BOO!

 

New work in MAINTENANT #15

Finally! Got my hands on New Three Rooms Press Maintenant #15. I've got a piece there. It is one of the later Detournement Crusade poems. Aside of that - lots of great stuff.

I've been part of this magazine for 8 years and every issue taught me something about curating a magazine and creating a flowing sequence. I don't know how Peter Carlaftes and Kat Georges manage to pull it off, but once you open it - you stop at the back cover. It take some serious engagement skills to do it that good. Thanks for including me.

NEW WORK IN Piotr Szreniawski's Anthology of One Letter Poems

 

Great news! One of my pieces was featured in Piotr Szreniawski Anthology of One Letter Poems.
It is one from the days of font collages (mostly documented in Eellogofusciohipoppokunurious book). 

The piece itself is stuck between two series I was working on back then - font collages and fontmen. The idea was to create some ideograms and eventually make an image-based conlang. However, the project felt too massive, so I went back to writing Roadrage. 

Probably need to come to back it someday.

 
You can also find the work of such vispo greats as Rosaire Appel, Tim Gaze, Andrew Brenza, Dennis Smith, David Kjellin, Michael Orr, Sacha Archer, Satu Kaikkonen, Andrew Topel, Stephen Nelson, Sven Staelens, Dave Read, Geof Huth. Lots of great pieces and even more inspiration.

You can see the rest via this link http://skr.comicgenesis.com/jednoliterowe.pdf

Detournement Crusade at Global Multimedia Poetry Stands.

let me share a link for an exhibition project I took part recently. It is Global Multimedia Poetry Stands. You can see a couple of newer pieces from Detournement Crusade on the screenshots.

Ironically, that's the second time I take part in this project. The first one happened in 2019. It used the early pieces from Detournement Crusade. 2021 exhibition uses the very last pieces created for the project. In fact, the piece "O lau Am Ha" is the final piece of the cycle.

You can look at the rest of the documentation here: https://www.oficinadoespirito.com/en/gmmps-21-exhibition/

new book - Detournement Crusade (Red Fox Press, 2021)

Great news! Selected works of Detournement Crusade are out at Red Fox Press. I want to thank Francis Van Maele for making it possible. It is a great honor to be featured in your lineup. Keep on keeping on.

You can check the book here - http://redfoxpress.com/dada-bilyk.html

Few words about Detournement Crusade. 

The idea behind this series is simple. Take some old stuff and make your own thing with it. I wanted to banish the sentiment of works of the past being sacred and seemingly untouchable. These works use old artworks, but they don't leverage on its cultural context and doesn't exploit its aesthetics. They are just made out of these things. 

Each piece is twofold in execution. 

The pieces were made out of various jazz covers, Bauhaus posters, penguin book covers, Lettrist publications, and other sources. Each piece was culled together from a dozen sources. However, the sources don't really matter due to casual defamiliarization. I'm not acknowledging or celebrating visual sources of the series - for all intents and purposes for this projects - they are just building blocks.

At the same time, the texts are pre-written at first and then augmented by interacting with visual sources. The driving principle behind most of texts is to write down the narrative and then condense it into a headlinese abstract sentence. Otherwise, it operates similarly to poems in Roadrage. 

The original text serves as the backbone of the piece. I've tried to work directly with the sources and write texts out of them, but it doesn't really come together. You can do freewheeling glossolalia that way, but not much else. 

Usually, I would anagram the words in the sources to find out what pieces to use to compose the base text. The process is a bit backwards as i need to match my text with the anagram findings. Sometimes i can further develop a poem that way, but it is a rabbithole timesink. Sometimes synonyms come into play, usually to keep things tighter.

Overall, the series creates abstract poems that leverage its visual component but not exploit the cultural baggage of its visual source material. 

Here are some more visuals from the book. Courtesy of Francis Van Maele. 

Strauss series in a new issue of Utsanga

There is new Utsanga issue online and as usual it is a total blast. I even have a new series in there. It is informally titled Strauss and it is about Strauss being awkward as told through redacted screengrabs of the review of the book about his epistolary conversations with Schiller.

The link https://www.utsanga.it/bilyk-works-2/

Thoughts on "Personal poetry"

A couple of days ago I've stumbled upon a Facebook post criticizing the so-called "personal poetry" and its seeming "overabundance" in the literary outlets. 

It was mostly a derogatory post dismissing the concept as some sort of "conspiracy of bland", but it made me thinking - why do some people have such a distaste for this kind of poetry while the others enjoy it?

So here’s what I’ve come up with.