NICHOLAS SYRIANUS KATSAFANAS
TOO GYROZ, LLC
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2gyroz [at] gmail [dot] com
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AMERICAN EPIC POEMS (>.667)
Echoes = Consonance + Assonance
[Echoes] / Syllables = Self-Similarity

S+P (ΣΎΝΝΕΦΟ ΚΑΙ ΠΡΊΑΠΟΣ) [2025]
Cloud Strife and 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?)—S+P investigates, both directly and via specific character digressions, these mirror images over the course of its 20 modal cantos.
Mode: >.667

MECHANISM AND DIALOGUE [2025] epub (for Kindle readers)
An American Epic 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.
Mode: 34-55 (8th Interval)

METROPOLIS + ISOSCELES [2021] epub (for iBooks/Kindle readers)
Adam Metropolis and Larry Isosceles, two moderately opinionated men, share their thoughts on the true nature of the number 1.99999 repeating and various theories of the so-called Western world.
Mode: >.667

$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.
Mode: >.667

"SELF-SIMILARITY IN THE EXTENDED LINE" (Essay)
If you mandate symmetry you restrict difference: Deriving a new American ("diagrammatic") meter for long poems via a sober analysis of Big Pun's line, "Dead in the middle of Little Italy little did we know we riddled some middlemen who didn't do diddily."

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 fraction portions of alliteration and assonance, the echoing. What I might even call a modal slant rhyme.

OTHER EBOOKS
FEELINGS COME FROM GAIN OF FUNCTION LABS [2024]
48 lyric poems in the 8th Interval (34-55 syllables per line).
12 TONES OF TUMULT: A COMEDY [2023]
Two MUFON investigators investigate a strange series of incidents involving microtonal pianos.

UPDATES
—10.31.2025: The S+P Official PDF is now available for download above.
—10.17.2025: "Buying Soju in Pesos is Basically Treason" is now on Substack.
—10.10.2025: "Neo-Fascism & The Moldbuggian Paradox" is now on Substack.
—10.08.2025: The paperback for "Blue Hydrangea", the second collection of poems from Katreena Dayacap (disclosure: my wife, whom I'm married to), is now available via Blue Velvet Review.
—09.16.2025: "Koreatown Bok Choy" (50% of S+P: Σύννεφα και Πρίαπος) will be serialized in 5 weekly Wednesday installments on The Blue Velvet Review beginning on Wednesday, September 17, 2025 through Wednesday, October 15, 2025.

Too Gyroz, LLC: Making American English into Ancient Greek