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Some economist’s estimates have the number of book titles published each year surpassing the number of readers available to read any one of those titles somewhere around the year 2020. For the record, we’ll have to wait and see if there is even a human race still around by that date.

Correspondingly, there is an argument espoused by many in the Small Press that the Small Press is just a waste of resources and trees.  When one considers the sheer number of copies of Newsweek and Time that essentially are never opened or used by anyone before making their way to the recycling mills or landfills of our fair land, the argument is fairly baseless.  Walk into a Barnes and Noble sometime and witness the amount of pure shit spewed out by radio personalities (almost all assholes) and mass consumerist “personalities” and tell me the Small Press is anything remotely that evil with a straight face.

So when an independent press like Kendra Steiner Editions turns out 85 “chaps” and counting in a period of three years (at about two dozen pages and a run of around 50 copies per title) complete with an independent music biz distribution source in Scotland, one can’t say they’re “saturating” the market, indie or otherwise.  But they are creating an unavoidable presence. One might even start getting the idea that some of these folks in the indie press know what they’re doing.

I say “chaps” because KSE books are miniaturized (that is, chap size) but instead of the fairly standard issue desktop/Kinko’s presentation, these subversives are true mini versions of the old school mimeo-zines which ruled “the underground” in the fifties and sixties (and somewhat into the 70’s.) This format, chosen intentionally by KSE’s Bill Shute and daughter Kendra Steiner, leads to the kind of releases we haven’t seen since that time as well.  Many of the books are collections of collaborations. Shute’s collaboration with Stuart Crutchfield on Stream (salmon and blood) (KSE #29) is a single chap length poem:

                                    “the plasma line
                                           forms before sunrise
                                                (center of the second-
                                                            string medical district:
                                                               lasix eye surgeries
                                                              gastric bypasses
                                                             vasectomy reversals)

                                                homeless wander over
                                                   from shelters before
                                                  the morning sermon

                                             transient single moms
                                                bring along half-awake
                                                toddlers and infants
                                                  crayons and pacifiers”

It should be noted that the poems in this collaboration do snake and meander like the course of a river, steadily in one direction as well.

Shute again collaborates with David Keenan and Bryon Coley in Voluntary Quicksand (in memory of Richard Brautigan)) (KSE # 37) a collection of nearly two dozen fast and furious poems, one unable to determine which belongs to which author, and this is exactly the point of the manuscript, and in a nutshell, the point of KSE Press.  While these are not desktop generic books (they are pressed and hand crafted)  neither are they artifact like pieces of art that come out of the “salon” presses who are looking to ultimately sell their gorgeous fonts, colors and high quality paper to the library collections of academia.  KSE books are nice looking, utilitarian and meant to be read in bus stations, on trains, in launder mats and coffee shops, sometimes several times over in the same sitting.

This type of presentation forces author and publisher to be more selective in content, take bolder chances in creative structure and generally convey a sense of something larger than just a small collection of poems.

An example of this would be the recent releases Rimbaud In the City: 10 Snapshots (KSE #83) by Glenn Cooper and Lullabies for Jackson (KSE #68) by Misti Rainwater-Lites. Rainwater-Lites in particular is someone who is unapologetically living out her literary growth process in front of the eyes of the small press and a growing core of fans.  Her KSE title shows her engaging with both a pregnancy and motherhood, giving her work a tender authority that was missing from her prolific Texas tough ass persona:

                        “your daddy also disapproves
                        when I read vladimir mayakovsky to you
                        he says the last thing you want to hear
                        is poetry, especially that kind

                       so I drink water with ice and lemon
                        read dr. seuss
                        sing “winnie the pooh”
                        while daddy watches
                        the crumbling of America
                        on CNN.”

Or as an exercise in the kind of surrealistic tricks that seem to delight Shute and his fellow conspirators, let’s run the titles of Cooper’s reimagining of Rimbaud in the 21^st Century consecutively:

                             Rimbaud chain smokes
                                    In the Brothel
                                    Rimbaud walks
                                    Rimbaud winds down
                                    Rimbaud picks up
                                    Rimbaud wipes
                                    in the sports bar
                                    Rimbaud plucks
                                    Rain falls against
                                    Alone in his single room apartment

Rainwater-Lites book is one poem and Cooper’s could be.  This could describe, I suspect the bulk of KSE’s catalogue, including many of Shute’s own titles which display a willingness to experiment with verse and line, nearly inversing their functions at points in Ground . (July, 2006)

The Mayakovsky reference above is appropriate (and not a little pleasing) in a KSE title…many of the collaborative exercises and experimentation found in these little books stem directly from the Russian Futurists innovations.

Brad Kohler’s Energy Fools The Magician (KSE # 45), Luis Cuauhtémoc Berriozabal’s Keepers of Silence (for Luis Omar Salinas) (KSE # 82) and other titles recent and forthcoming from Michael Layne Heath, Stuart Crutchfield and MK Chavez display the wide range of focused and spare manuscripts with hard edged themes that fill in the lines between the playfulness.

The output of sheer titles by KSE is one of the most impressive things I have seen in the small press in some time.  Shute states in his interview on Michele McDannold’s blog (http://wearduringorangealert.blogspot.com/2007/11/writers-corner_22.html) that his goal is to continue to release two titles per month through the calendar year of 2008.  He also credits D.A. Levy, NY School, Beats and Flux movement for his inspiration.

If folks want to know where the Small Press movement is headed, one of the first places they need to look will be in San Antonio, Texas.

-Paul Corman-Roberts