NICHOLAS SYRIANUS KATSAFANAS
(508) 813-5987
@nickkatsafanas | tumblr
(author photo w/ waifu)
This website consists of a portion of my literary output to date, with a particular focus on my book length (satirical) American Epic Poems, which are written in a proprietary meter I've deemed: modal slant rhyme (John Donne Shit). Also featured is the essay "Self Similarity in the Extended Line (w/ Reference to Big Pun)", which is in reference to said meter.
I've worked as a busboy, a grocery store bagger, a telemarketer for a CPA firm, in various stock rooms for various retail outlets (up to and including Ann Taylor), and as a street team member for a Boston radio station. I currently work in the finance dept for a design firm in Massachusetts. My favorite job to date is busboy.
I live in the West End of Providence RI w/ my wife Katreena. I graduated from UMASS-Amherst in the Coolidge Tower, briefly took part in a now defunct "tanka screamo" band called The Massachusetts Department of Revenue (all the songs were based on tanka poems), and began my adolescence rapping in an underground hip hop group called inSTEREOtype under the pseudonym Faux Nick.
Some of my favorite books as of this writing are: Proclus's Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, Pound's Cantos, Strindberg's Inferno, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, ibn Arabi's Bezels of Wisdom, Deleuze's Bergsonism, and Byron's Don Juan.
Drop me a line at: 2gyroz [at] gmail [dot] com
AMERICAN EPIC POEMS (>.667)
Echoes = Consonance + Assonance
[Echoes] / Syllables = Self-Similarity
=Modal Slant Rhyme
"Mr Pound has more recently insisted ... on the importance of a study of music for a poet."
- T.S. Eliot, "Ezra Pound: His Metric And Poetry"
S+P (ΣΎΝΝΕΦΟ ΚΑΙ ΠΡΊΑΠΟΣ) [2025]
Cloud Strife of FF7 and the Greek God Priapus, both virtually depicted with shifting images depicted across eras—from Playstation 1 to Playstation 5, Democratic Athens to Imperial Rome—one gripping a Buster Sword that's, of course, vaguely phallic, and the other wielding a gigantic phallus that's, of course, often employed as a deadly weapon, both psychologically tortured via an ambiguous demigod-adjacent genetic lineage (Jenova and Aphrodite?)—this poem investigates these mirror images over the course of 20 cantos.
Mode: >.667 (note: ">.667" is a rhyme scheme...)
1st Edition Released: 10/31/25
(This is a 29,950 syllable poem that, ideally, will be rapped aloud by its readers.)
Excerpt
Canto I to "footnote to Plato or whatever"
(Jazz Edit)
$14.28 IS MORE ATTRACTIVE THAN $14.00 [2023]
John Hawkes rightfully noted the superfluous nature of plot, character, setting, and theme. In addition, Symeon The New Theologian's The Divine Eros was certainly an epic poem. Also: 33% of $14.28
Mode: >.667
1st Edition Released: 09/04/23
METROPOLIS + ISOSCELES [2021]
Adam Metropolis and Larry Isosceles, two moderately opinionated Greek theologians, share their thoughts on the true nature of the number 1.99999 repeating and various theories of the so-called Western world.
Mode: >.667
1st Edition Released: 05/21/21
Note: Unlike some contemporary poetry these are meant to read (or at least "mouthed") aloud.
SELF-SIMILARITY IN THE EXTENDED LINE (w/ REFERENCE TO BIG PUN)
There’s “measurement” and “division”; there’s “self-similarity“ and “syllabic interval”.
There are two crucial elements that, at this point, it’s imperative for us to define if we’re going to continue to write poems. The first is the syllable, which is a simple unit; the syllable is unitary, a simple mathematical unit. But the second element is the echo. The echo is relational, something that exists only as a derivative of the unitary syllable. The echo is a mist, a notable participation in Likeness across two or more of these units, separated by a reasonable spatial distance, connected temporally via speech.
The echoes, in aggregate, become a measurement of self-similarity.
The line or block of text is composed of “syllables” and the echoes are the “measurements of likeness” between these fundamental elements. This will be the case for either in an individual line or a block of text that’s then either left as a block or then diced up into set intervals after the fact.
The canto itself is a “self-similar line”, and the (epic) poem is a “self-similar wave”, both of which come into being via measurement. The measurement defines the “mode” — a quotient range (>.667; .650-.800, etc) is just a variable restriction, like a mode.
These blocks of text could also be called “macrotones” in a sense, and by that I mean they have a measured quotient of self-similarity (which expresses itself via sound) that defines the unit, that can’t be divided without changing essentially. A macrotone of .754 even if divided equally into two will change essentially, it will no longer be .754. Whereas a microtone takes a tone and divides it — a macrotone is an aggregation of sound.
But the best example of all of this isn’t in Whitman or Pound or Ginsberg or Ashbery; it’s just the last line of the first verse of Big Pun’s “Twinz.”
“Dead in the middle of Little Italy little did we know
that we riddled some middleman who didn't do diddily”
“[D]ead [i]n the [m][i][d]dle of [L][i]ttle [I]t[a][l][y] [l][i]ttle [d][i]d we know
that we r[i][d]dled some [m][i][d]dle[m]an who [d][i][d]n't [d]o [d][i][d]d[i][l][y]”
31:31 .100
The self-similarity of “1.00” — peak lyricism? There are no fixed syllables per line here, and there’s no fixed pattern of stressed syllables, and there’s no technical end-rhyme, because although “Italy” and “diddily” might technically rhyme, in the incessant referencing back upon itself of the line, this outright rhyme is diluted by various the D’s, soft I’s, and L’s that ricochet violently across the line, engaging in fractional portions of consonance and assonance. An echoing. What I might even call a modal slant rhyme.
OTHER WORKS
FEELINGS COME FROM GAIN OF FUNCTION LABS [2024]
Rhyming poems para tu madre
JAZZ SINGING ABOUT SUICIDE - S/T LP [2025]
This record is the culmination of my COVID-era studies in music: fusing trichordo buzuki modal improvisation (taqsim) with my experiments in reciting poems at 377 syllables per minute and pairing them with drum loops that are set to 89, 144, or 233 BPM.
MECHANISM AND DIALOGUE [2025]
A long narrative poem consisting solely of spoken dialogue by Ingo S, an adroit remote viewer, and the entities (a school bus sized orb, floor fan, and a tic tac shaped "UAP") he encounters during his various out of body sojourns.
12 TONES OF TUMULT: A COMEDY [2023]
Two MUFON investigators investigate a strange series of incidents involving microtonal pianos.
WITH APOLOGIES TO THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: A NOVEL [2016]
Something about accidentally courting a married exotic dancer who actually had a soul you respected despite your dual mutual deeply interpersonal flaws.
