Longhand into Tiny Notebooks I Carry for Months: Fragments towards a Review of Nico Vassilakis’ Text Loses Time

What Nico Vassilakis’ new book Text Loses Time, just out from the newborn ManyPenny Press (child of Crag Hill), does is show us what a book of poetry by a visual poet must always be: an edifice that holds textual possibilities of all kinds. This is a book of visual poetry, textual poetry, prose poetry, and sound poetry (the texts for same).

Nico works in each of these modes in this single book. His visual poems are often wordless, or almost so, or virtually so. His sound poetry scripts are visual and aural, often to the point of nonsense, to the point of listening to the human voice, unsung, as music. His poetry would be lyrical if that didn’t demean them. The poems work on a principle of fragmentation. Glimpses, flashes, instances of language appear and flicker away, replaced by another enigmatic phrase, but each of these is held together with a sinew of sense and sense of direction that propels us through them even as we do not know where were are going. And his prose poetry almost recreates his lineated poetry, but not quite: its words surge en masse accumulating in size, growing, expanding, ballooning into sense, enchanting with their audacity.



Unexpectedly, this thick book opens with a sequence of visual poems under the title “Porto Middled.” Each of these poems is a poem for the eye. Nico has taken images of text, distorted in various ways, cut them into squares and present two to a page, one atop the other. These are tiny akilter dyptichs that lead us to think of visual art, that provide almost no real textual matter, but which remain textual, which recall a meaningful textscape we cannot recreate. These are the ghosts of printed language, regimented. We know they have meaning, but we can not know what that meaning is any longer. Nico has torn and twisted language apart to find a more beautiful way.

In person, Nico rebels against the idea that he is a language poet, and that might be because he rides in a different herd. But he often constructs a poem as a language poet might: gathering up strips of language and laying them out in a pattern until their patterns of propinquity begin to make sense, until that most literal of contexts that they live in begins to give them unexpected significance. Nico shows this clearly in the poems of “Dear This, Dear Ampoule”:*

Dear alleviate, Dear horologist,
It walks into the room everyone stands up
A modern dashboard of language
A two decade long affair with brand names
Unluckily love continues defying logically
The part with rogue monkeys in the cafeteria
So retaliate against machines
The thursday of several calendars

In this poem and its brethren—because Nico presents a series of capsules of similar creations within this book—each line of the poem is not necessarily related to the others, even the sequence of lines could be changed. These lines would like lines from Ron Silliman or Lyn Hejinian; they accrue meaning despite their apparent unrelatedness to one another.

Nico is a Greek bear of a man, tall and dark and sturdy, yet his words have a delicacy I rarely every hear. The disparate pieces of his poems might seem sere and uninteresting, but everything is alive in his poems. The vocabulary burgeons with each coming line. The linebreaks add to the tension. Below, in this poem from “After Perect,” the lines break almost always at the awkwardest spot: and, A, the, and They, for instance). And the images in one of Nico’s poems come in bursts. They are almost abstract. And then there will be a turn of phrase that surprises, then another. Everything flickers down through these lines:

C.
Generally the page and
its two dimensions. A
memory attached to the
narrowness of it. They
were called boats because
of their shape. A
description of the unfinished
project. The film, a film, as shown
on French television. The
appearance of the crocodile.
A new continent spills from
her eyes. A glass full
of pencils. An autobiography
composed entirely of photos.
The long trembling moment.
Trembling before the blank
page. Sitting on a bench
opposite fig. 1 or Figaro. These
4 poles define the whole literature
of my own time.

“The Text Develops and Loses Time in the Reading of It” is a long sound poem score of Nico’s. It works, however, both aurally and visually. The complicated structure of the score itself helps to fragment the writing, because Nico’s work is always about fragments—fragmenting text and bringing the fragments together. In this score, text runs according to the four cardinal points, but every which way. Words are written against and across each other. Texts of different sizes are sequestered in different parts of the score. A series of eighteen squares defines the canvas, segregates and controls the text. The fragmentation is so great that meaning is hard to squeeze out of the piece, and if you hear it in person, with multiple voices declaiming the different parts, the sense of chaos increases. Nico is interested in language as a physical fact, aural and visual, and this work brings that most fully to the fore.

Often, Nico’s poems reflect on text, on reading, on meaning, because language is his only sacrament. Human beings prove themselves by being masters of language. It is that skill that makes us who we are, and Nico sings that every time he writes. Listen to it in this poem from “Flat Out”:

*
It’s yours now completely. Even while the words form meaning adjoining sounds distract you. That trick of how you associate to the text. That ability of meshing life with what you think of life. You decide. You decide what to read or how to read and you are deciding as you are reading. Find me, and you already have begun a new book in your hands. Put me down and still you seek a new source. Thought travels a certain distance then returns. And it dawns on you, or has been dawning on you or you’ve enjoyed many dawns or are still transfixed by that one dawn, that first dawn. Even now. Here now. Go ahead close the book and walk away. The texture of it is nothing to speak of, but you’ve thought of it already, the kind of paper, its dimensions, its similarity to other textures you’ve known. It just happens so quickly. You are in command the whole time. I am here to stop you up, to remind you. Now to begin again...

In the poems of “The 4th Eleven,” Nico introduces a technique he uses elsewhere. He capitalizes words seemingly unnecessarily within a line, but what he is really doing is redefining the line, giving it more definition, dividing it into its necessary parts. Just before every capital letter, we hear a pause and what was not a single line is three lines long. These internal linebreaks, these literal caesurae, control both pace and meaning, changing the reading experience.

=
Her penalty is Her wealth is An elbow
A roomful About the head
The other night You wanted it
Transparent Like a ghost
And even stroked The jellyfish
To master its poison

The reach of Nico’s work in this book is so broad that it even encompasses the punctuation poem, that most wordless of poems, those poems made out of nothing but punctuation marks. This one is merely a simple permutational poem, but it is striking how powerful that growing river of parentheses appears to be.


The sequence entitled “Rubber” includes simple rubberstamped poems with obsessive repetitions of letters, yet if we read these soft poundings carefully we will see a word arise off the page. It is something of a surprise to discover that this dense mass of letters spells out “HELIUM,” a weightless gas that appears here as solid ink on paper. But there is something in the way Nico stitches from H to E to L and on that makes this poem a meaningful examination of transformation: how language moves from one thought, one word, one sound to another, how helium leaks out of a balloon and become indistinguishable from the air itself.

I keep reading this book over again, enjoying the poems and trying to uncover their secrets. I cannot quite figure it out. Why do I find these lines so beautiful? Why do I believe I can live with them forever? Yet why don’t I trust this wealth of beauty? How can I not believe they can exist? After reading through this book, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of peace, because the music and the vision that Nico has created here is what I look for in poetry. I don’t look for sense, though I can accept that if offered. Instead, I look for an experience that goes through and beyond sense, that captures my ears and my eyes, and Nico has done that in this book with stunning and indefatigable regularity.

In the end, my major problem with this 188-page book of poetry is just too short for me. The book doesn’t include “A Name for Radio,” a beautiful little poem that Nick Piombino even mentions in the afterword.† Unfortunately, this book includes none of Nico’s color visual poems (for obvious reasons), yet I miss their shimmering Vassilakisian colors. And there are so many other poems that could be here. It is a shame this book is so small. We are merely lucky Nico is still young.

_____

* What is it that makes me believe that I should show a visual poem before I say a word about it, but that I should introduce a textual poem before I let the reader see it?

† My review of that chapbook was part of my first foray into reviewing poetry, and I think back to that poem when I think about what I want poetry to be.
_____

Vassilakis, Nico. Text Loses Time ManyPenny Press: Moscow, Ida., 2007

Cost: $15.95 + $3 postage (check payable to Crag Hill). Order from ManyPenny Press, 1111 E. Fifth Street, Moscow, ID 83843 USA. Or order online.

ecr. l’inf.