Focus-Pocus?

Thank you, Alex.

I'm transparent.

Aren't you?

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Since I quashed the publication of EXPOSURES my anxiety levels have ramped up and I feel as if I don't know if I can write anymore.

I feel displaced. I've lost some measure of focus.

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Last night nothing but nightmares about loss and infidelity.

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I need a project (or something),a __________ to which I can surrender.

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In Little Did I Know: Excerpts From Memory, philosopher Stanley Cavell's recently published memoir, there's a sentence I keep returning to:

"Must we become artists in order to express experience so unmistakably that we not become isolated, desolated, by ecstasy or by confusion?"

Beautifully said, that. And unarguably true for me.

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Nico Vassilakis

When I interviewed Nico he was pretty resistant to talking poetics/process. He even sort of sheepishly apologized to me at the Avant Writing Symposium for being grouchy during our exchange. The fact is that Nico Vassilakis (not to mention Geof Huth and Crag Hill) may well be the most lucid exponent of vispo poetics we have. When Nico and Crag's massive anthology of vispo finds a publisher it is going to be a revelatory experience for many--a game-changer.

This morning I re-read Nico's protracted type (Blue Lion Books, 2009) while I was doing my 10 miles on the stationary bike at the gym. It's a fascinating volume. It juxtaposes vispo sequences with passages of text about Nico's "staring poetics."

For Nico it all begins with the letter:

"Poetry is comprised of charged units of
language. Before sound, before meaning,
before even the impulse to write - the letters
are preparing to congeal. To see it at this level
is to see the visual aspect of poetry forming."

And later:

"Talking is an acceleration of letters."

Later still:

"Words make a prison for letters."

Nico literally stares at texts until letters come unmoored. That, at root, is his poetics. And it is, as revealed through his practice, profound.

THIS

Layeredness of experience.

You said despair

Is just corny.

Really? Layeredness of

Sensation. Parse this

Drop of semen,

This passing fever.

Who are you?

Kinds of laminate.

Layeredness of perception.

A meter long

Unmirroring song of

Revelation as blank,

Blank and blank.

Eyes are blinds.

Layeredness of emptiness.

Layeredness of yearning.

Layeredness of receptivity.

Monotony of neediness.

Polyrhythms of purpose.

What is this

Thing called now?

BECOMING OUTSIDE

I’ve never been
Good at dating
Or job interviews.

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I don’t exactly
Believe in ghosts.

I believe I’m
Inhabited by others.
If not possessed.

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Where are you?
Have we met?

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Does killing oneself
Mean becoming exterior,
Mean becoming Outside?

Does saying oneself,
Not saving oneself,
Create an Avatar?

*
Are you listening
To me yourself?

ARSE POETICA

My turd

emerges pre-

polished, always

already gleaming.

Feeling blocked and discouraged. Not just in terms of writing.

Fragment

What images

manage to become

can be read.


Secondary sexual characteristics

in primary colors.


Torso in mirror

receding faster

than it appears.

Unsteady
state. Presences
out of register.