Andrew Brenza : Voir Dire, by Nico Vassilakis

Voir Dire, by Nico Vassilakis
Dusie, 2020

 

 

In his new book Voir Dire (Dusie, 2020), Nico Vassilakis offers something of an apology, in the old sense of the word, for visual poetry (or vispo), although the book offers only one brief example of the genre. Instead, through serial poems divided into three sections, Vassilakis enacts what seems to be his struggle to create visual poetry and to offer something of an explanation as to why.

At first, it appears that Vassilakis’s subject is the struggle to write meaningful poetry in general, and the impossibility of doing so in this period of history in any conventional way. Through a series of fragmentary statements in section one titled “Then There Was You,” Vassilakis shows us, much as the modernists did, that the logic of language, the temporal relations of cause and effect are illusions, or, at best, metaphors, we have come to accept as real. Although conventional language offers what seems to be understanding and control – “I handwrite in small notebooks / as a shield to protect me from / the surrounding noise and chaos” -- it is also fundamentally inaccurate – “We’re an amalgam of unrelated gestures, / separate and sequential, it’s who we are, how the / day’s noise gets made.”    

Further, Vassilakis suggests that words, or, more specifically, written words, although born from the desire to understand and categorize the world, although born from the need for safety and order against a chaotic, violent and inexplicable universe, can result in a form of control that is oppressive, the death that comes from an overly ridged order, and the unquestioning acceptance and reproduction of that order.        

For Vassilakis, vispo offers a freeing alternative to the above. Vassilakis suggests that through vispo, the stifling of understanding within an edified construct is destabilized figuratively and literally through the breaking of words into letters and/or letters into fragments of letters to be arranged on the page. In Vassilakis’s words, “The letters defy word. They detach and leave word / unstable. The letters, tired of adjusting to word, are / free to roam…. These letters are then freed to interact in unprec- / edented ways.” So, Vassilakis argues, only by destabilizing the foundations of our understanding and the very means by which that understanding is constructed, i.e., language, can we open to alternative experiences, and new ways of being in the world, hopefully for the better.   

And this is the main point of Voir Dire, that there is still newness to experience, alternatives to a world wracked by disease, poverty and political oppression, and there is still a future, if we create the conditions to allow it to arrive. Vispo can help. To conclude, in Vassilakis’s words: 

Imagine laughing caused by
Everything being new again
Like the hilarity of seeing it
For the first time. 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Brenza’s recent chapbooks include Geometric Mantra (above/ground press), Poems in C (Viktlösheten Press), and Waterlight (Simulacrum Press). He is also the author of four full-length collections of visual poetry, most recently Automatic Souls from Timglaset Editions and Alphabeticon & Other Poems from Redfoxpress. His latest book, Spool, will be published by Unsolicited Press in February 2021.