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This website is a PDF repository for a portion of my literary output. Currently, I'm phasing out of a long Postmodernist Drivel Era and moving into an Anti Avant Garde Era. But both bodies of work are mostly written in a probabilistic meter I consider a Modal Text. Featured below is the short essay "Self Similarity in the Extended Line (w/ Reference to Big Pun)", which expands on that concept, and "Category Theories", which expounds on where such a writing could fit into the current literary landscape.
A list of some of my stuff (w/ PDF links) can be found here.
A few of my favorite books are: Byron's Don Juan, Pope's The Rape of the Lock, Donne's Songs & Sonnets, Pound's Cantos, Strindberg's Inferno, ibn Arabi's Bezels of Wisdom, Bakunin's The Immorality of the State, Proclus's Commentary on Plato's Parmenides, and Baraka's Somebody Blew Up America.
A few records that have influenced my approach to writing are: Ghostface's Supreme Clientele, Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, cLOUDDEAD's s/t LP, Big Pun's Capital Punishment, and Robert's Ashley's Foreign Experiences.
I live on the Southside of Providence RI USA w/ my wife Katreena and my impending son Nikolaos Enrique (Iglesias) Katsafanas.
Feel free to send me an email at: 2gyroz [at] gmail or connect w/ me on Instagram.
Echoes = Consonance + Assonance
[Echoes] / Syllables = Self-Similarity of the Line
=Modal Slant Rhyme
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 in metrical structures. 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 section or sentence is a “self-similar line”, and the text 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.
Prose (Noun): written or spoken language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure
We should only critique out of love, so please believe me when I tell you it hurts my soul to see the cultural decline of Poetry over the last, I don’t know … one hundred years?
It’s like witnessing some down on their luck bloke finally confess they’re “only” snorting coke a “few nights a week,” popping a few pills here and there.
Sure, you could reply, “Maybe blowing lines until 4am on a Wednesday night is a tad ill-advised at your age?”
But when has that ever worked?
The cocaine of poetry was introduced at scale by, of course, those righteous Beats, who were so easily co-opted into the very State Apparatus they made such a stink about opposing (as virile young white Buddhists).
And the poetic cocaine of the Beat is the idea that metrical structure is the tyrant holding the poet down.
The Beats weren’t the first to have this idea, but they were the first to successfully assimilate it into the universities and large-scale publishing houses.
But while I could, sure, spend the next 2,000 words lambasting Gregory Corso, the real issue introduced by this “revolution” was this: If prose is written language sans metrical structure, but now the Beatnik Adjunct Professor has decreed that poetry is … written language sans metrical structure?—well, I think you see the concern there!
Prose or poetry? O, dualities! How you always lead us astray!
Even when a movement like the Golden Age of Hip Hop took our country by storm—reintroducing a metrical rigor even Alexander Pope would be proud of—Poetry remained in their room aloof, with no real change to their habits, seemingly unaware of it all.
I’ll be honest with you, reader. I never read Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry. But I think at the very least he got the title wrong.
Hatred of Poetry? In America?
Americans hate MAGA. Or they hate allowing trans athletes to compete in Women’s High School Volleyball.
But Americans do not hate Poetry. Hatred is a visceral response. Hatred is a response. And the primal issue with poetry in our epoch is there is no response.
Which by definition cannot be hatred? It’s dissolution. It’s non-existence!
No one’s saying you can’t snort a line here or there! On a birthday or some shit. Write a free verse poem every now and then. But when your whole vibe 7 days a week is Bukowski …
All of which is to say texts adhering to metrical structures are no longer poems to me.
Only because there’s been scant evidence over the past hundred years that American poetry has any interest in reintegrating any sort of metrical structure into its cultural milieu.
In 2026, in the English speaking world, a style of writing adhering to metrical structure is certainly not prose, but it’s also not poetry.
To describe some metered series of syllables you wrote to anyone as a poem would only generate a quizzical expression and series of questions, which is the last response a proper definition should elicit.