New collection of one-word poems out

As some of may remember, I have some interest in experimental poetry. I've done a collection of e-mail spam poetry that is still available (check it out here), and I've also done some very small booklets of other spam-related or found stuff.

Now there's a new book of experimental poetry out. It's called velernic syoke mulnec, and it's a collection of word verification words that were once used in blogs and other sites that required some sort of notification you're not a bot. So, a machine wanted to know whether we are humans. There's irony in that, to be sure.

velernic syoke mulnec is a part of the "pwoermd" movement (if there indeed is a movement), poems that include only one word. The words in velernic syoke mulnec are fictitious (unless by accident there are some bona fide words included), which also is ironic in itself. There's also a preface (two, actually), and it's in English.

These word verification words seem no longer to be in use, so the collection has already become a historical text, an archive, one might say. The bulk of it was collected by me and some other folks in the end of the first decade of the 2000's, and there was also a publisher, but for some reason or another it never came out. Now I decided to put it out as an e-book, and it will be free for some time now. So go grab it, if you're interested in this type of thing. The book is available also through Kobo. Amazon's preview option might also satisfy your interest.

The book looks like this:

Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Alphaville (1965)

Woody Haut once wrote that both poetry and pulp fiction start from scratch. One film that is right in the middle between poetry and pulp fiction is Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville. In the film the hero kills the evil central computer by reading it Paul Éluard's poetry.

The film stars Eddie Constantine as Lemmy Caution, the hero of cheap French crime flicks, originating from Peter Cheyney's once-popular novels. Alphaville is a mix of parody, pastiche, deconstruction and homage to the cheap genre, timed to the rhythm of the Lemmy Caution's gun, Paul Misraki's pounding but jazzy music, hysterical car drives through the suburbs of Paris. The film is at times pure poetry in motion: the image changes into negative all of sudden, people stagger strangely in the corridors of the central computer building, the lights flicker, the screen is filled with neon-light words.

Seems like Todd Mason isn't doing his usual Tuesday round-up, but I'll post this anyway and add a link to his blog here.

My first collection of poems: Bodice Ripper Apart

This book has been long time in coming. I started saving spam e-mail some four or five years ago, in order to gather enough of them to make a book, with the aim to archive some of the spambot literature, which can be seen as a form of Dadaist or concrete poetry.

And here it finally is: Bodice Ripper Apart: A Book of Spam Poems is out from ntamo, who's specialized in modernist, postmodernist, weirdish, concrete and language and non-language poetry. ntamo works via Lulu.com, so the book is available throughout the whole globe. Follow the links. The book is accompanied by an afterword from Jussi Parikka, a friend of mine, who works as a lecturer in Anglia Ruskin University and who has shared my enthusiasm for spam for some time now.

The book is totally in English, save for some parts that are more like in Spammish, whatever language that is.

A mysterious three-line poem

I made myself a note on Word about some matters that had crossed my mind. It looked like a short poem. Can anyone recognize just what I was trying to remember? (The members on the PulpMags e-mail list are not allowed to answer.)

love
sensations
they shoot horses

The cover illustration for Kaarlo Uskela's anarcho-communistic poetry collection from the twenties

I don't really remember whether I've mentioned it here or not, but I wrote a foreword to a reprint a small publisher working in Turku, Savukeidas, did a month back. It's Kaarlo Uskela's Pillastunut runohepo (The Crazed-Up Pegasos, if you will) from 1921. The book was deemed revolutionary (which it is, very much indeed) and the remaining copies of the print run were destroyed. I believe also some of the copies already sold to customers were taken away and burned - the book is really scarce. I don't believe it for a minute, but let it be said that a book antiquarian I know told me that the book, if it can be found, would cost 1,000 euros.

Well, here it is anyway. The book is not mine, I'm sorry to say, but it is almost mine, since it belongs to a dear friend of mine with whom I've been swapping books for two decades now. He borrowed the book for me when I was writing the foreword (which actually became an afterword in the process). Savukeidas made a pictureless cover for the book, because they didn't know I had the book with the illustrated cover - more's the pity! The cover is done by the famous Ola Fogelberg, who's best known for his Pekka Puupää comics here in Finland. The colours show anarchistic ideology: black and red.

Should you want to know more about Uskela's poems (which are pretty old-fashioned and metric, but show some flair for bad taste and black humour), ask. I'll be writing more about this stuff at my Finnish-speaking blog, Julkaisemattomia, here. But not now. Suffice it to say that Kaarlo Uskela died in 1922, after having refused to have a rotten tooth taken care of. And that after the Civil War he was put in a concentration camp for some months in 1919. There are some really touching poems about this in the book.

Typewriter samples

When you don't set out to write good poetry, you sometimes come up with good ones. Here are some samples I wrote when I tried my vintage typewriters (I'll put up photos later on). I don't really know if they are any good as poems, but there is something intriguing, something surrealistic about them.







The horribleness steps into the unknown river.
The eyes are looking at us.
We are prisoners and we don't know what explodes the eyes.













[This is my exercise in Federico Garcia Lorca.]

tambourine is playing
the Greekishness is spreading its wings
there are limits to being unknown
tambourine is playing in the dark night
it is the night of being European



[This is virtually untranslatable. At least I won't try. It's not really a poem.]

The Barbie typewriter

Someone might remember my fascination with old typewriters. I wouldn't call myself a collector, but for some reason I find that I've managed to accumulate five or six typewriters from the fifties and the sixties.

Here's the latest find: a plastic Barbie typewriter. When I bought this from a thrift store in Pori (I think Ottilia found it for me and brought it to me proudly), I thought immediately that it's strictly eighties. But hell, no - there's a note under the writer that says it's from 1997! Just who used typewriters in 1997? Even I had a laptop by then!

The font is ugly and you can use only capital letters. Some of the Scandinavian letters, such as Ä and Ö, and all the numbers can be used only by shift. No corrections are possible. I wonder how many writers working now started with this...

The machine was broken down, but I managed to fix it! I'm not very handy and I felt very proud of myself. The letter "I" doesn't work, it just leaves an empty space. I don't think the machine will last for long, but I wrote a poem with it:













In English:

The merchandise is produced
by producing random
unfamiliarity
Familiarity steps over the
borders the stars step down
to the world the world under the moon
where the slave is the ruler
and the king of his own thoughts
This is the truth and you can't run away from it
not even in a dream
Death is our friend, comrade
from remoteness, from the production fields

(I don't think that's a very good one, mind you. It took one minute to type.)

I also came up with a title of my coming poetry collection while introducing the machine to Ottilia and Kauto: The Unknown Spiders.