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.

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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.

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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.

New works in Ranger Magazine Issue 2

Great news! Ranger Magazine Issue 2 is out and there's a selection of my works in it! many thanks to David A. Bishop for featuring me. Keep up the good work.

• THE LINK https://www.rangermagazine.net/bilyk_issue2

Here's what stuff you can see in there:

• 2 Detournement Crusade pieces;
• 2 Dulcet Epee (coming soon) pieces (the "let's roll" batch);
• One concrete poem that doesn't contain any swear words (i swear);
• One poem out of an old-timer's book but not really because I can't help myself

4 NEW WORKS IN HELIKOPTER

My life can be a garbage fire at times, but it doesn't mean it's all bad. For instance, I've got published!

Four pieces got featured in the newest issue of Polish experimental art magazine Helikopter. 

• THE LINK: https://opt-art.net/helikopter/7-9-2023/volodymyr-bilyk-poezja-wizualna/

Few words on the works:

• НЧНЧАЯЗ – sound poem made out of Petrarka translation comments.
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• UM thka – one of the Detournement Crusade series. DC was always featured in Helikopter back in 2019.
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• ege – concrete composition made out of nice looking commas, perious, dashes, letters "O" and "I".
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• крайнеба – one of the Durysvit poems visualized out of an old book scan. 

CYBERPUNK POEMS IN THE LAST ISSUE OF OTOLITHS

End of an era. The last issue of OTOLITHS is out. It is an honor to be featured. Mark Young did a great job. 

If you are looking for a blueprint for an arts and literature magazine with an experimental twist - OTOLITHS is the one.

• THE LINK https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/.../07/volodymyr-bilyk.html

My contribution is a series of cyberpunk poems from the book that can't catch a break (blame covid and now war). 

Some brutal data stuff.