Six new works in Die Leere Mitte

Got some great news! Six of my poems were featured in the newest issue of Die Leere Mitte. But this time it is some big guns. These guys know how to make a mag that flows smoothly. 

I want to thank Horst Berger and Federico Federici for accepting my works and featuring them prominently in the issue. 

The last time I've been in Die Leere Mitte was in May.

Here's what we got on Page 7 to 12:

• 3 sound poems made around the same time I started working on Dulcet Epee for Redfox Press. 
• 3 Ukrainian-language poems from my "Дурисвіт" book. It features no public translation from Ukrainian to English because it really helps me to engage with my reader. They write letters "dafuq man, wot daz it mean?!" and then we talk. Never thought that it can be that simple.

LINKS:

• DIE LEERE MITTE WEBSITE LINKLINK
• Read ONLINE
• Buy PRINT EDITION

New works in A-Minor Magazine

Great news! Four poems of your truly with visual arrangements by Michael Orr were recently published in the newest issue of A-Minor Magazine. 

THE LINK https://aminormagazine.com/2023/09/28/three-pieces-22/

One of the poems got as far as getting featured as the issue's cover. 

One of the poems (the last one) originates from my Ukrainian-language probably never coming out book called “Дурисвіт”.

The rest are from Go Boating project.

Back in 2012 I had another feature in A-Minor Magazine. In fact, it was one of my earliest publications. These were some of my clumsy scanographies titled Wordfall. Check it out https://aminormagazine.com/2012/07/16/wordfall/

***
Just in case, I've got translations for the poems 

1.
bom-bom.
it’s a bubble

the wind blows with this odd ringing,

a hair-raising sensation of
an overwhelming senselessness…

an abominable swish abound.

2.
ray smashed to nil.
This moment is quite something.

wordless stars –
an earthquake of infinity –
all for nothing.

the curtain of the eyelashes –
grotesquely weaved
and very crooked

– the gust of eldritch.

Oblique fatigue.

3.
a gentle breeze
flows with a rumble
– the curly feeling:

the palm tree of the back of the neck.
the broken flash of eyelids,

sheer helplessness,
bosh!

untying the shadow with zeal,

this seething squawk…

4.
the volcano of the eye
got crumbled by the cheekbones
jumping up and down.

the round tatters
are catching up downwards –
wild mane lashes out of nowhere –

a burn:

the ripples reflection got lost on the other side
– eyelids play a trill
beads roll down the spine
rolling the bell’s tongue into an incessant drone:

the burst of the braid scythe –
light shrapnel’s dap
goes inside out
– whiplash with a skewed syncope

stuck like a cork in here –
a cloud stretches out into a thin vertical strip until it fully dissipates.

UTSANGA - Cyberpunk Poetry and Laugh Poems

Great news! New Utsanga issue features two batches of my works.

• Cyberpunk poems https://www.utsanga.it/bilyk-poems-4/
• Laugh poems https://www.utsanga.it/bilyk-works-4/

Big thanks to Francesco Aprile for making it happen.

Few words about the works.

***

Cyberpunk poems are written to replicate the experience of extreme overwhelming information overload and its lasting afterthoughts and afterimages that remain racing through your head when you're trying to unplug and get some rest. Thus the Cyberpunk Poetry subtitle. 

It's a chaotic stream of consciousness of the extremely online age. It also illustrates the brutal compression of information and barbaric distortion of comprehension - something we all experience at times when consuming too much content.

***

Laugh Poems - short and sweet poems that blow your mind because The Beatles' "Because".

NEW BOOK - MALEVICH BLACK SQUARE OCR

 Great news! Paper View Books released my new book - Malevich Black Square OCR. Many thanks to Sal Nunkachov for making it happen. Much love!

• THE LINK - http://paperviewbooks.pt/books/malevich-black-square-ocr/

THE INTRODUCTION

My homie Miekal And once said that poetry evolves in the ineffable. He's kinda right about that. Seekers finders. What else does a soul of mischief do? That's what it is about. Gotta go beyond and explore further regions of experience.

What the hell is this book? It is an assorted collection of optical character recognition of Kazimir Malevich's seminal painting "Black Square" arranged into a sequence of poems. Each poem is a result of several OCR sessions. It is mostly one line - one bout of OCR to get something truly exciting out of it. No diggity. I first did them in 2017, and then a bunch in 2018 and once more in 2019.

The resulting texts are as scuffed and cracked as their source image. What's interesting is that these poems are quite fun to write down longhand. You notice there's a peculiar rhythm to the characters as if there was a system behind them, a kind of language. It makes sense after all. Or so it seems.

It is an otherworldly, alien kind of text, a kind of text communicated by an unblinking eye of boundless abyss. This text is a squib burst of your mind that happens when the void stares back.

Why would I do that? Well, have you seen OG 1915' zero point of painting? Must be some kind of creature up here having fits. It went through some hard times - all covered in cracks, barely keeping itself whole. And if you keep looking at it - time after time - you get so involved, you don't know what to think. And when you get to that point - the unpredictable swerve of atoms occurs. Yugen bum rushes ye.

The vastness of blackness... It must be these cracks that got me like damn. Here goes the sound of the wrecking ball. You get these impertinent, meddlesome, obtrusive, and officious thoughts about the scarring this sable raven had to sustain. I can't get behind it. And once I get started I go to town.

Wabi-sabi, motherfuckers!

NEW BOOK - Dulcet Epee (2023, Red Fox Press)

Great news! Red Fox released my new book - Dulcet Epee. It is an assorted collection of sound poems that sound cool. 

• THE LINK http://redfoxpress.com/dada-bilyk2.html

Here's a bit of an extended intro.

This is a collection of sound poems that sound really cool. That’s what it is. Everything else is apophenia, and totally fine with that.

Back in 2020, I decided to experiment. Instead of performing poems in English, I started reading Ukrainian ones. Believe it or not - no one died. After the initial confusion, people began to like it. Language barriers be damned. They couldn’t understand a word (except for the stuff I was retelling or freestyle translating), but nearly all said, “That thing sounds cool.”

Flash forward to late 2022. I’m spending my days either in complete darkness (but not silence) due to energy grid attacks or listening to nearby explosion rumblings from the comforts of the bomb shelter. 

One time my phone’s recorder accidentally turned on, and it captured a solid hour of muffled noises. I didn't notice that file until a bit later when I recorded a phone conversation and wanted to do a transcript. But instead of choosing the correct file, I chose the one with muffled noises and somehow got a transcript. 

That thing was glorious. A bunch of letters in-between vast empty spaces littered with time codes. And those letters together sounded like some old-school dada stuff. Later that day I had a reading, and while recording my stuff, the “sounds cool” thing waltzed into my head, and  I thought - but what if I did poems that just sounded cool and nothing else?

• Each day I would sit and improvise a piece and then put together its visualization. 

• Some of it has actual words. Most of them are pure cool melodies. 

• Don’t try this at home unless you have too much time on your hands.

The texts themselves are Ol’ Dirty Bastard's drunken master freestyle sound poems thrown together on the spot - total spontaneity.

• It’s all about the sound of individual letters and sounds they make together that create arcane melodies that shoelace your mind. 

• That’s where the title comes from - it is pleasing to the ear and melodious, but poems also have this thrusting back-and-forth groove like a fencing epee.

The visual component was meant to extend the Detournement Crusade aesthetic. Around the same time, Midjourney, Dall-E, and Stable Diffusion generative text-to-image AI tools started to gain traction. One of my biggest regrets working on the Detournement Crusade project was that I never had enough material to compose poems in Ukrainian. There are some really creative examples of typography, but you can only go so far with a dozen workable pieces. Doing that stuff with digital fonts is not the same. There’s no grime.

And so, I used Stable Diffusion to produce variations of my favorite Bauhaus designs or jazz typography. After a while, I’ve composed enough prompts to produce pieces with no reference images. Either way - it takes like 50 takes to produce a line or two. And if you want to keep the style for letters - the figure can go as high as 150 takes. It is time-consuming but oddly satisfying because you eventually get the poem done.

There is nothing else you should know. Proceed reading the book.

NEW UKRAINIAN POEMS IN POSESTRY

 Sweet jumping Buddy Peacock and Roy Sunny Jones! This is happening! 5 of my poems written in ukrainian are published in prestige polish-ukrainian magazine Posestry.

Many thanks to Jurij Zawadski for making it happen.

All poems are from the upcoming collection called DURYSVIT (ДУРИСВІТ).

The links:

• Author Page
• Вірш 1
• Вірш 2
• Вірш 3
• Вірш 4
• Вірш 5

Short note on Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer is a kind of movie that should've just said fuck this shit I'm having fun and brought in Godzilla to wreck shit and spit radiation. But it doesn't because reasons. 

Remember Sunshine? It was this long and pondering hard Sci fi about throwing a bomb into the sun so it could get its shit together and stop being so dull. and it was fine and it even managed to get its points across in articulate manner without getting too pretentious. 

But then it went off the rails and turned into a slasher flick in space starring crazy naked dude with burns all over his body aboard a ship in front of the sun transporting the bomb. Why not? 

I was 16 when it came out and I hated that shift. Because the movie didnt needed it. 16 years later I think it was transcending creative decision because the movie just went fuck that I'm having fun. Gotta respect that.