CRAG HILL Engages
ALPHABET NOIR by Nico Vassilakis
(CL Books, 2016)
[First printed as an
Introduction to ALPHABET NOIR by Nico
Vassilakis (CL Books, 2016)]
Into the Noir
In the beginning was no sign; it was too dark. Or not dark
enough.
In the beginning was the sign, the spoken, gestural, written
light. Or the dark, inside out.
The written sign was the beginning of written language. The
power of the originary sign remains and sustains while the kinds of signs and
the complexities of signs have increased and continue to increase, in space,
light and dark, on pages print and digital, in and out of body. Nico Vassilakis’
work is rooted in this beginning but also in the perpetual becoming of
language.
The letter is the pivot, the fulcrum. The word is an oar.
The letter is the river you can never step in twice. The word names the river
and stems its flow. Vassilakis’ poetic is intensely focused on documenting the letter in its
pre- and post-word state of being/ness.
The letter is not the building block. The letter is a
building itself, the process of meaning processing the language building
meaning. Vassilakis works at the DNA level, unraveling the signatures letters
encode, embody, enact.
I have always appreciated that Vassilakis believes in his
readers; his work does a lot of thinking but it does not do all of the thinking
for its readers. It possesses but is not possessed by its own hermeneutics.
“The thing you do not want to
do is
explain everything.”
I have known Vassilakis’ work for over 25 years. A hallmark
in multiple genres—visual poetry, poetry, performance, or in his critical
writing as demonstrated in this book—is how the work itself is thinking as it
is doing its work. It’s thinking in the act of creating, on the act of
creating, for the act of creating.
“say deceives writing
retrieves
say conceives writing relieves
say what you mean writer of invisible ink
to say it ends is false this writing continues”
Vassilakis
wants the notion/s of letters living life outside the constraint of a word
scrum to be available to all. The reader may get stymied, curtailed by the
ephemeral nature of letters’ lived life: how does one explain, or frame, or undergird
this phenomenon, this deliberate fabrication, this tenuous cloth and this whole
cloth of language that lives in us as much as we live in it? The letter our
cell.
Vassilakis
wants the reader, in this book, to read how a visual poet verifies and validates
their seeing, their life of sight, and he wants the writer to read seeing. He
hopes to magnify and multiply and for a moment enable the reader to dislocate
his/her eyes, to see language, its material, happening and happening and
happening. He wants to push the reader and the writer who reads seeing and is
interested in writing visual poetry, the letter casually mounted over the
mantel in hopes it will disturb and disrupt and get passed down to other
readers and writers.
Alphabet Noir has
two movements: implicit and explicit arguments on the poetics of the letter,
the space/s of meaning before and after the word. The first movement is more
suggestive, ellipitical, transitory, a verbal cognate of Vassilakis’ visual
poetry. The second movement, the notes section, pulls the curtain aside on to the background
of his work, deeply rooted in shared contexts, ways of seeing that may not be
as old as seeing but are at least as old as the first written sign.
Now
is the time for you to be the beginning and the becoming. Into the noir is into
the light.
*****
Crag Hill has been engaged with the liminal spaces between letters, words, and images—the images of words—for over three decades. With Bill DiMichele and Laurie Schneider, he co-edited Score, a magazine devoted to concrete/visual poetry that presented the work of poets from dozens of countries through 20 issues. With Nico Vassilakis, Hill co-edited The Last Vispo Anthology (Fantagraphics, 2012), a project that documents the art of word/image as it prepares to pivot off the page. His most recent book, a series of 52 poems, is 7 x 7 (Otoliths, 2010). He teaches English Education at the University of Oklahoma.
No comments:
Post a Comment