New Book! Divagation (2022, Sigilist Press)

Meanwhile, with the help of my good friend Andrew Brenza, I suddenly got a new collection of poetry published.

divagation /,dīvəˈɡāSH(ə)n/ n: a message that departs from the main subject.

The whole book is made with random word generators with no extra input. Seriously. As it turned out - it is way harder then you think. It is a challenge to keep yourself from finishing the text the way you feel it on your own - mostly because random word generators only work to an extent. You can get lucky and make one poem with random words only. But further you go - harder it gets. 

The visual parts consists of reconstructions of damaged drawings. They damaged by water and i tried to fix them digitally but it didn't work so I embraced the aesthetics and went as far as I could with it.

You can order book here: https://sigilistpress.com

The work began in the summer of 2018 immediately after the release of the first version of Roadrage. The idea was to quickly make a small collection the laziest way possible. To do this, I used several random word generators. I expected to "make" a few dozen poems in a week or two. 

As it turns out - it doesn't work that way. In fact, writing poems with random word generators only is basically an exercise in futility. Unless you have all the time in the world. But even then you would probably have better things to do. 

It all began simple enough. The first poem got made fast and easy and it gave me false confidence that I could do it in swift fashion and churn the whole book in a matter weeks. The images felt right - unexpected and curious with absurdist narrative out of nowhere.

But then I started working on the second poem and the whole thing just started to crawl. It was all wrong - words, images, nothing really fit together. Just a bunch of stuff. As it turns - that's what you get most of the time. 

Then I started looking at word combinations of nouns, verbs, adverbs - it was a bit easier than picking up word by word, but we're talking about moving a few centimeters faster than usual - it wasn't really a breakthrough. 

The whole thing just took too long. On average - it took 5 or 6 hundred words to find one that works in the poem. It was easy enough to kick off the poem, but to get it moving - it was borderline impossible. It took approximately 2, sometimes 3 weeks to finish a poem. 

Visual part goes back to my university drawings of 2008-2010. I kept them in the backroom at parents home. At some point they got damaged by water. I found it out in 2013 when i was cleaning the place. 

Most of the drawings were lost, but some of them remained somewhat intact. I scanned them and played a bit with it.

***

I finished the poems in 2019. At first, they were supposed to come out at Jukka-Pekka Kervinen's Ma Press, but one thing led to another and it never came out.

Two and a half years later. I worked with Andrew Brenza on several Brave New Word Magazine publications. I was going to collaborate with him on a project for his press.

Then the war started and it all went through the window. So i decided to use the poems as the basis for further collaboration. However, Andrew thought the poems were good as they were, so it was decided to publish it.