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.