KSE blog, so stay tuned…and thank you for your support and encouragement over the years.

Oh, I’ll be filming a video of one of the Florida chapbooks while in Pittsburgh this summer, and that should be available online before the publication of the Word Mechanics book.

AND, finally, if you are within driving distance of Pittsburgh, please stop by my reading with Jim D. Deuchars at Amazing Books, 929 Liberty Avenue in Pittsburgh, at 2 pm, on Sunday 28 July 2013—-it will be my only reading/performance East of the Mississippi in 2013 (although I hope to get back East again in 2014…we’ll see…)

BILL SHUTE, THE FLORIDA NOCTURNE POEMS…coming in Fall 2013 from Word Mechanics, Palm Springs, California (publishers of  POINT LOMA PURPLE)

Peach Cobbler In The Poker Room (KSE #245), Book Three of the Florida Nocturne Poems

BILL   SHUTE

PEACH  COBBLER  IN  THE  POKER  ROOM

Florida Nocturne Poems, Book Three

KSE #245 (poetry chapbook)

$5 postpaid anywhere

payment via paypal to django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com

———————————————

also available in the Florida Nocture poems series:

Book One: Shades of Night Descending  (KSE #234)

Book Two: Mondo Daytona (KSE #241)

Book Four: Jupiter In The Rearview Mirror (KSE #248) 

Unique times require a unique poetry, hence The Florida Nocturne Poems series. PEACH COBBLER IN THE POKER ROOM, composed during my July-August 2012 time in Central Florida, is another poetic core-sample of crazed and crazy America circa 2012, this time set in the state famous for the stolen 2000 Presidential election and the Trayvon Martin shooting.  A world where the fundamentalist churches and the casinos and the right-wing politicians  engage in an awkward  Waltz of the Toreadors, fooling no one but diverting attention away from what’s REALLY going on, a power shift and wealth transfer that looks to turn the state into a third-world country with an ruling oligarchy supervised by Governor Ultrasound.

This is a sparse poem in places, it’s angry in other places, and it captures a narrator stumbling through day-to-day life in contemporary Florida (kind of like a semi-tropical Texas in a minor key), trying to adapt to others’s needs and desires in the hope that that might make life go by more smoothly (it’s always easier to adapt and to turn the other cheek, he thinks)…and that smoothness helps in a nightmare world of rich people in SUV’s, Buford Pusser-esque law enforcement figures staring down from billboards, Bob Evans covering everything in thick white gravy, know-nothing politicized fundamentalist churches controlling the schools, and cloying plastic nostalgia coming at one from all directions. No wonder Myrna gets excited about the Peach Cobbler In The Poker Room.

Alice, the narrator’s on-again/off-again partner, doesn’t have time for those silly and confusing Bill Shute poetry chapbooks (after all, she says, one can only willingly suspend one’s disbelief so far!) that she quietly returns, but maybe YOU DO? And if so, you can get this one for only $5 postpaid anywhere. And while you are at it, why not get the entire Florida Nocturne poems series of four chapbooks…each is chock-full of as much detail and life experience and food-for-contemplation as a feature film or a full-length novel, but they are only six-to-eight pages each, and like rich food, a little bit goes a long way…. through understatement and selectivity and synecdoche (I liked that word better before Charlie Kaufman used it) and a collage-like aesthetic, you get the feeling of getting much more than six-to-eight pages.  People are busy today…attention spans aren’t what they once were. Your time might be better spent reading Melville’s CLAREL, I agree, but that was then and this is now. And you can’t get more NOW than this sequence of Florida-based poetry chapbooks documenting the America of 2012…true today, true next year, true next century, alas.  The more things change, the more they stay the same…only the technology and the slang change.

PEACH COBBLER IN THE POKER ROOM…limited hand-assembled, hand-numbered edition of 49 copies…get yours now…it’s better than wasting that $5 in the poker room on either gambling or on an order of peach cobbler that will just raise your blood sugar and cholesterol…

San Antonio Sky Songs spoken-word cdr reviewed at Volcanic Tongue

 

Bill Shute
San Antonio Sky Songs
Kendra Steiner Editions #171
CD-R
£6.99

First-ever full album of readings from Texan poet/critic Bill Shute, whose Kendra Steiner Editions has done more for living, breathing POETRY than any number of godforsaken writers workshops or poetry ‘slams’ over the past few years. Shute writes and champions poetry that is birthed in the gut as much as the brain and that comes out of the reality of lives lived more than banal academia or creative writing classes. Over the past five years or so he has written and published more than any other poet/writer I can think of, and when the time comes to take the temperature of samizdat post-Beat publishing, Kendra Steiner/Bill Shute will be one of the central players. This collection of readings, recorded in Austin Texas in July 2010 by Derek Rogers, covers material published between 2006-2009. Shute has a great voice and it’s a blast to listen to these poems that you know so well and hear the way the rhythm and pacing leaps off the page, adding a whole new level of visualisation to his already highly place/time specific writings. This one features “Four Texas Streams” (an early favourite), “Emergency”, “Pebbles, Screens, And Trombones”, “Acres”, “Suspension”, “Boss Man”, “Shore Access” and “Silhouettes”. Highly recommended!  

(David Keenan, Glasgow, Scotland—–2 October 2010)

Europe: 0rder from Volcanic Tongue (www.volcanictongue.co.uk)

cdr available in North America for $7 ppd. paypal to django5722(at)yahoo(dot)com.

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.