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Twelve Gates To The City: The Labours Of Hercules In The Lone Star State World Mechanics book £7.99 Can't tell you how excited I was when this beautifully presented poetry collection first fell through the door. Shute has long been one of my most admired writers/livers/thinkers and over the years I must have worn the words of his Inner Mystique column that used to run in Black To Comm alla the way through the page. Shute remains the best of the post-Bangs school of rock write-as-personal revelation. The way he tied up his passions (as diverse as early silent-era Westerns, boob tube TV, John Cage, Sky Saxon, Dylan, esoteric philosophy, pizza and beer) with so much personal detail made you feel like maybe the world was made up of kindred spirits after all, living and wrestling with the same ups and downs, no matter how scattered across the map we might all be. I struck up a brief post-Inner Mystique correspondence with Shute where he turned me on to a ton of great books and movies (check out his amazing archive of movie reviews here: http://www.imdb.com/user/ur1083764/comments?order=date&summary=off ) but it was a long time since he'd actually published any of his prose. And now this, a beautifully bound series of poetic meditations based around the labours of Hercules transposed to the modern lone star state. It makes sense that a lot of rock writers (Coley, Meltzer) end up working in poetry, it feels like the perfect form for the gush of sensual imagery and the kind of advanced synaesthetic vocabulary that writing about something as essentially ephemeral as music demands (not that you'd know it from most mainstream music criticism that still seems to be dominated by the zeitgeist-humping/vague cultural studies school, regularly betraying its subject matter with a whole lotta mis-translated and woefully inappropriate critical tools, not to mention bad fucking slacks. And let's not even start on that breathlessly twee style of reportage with all its ‘and yet and yet' and ‘but what's important' that seems to dominate the UK indie press). Shute's poetry here is beautiful, working biographical details and classic Texan topography into moments in time framed by an overall mythic/esoteric arc that works to situate his work somewhere between the caught-in-the-teeth-of-it feel of Dave Alvin, William Wantling and Douglas Blazek, the fluxing time-lines favoured by the major modernists and the gnosis of David Meltzer or Jack Hirschmann. And his vision of maleness, of what it means to be a man, is refreshingly new, avoiding the kind of sacrificial emasculation favoured by most contemporary male poets while simultaneously steering clear of the same old macho bullshit. The book is a limited, letter-pressed edition of 300 copies bound with a hard card cover and is highly recommended. Welcome back Bill! |
