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.

Find the complete review at: http://dbqp.blogspot.com/2007/10/longhand-into-tiny-notebooks-i-carry.html

Theories—and other thick things—can be pleasures in themselves. But they are often too leaden for the play of art in the making. I mean, it is not frequently recommended that an artist work from a given theoretical program. Commissions can be tough, I hear.



Some wits and creators, nevertheless, come equipped with folders and files and heavy cabinets of their attendant theories. Even minus all this furniture, we tend to read such writers less like solo voices, more like dialogues, attached as they are to a built-in quarrel. Is this the age of the twin-engine artist-analyst? Poet and critical program in one strand?



Posit a reader—free in her rambling—who finds a theory she likes, and then stumbles, as if onto some mushrooms, a writer performing that very idea, embodying it like an eerie, autonomous gnome. Lucky find. Now our reader proceeds with a special pleasure, because it is in her reading, in her own unique ordering of events, that those two aforementioned strands have twined. And so she comes back from her rambles a bit fuller in the apron-pocket (cue scent of mushroom caps in butter, sizzling away in the background).

I’ve had myself a little Red Vine today—the sensation, I mean, of something intertwining, of topography touching, of good vibration. (It’s like the antecedent of a hyperlink: what a hyperlink imitates by casting a literal glow on a single entity which, as it turns out, contains a two.) The theory I came across? A provocative one Susan Sontag has regarding staring, in her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence.” The other writer? The one I mentioned in a previous post, but then unwittingly, neutrally, Nico Vassilakis.



It happens that Nico has just-published a book, Text Loses Time. It’s a big compendium of work, various in its non-thematic flow. It’s also a nice square shape. Some parts of Text Loses Time can be called textpo, other parts, vispo. Here’s one of the vispo pieces under the title "Formulas."



To be continued at: http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=604

http://sustainableaircraft.com/?p=1

http://wordwithinword.blogspot.com/2008/10/time-loss-textual-nico-vassilakis.html

Dear Crag,

My review of Nico Vassilakis's 'Text Loses Time' has just gone live in the new issue of Galatea. I thought you might be interested. The link:

http://galatearesurrection9.blogspot.com/2008/03/text-loses-time-by-nico-vassilakis.html

Best from Paris,

Nicholas Manning

The book is very lyric (and that is so rare today). I can easily identify with its momentary balances produced here and now - always (as long as...) on the way "from vulnerable to delirium" and vice versa. The poems don't (try to?) talk out from the sphere of the esthetic where they belong (a rare quality again) and which they permanently widen (actualize) with their shifts and motions. That is one of the reasons why they are so helpful and selfless companions.



In structures like:



"your light is..."

never

more of me

in the middle



everything happens simultaneously as if, paradoxically, we were able to walk around a moment ("this" moment: once upon the time) where we also are (and will remain) locked in. Fragmentariness becomes a concentrated tool for expressing the miraculous synchrony of reflections.



The textual and the visual pieces run parallel, they reinforce each other in this great ("meta-impressionist"?) work. Just one example: in Negative Alphabet Alphabet we have - almost - no time to read the letters: it is too late and too early, since we are always "here" rather than "here". And will remain.



Marton Koppany

Implicit in the title of this collection is a ceremony of disintegration: shattering, fragmentation. A shedding of time. A shaking loose of the bonds of linearity and sequence. An immediacy of contact with the tools of construction so lucid and unsullied by the seductions of the future and the burdens of the past that the writing becomes a continuous doing and undoing, a joyful participation in the creation of a strange new alphabet of illimitable occurrence, a fetus of meaning in a placenta of ink.



The presentation is twofold: writing as writing (sentences, laminations, thought, “an undulant mind on soft display“), and concrete poetry -- letters arranged in eccentric patterns of visual energy. The writing is playful, probing, and provocative; sentences in paratactic leapfrog with their teasing proposals: “what restrains a superpower after guilt has lost its charm”; “as a windowsill is a place for elbows, so should a beach be a horizontal wonderment with the diesel fumes of military aggression”; “an unplugged brain is more dangerous than any taxpayer.” The emphasis with both strategies -- abstract and concrete, linguistic and visual -- is to advance an experience with language that becomes an ongoing textual genesis, Stein’s “continuous present.” It is also highly entertaining. Vassilakis is a funny guy, a postmodern Socrates with a quizzical cue stick.



This tendency toward showcasing the implements and machinery of language -- what Charles Bernstein calls “the desire for writing to be the end of its own activity, its very thatness” -- is most abundantly available in Vassilakis’s sections of concrete poetry. For instance, the configurations of letters displayed in the section titled “Rubber,” such as the entity on page 136 consisting of Os and Hs and Gs and Ss and Ts (which could spell the word ‘ghosts’ any number of times) (the letters are, in fact, rather pale) resembles some sort of wiggly-wobbly creature from the alphabet lagoon; Jean Tinguely’s Cyclops comes to mind, as do the Martians from War of the Worlds.



Wittgenstein wrote that “philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.” In Text Loses Time, language is on a holiday from time: sequence, servility, routine. We enter a hall of mirrors where words refer to one another. Where words bump one another like bumper cars, lean into the dark, return us to trance, the means by which we meander. Most importantly, it provides (I am drawing this quote from the Afterword by Nick Piombino)”, “an exit from the current pervasive cultural tendency to employ meaning and visual space according to needs and desires for personal advantage, corporate profit and social control… refuge in the microscopic details of immediate, unfiltered visual and internal perception…”