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:

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.

Okay, my Facebook book

I didn't get seriously sick, as you might've surmised, but I've kept busy. I'm very much behind my schedule in the historical novelist reference book, but I managed to self-publish a small volume of my Facebook status updates.

What? you ask. What's the point? I hasten to add that my use of Facebook is strictly something else than promoting my latest book - which is something American and British authors like to do, to the point their so-called friends don't really know what they are about. (I once noticed an author mentioning his signing or some such event and one of his friends asked: "Hey, great! What kind of books do you write?")

My use of Facebook status updates is more akin to conceptual poetry, even though I'm known to have written also about something topical, comments on Finnish politics, media, literature etc. I've done lots of updates picking up random texts from other sources (I've taken a piece of writing from one reader of this blog, but I won't tell who it is) and using absurdly ephemeral texts the contexts of which no one knows but me. Put together, they are, I think, an interesting mix. (I'd like to compare it to a small book a Finnish poet Karri Kokko did recently: he listed all the people he met during a year and places he met them.)

And years later it will be valuable to see what has been in air, so to speak. I've been thinking I should do a similar volume each year, as long as I will be using Facebook, but actually the process is a bit difficult: the statuses (stati?) don't easily transfer into written text. And I've already lost many while sitting on them.

So, The Book of Updates: 11 Months in Facebook is available. At the moment it's pretty difficult to obtain to foreign countries, but I think it can be solved, just use the comment box or e-mail (or Facebook!). For the Finnish readers, it's 3 euros plus postage. The book is bilingual - some of the comments are in Finnish and some of them are in English. I'd say the percentage is fifty-fifty. (I've been thinking about doing a wholly English version of the book and put it up on Lulu.com or some such, but I don't know whether I'll have the time for that.)

I'll be posting the foreword to one of my other blogs later, but not now (it will be in Finnish). The latest version is only on the other computer we have and I don't have access to it at the moment.

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

My newest work: MACHINES

I've forgotten - as I've been doing something else besides blogging (which is a healthy sign, isn't it?) - to promote my newest book. There's not much to promote, though: the print run of MACHINES is a measly 30 and I've already sold and given away the majority.

MACHINES is one of my rare forays into experimental poetry (you never know what I'm up to) and is of a found text type. The four-page poem consists only of a import manual I found in an Indian guidebook from the fifties. (Exhilaratingly obscure, isn't it?)

The booklet has the ISBN title, though, so it's a legitimate publication. Be sure to grab one, while you still can - your future might depend on the breadth of your Nummeliniana collection.

Here's what my friend Jussi Parikka said about MACHINES:

"Hieno kokoelma, hämärästä lähteestä. Hyvin vaikuttavaa! :-) Tulee mieleen italialainen futurismi + seonnut teknoarkeologi, jolla luettelovimma. Toimisi hyvin ääneenluettuna (vrt. uudelleen italialainen futurismi.) / A fine collection, from an obscure source. Very impressive! :-) Reminds me a bit of Italian futurism and a crazed technological archeologist with a list mania. Would work well read out aloud (cf. again Italian futurism.)"

(Will scan the cover later on.)