The Etcetera Variations: Book Launch and Poetry/Music Celebration

 To launch Denver Butson’s sixth book of poetry, The Etcetera Variations (The Bodily Press, 2025), the poet will be joined on stage by a stellar array of musicians and performing artists, including the duo of ECM recording artists and NPR record of the year recipients violist Mat Maneri and pianist Lucian Ban, the duo of guitarist Marco Cappelli and bassist Ken Filiano, bassist Brandon Lopez, and actor/voice artist Rhonda Keyser. 

 The Etcetera Variations is a collection of several suites of poems that Butson has written and performed with musicians over the past two decades --most recently with Reso Kikadzne at the Tbilisi International Literature Festival, with Italian Surf Academy on a 5-city US tour culminating in a recording session, with Maneri and Ban at various venues in the US, and with Cappelli, drummer JT Lewis, and guitarist Marc Ribot in Brooklyn. 

 Butson’s work has been praised by such literary luminaries as Billy Collins, Edmund White, WS Merwin, and Colum McCann. About this collection, poet Lorraine Doran writes: 

 In The Etcetera Variations, Denver Butson is a builder of worlds that cannot last. Nothing shatters, but everything dissolves, fades away, returns to silence. Night unravels, rivers spill themselves away, the carousel is there, then gone. Whatever the mechanism of loss, these poems celebrate the disappearance itself, turn bewildering chaos into a beautiful, orderly ritual. What remains is ash and music, a long-ago kiss, and the eternal sky. 

 The event is free and open to the public. There will be books and CDs for sale, a raffle of recent books and recordings of the artists, beer and wine, and more.

The Etcetera Variations 

“The first problem I had to solve was how to play jazz on a string instrument. I knew about Stéphane Grappelli, of course, but I wanted to be able to play like the major forces in jazz, like Miles Davis or John Coltrane.” 

Mat Maneri, a leading improvisational voice of his generation, was born in Brooklyn in 1969. He began studying the violin at the age of five, but since borrowing a viola for a jam session at the 1998 ECM festival in Badenweiler, he has made the viola his instrument of choice. Important influences on Maneri’s work – in addition to all the major forces of jazz – include Baroque music (which he studied with Juilliard String Quartet co-founder Robert Koff), Elliott Carter, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, which was also of central importance to his father, the late, great saxophonist, clarinettist, composer and educator Joe Maneri. Of his studies with Koff, Mat Maneri has said: “Studying Baroque music helped me to find my sound. [Koff] brought me into the world of contrapuntal playing and a way of using the bow that sounded more like a trumpet, like Miles, to my mind.” 

Jazz writer Jon Garelick has written of Maneri’s distinctive style: “Maneri’s virtuosity is everywhere apparent – in his beautiful control of tone, in the moment-to-moment details that unfold in his playing, in the compositional integrity of each of his pieces, in what visual artists might call the variety of his ‘mark-making’: spidery multi-note runs, rhythmically charged double-stops and plucking, subtle and dramatic dynamic shifts.” 

Maneri’s ECM discography includes his solo violin and viola recording Trinity, five albums with Joe Maneri in duo, trio and quartet formations, and three discs with Scottish singer, poet, harpist and guitarist Robin Williamson (Skirting the River Road, The Iron Stone and Trusting in the Rising Light). For the Transylvanian Concert, recorded in the Culture Palace of Targu Mures in June 2011, he teamed up with Romanian-born pianist-composer Lucian Ban for what Maneri describes as “a special and productive collaboration”. John Fordham in the Guardian praised its “melancholy beauty” combined with “plenty of wayward exuberance”.