Concrete Jungle

Page 17 July–August 2008 B O O K R e V i e W s ConCrete Jungle Vanessa Place Concrete poetry is no longer concrete. TexT loses Time Nico Vassilakis ManyPenny Press 1111 E. Fifth St. Moscow, ID 83843 188 pages; paper, $15.95 There is something utopian about visual poetry, something that believes that words mean, that letters are, that print laid bare will bear witness. This crux of meaning resists all attempts at negation: sense pokes through nonsense, and even erasure leaves traces of words’significance. Like bullets and babies, it’s enough that they’ve been there. But like every utopia, this literal bedrock is both a perfect place and a place that does not exist. And like every utopia, its existence is nonetheless proved by its would-be residents. Nico Vassilakis believes, and Text Loses Time is his witness. Throughout 174 pages of poetry and vispo, Vassilakis reasserts the fundamental tenets of postwar concrete poetry with the same variance through repetition and faith through works that make gospels from goatskins. Text Loses Time is divided into twenty sections , each section illustrating a facet of Vassilakis’s particular iconography: the pages of “Negative Alphabet Alphabet” are bisected horizontally, half the page featuring a fractured white capital letter set in a black box, the other a broken black letter on the white box of the page. The letters are spliced, sometimes tectonically, such as the “D” whose midsection’s shifted, or a stuttering “Z,” sometimes conceptually, an “X” whose amputate fore-limbs creep round the other side of itself, like that junior-high party trick of hugging yourself to pretend to be making out with someone else. The eye, of course, heals the fracture and puts the letters back in visual order, thus engaging the reader with the materiality of the letter as letter. Similarly, in “Rubber,” a series of ink-stamped congeries easily unsort themselves to their hollow sets, spelling ghost, helium, shaft. “GHOST” is a thing with two hissing legs, “HELIUM” surrounds the shape of an undone balloon, and “SHAFT” models both a necktie and a keyhole vagina. These whats that are not coherent by way of their referents; if I’m rubber, Vassilakis implies, letting his letters cling to the thing they implicate, you’re glue. Contrarily and complimentarily, the non-vispo works in Text Loses Time are wholly nonvisual: they squat obediently in variously sized blocks and contain little or no sustained written imagery. They are, however, chock-full of clues. Not clues to Vassilakis’s concrete poetry, for his vispo is relentlessly accessible: unlike the poème-conversation or the poème simultanè, Vassilakis does not indulge in visual metonymy or metaphor to the point that any individual codex would be required. In fact, individuality itself is unnecessary. Vassilakis’s tautologies are tautological, and his legends come with a pass key. The poet’s exhortations are to “Refrain from smoking please” and “retaliate against machines,” and his salutations include “Dear appliance” and “Dear container port,” making “dear angel” as diminutively commercial as “Dear almond joy.” While there are some allusions to sexuality, there’s no private or rude parts, no dicking or farting, nothing that’s not orderly. “Lick” thrice typed turns to “luck,” but will never be “fuck” or the equal opportunity “suck” and even the beautiful skull in “a silent shell, a fontanel” is duly plucked into meatless abstraction (“shaped like a moment here”). All images are safely contained in the plane of the page, and most huddle in a box within the box, a pane within the plane. There’s no sense of expansion, or lack of control, no feeling for anything that cannot be pent up and put on display. It is vispo for the gallery, not the street. Likewise, the clues Vassilakis carefully plants, the aches he will allow, are codicils to his creed, not himself: “Deter nothing. Engage nothing”; “the whirligigs clog the funnel”; “It’s okay, it’s natural for blur to occur”; “After 45 minutes formal design seems pointless”; “Fragmentation leaves you starving”; and “Fragmentation leaves you starving for more.” And more is what I was hungry for. The problem with Vassilakis’s project...