Column089 — September/October 2008
Out of the Ultra-Otherstream
Small Press Review,
Volume 40, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2008
Text Loses Time
By Nico Vassilakis.
2007; 180 pp; Pa; ManyPenny Press,
1111 E. Fifth St., Moscow ID83843. $18.95, ppd.
I coined the term, “otherstream,” over twenty years ago to stand for art that is outside the understanding, and probably knowledge, of all but a few college professors who teach some form of art. At the time I coined the term, Nico Vassilakis, in his early twenties, was already doing major otherstream things in Seattle, then perhaps the top city for otherstream poetry in the U.S., thanks to him–and to Trudy Mercer, M. Kettner, Ezra Mark, Joe Keppler, Jim Andrews, Jim Maloney, Nancy Brush-Burr and a number of others. (It wasn’t until the nineties that Port Charlotte, Florida, moved into first place.) Even then Vassilakis was active as a poetry-organizer and publisher as well as a poet, co- founding the Subtext Reading Series, which he still curates.
His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including Ribot, Caliban, Aufgabe, Chain, Talisman, Central Park and Golden Handcuffs Review–and his visual poetry videos have been shown worldwide at festivals and exhibitions of innovative language arts. Among his many chapbooks are Askew (bcc press), Stampologue (RASP), Orange: A Manual (Sub Rosa Press), Diptychs: Visual Poems (Otolith), Pond Ring (nine muses books), sequence (Burning Press), Enoch and Aloe (Last Generation Press), The Colander (housepress), Flattened Missive (P.I.S.O.R. Publications), Species Pieces (gong press), KYOO (Burning Press) and others. He’s even got a DVD out called CONCRETE: Movies. In spite of all this, it wasn’t until quite recently that Vassilakis had his first full- length collection published thanks to Crag Hill’s new outfit, ManyPenny Press, but that’s what you get for being otherstream.
Here’s its author’s statement about this collection, which is called, Text Loses Time: “This book intends to present both verbal and visual poetries as equal. Though notions of poetics have shifted and swerved, what has stayed solid throughout is that the alphabet, the word – however arranged – contains, within it, dual significance. First, the proto- historic role of the visual conveyance of represented fact. Second, the overriding desire of human utterance to substantiate existence. In conjoining these two models this book hopes to form a third, blurred value. Thought and experience are factors that accrue, while staring and writing help resolve and conclude. Text itself is an amalgam of units of meaning. As you stare at text you notice the visual aspects of letters. As one stares further, meaning loses its hierarchy and words discorporate and the alphabet itself begins to surface. Shapes, spatial relations and visual associations emerge as one delves further. Alphabetic bits or parts or snippets of letters can create an added visual vocabulary amidst the very text one is reading. One aim, to this end, is to merge and hinge visual and textual writing into workable forms. This book collects some of these experiments.”
“Dear appliance, Dear container port,/ Frayed edges of a soluble fish/ Uninvited on arrival and completely soaked/ Investigates misspellings throughout the city./ Shows little regard for the pond./ The hair draped on purpose/ Something ecclesiastic in conversation./ Refrain from smoking please.” Thus goes the first poem in Vassilakis’s “Dear This, Dear Ampoule,” sequence of seven eight-liners to give you an idea of the wily-witted verve of the solitextual work that takes up a little more than half of Text Loses Time. To give you a very incomplete idea of what he does vispoetically, consider his Negative Alphabet Alphabet. His subject is, yes, the alphabet. He sets it down, two letters to a page, over thirteen pages–with each letter altered. For example, he removes the middle horizontal of his B, along with a bit of the curves it is attached to, and shifts the detached piece to the left of the B, but keeping it at the same height it was. Simple, right? Nonetheless, when Vassilakis does tricks like that to every letter in the alphabet in order, shifting back and forth between white letter on black and black letter on white, the result is a veritable symphony. This sounds like gush, but it’s not–because of alphabetization.
Alphabetization came after the invention of letters, needless to say. The latter was a primary landmark in the advance of civilization–but I claim that the invention of alphabetization was of great importance, too–however overlooked by most cultural historians. I don’t know when it occurred, but–well, think what it’s done just for orderly use of the computer. For infraverbal poets, it has provided a wonderful, accessible metaphor for Order, and Sequentiality, both of which Vassilakis has maximally exploited in Negative Alphabet Alphabet.
As his alphabet moves inexorably to its climax, the Z, each letter has a part of itself jolt out in an unexpected direction. I’m reminded of dance steps. The aesthetic key is that each “step” is just slightly different from the one before, just different enough to jar, but not different enough not to seem almost instantly “reasonable”–due in large part to the fact that each letter, being in alphabetical order, is–in the gross–fully expected. The sequence is thus a flow of the standard melody of the standard alphabet jazzedly accompanied by riffs off it that form a “negative alphabet.” Both flows reach the same destination–a Z that can pass for three Z’s–whose zing is set up by all the other letters’ seeming like fractured single letters.
I wish I had space to say more about Negative Alphabet Alphabet, and something about the many other equally ingenious but never even slightly superficial works in Vassilakis’s new book. I’m actually a little glad, too, if truth be known, because it’s hard to say just what it is about them that makes them so effective. Nick Piombino helps in that task with a fine afterword, however. My final word is a common one in my columns: if you have any interest in poetry beyond what you can learn from the academics, this is one of the books you really ought to have.