Artist’s Statement:
So, if the eye were tracked while reading a textual poem it might look like endless tide coming onto shore. What happens to the eye when it reads visual poems? It gets lost. It’s desperate to locate a beginning. The eye is confused and tries to determine if it should be in reading or viewing mode. Two different eyes colliding. The tracked eye looking at vispo tends to be chaotic, not orderly. It might resemble drunken spider webs or pin the tail on the donkey or any aleatory start looking for logic.
That vispo is squeeze to chisel a word into bits before the letters emerge
I find it’s true, letters arrange themselves – it’s never a word first. They take time, they take their time, one letter at a time. A word is built, it doesn’t simply appear. We have forgotten, we live our lives at such velocity that words emerge fully formed, an effortless fact. But it is not that way, alphabets are the history of human sound applied visually. A word is considered a convenience, a formation of letters that represents an object. Letters are the construction and compositional material of societal communication. The ingredients, if you will, of talking, of writing, of thinking, of getting by in our everydayness.
It’s the phrase “letters arrange themselves – it’s never a word first.” One on top of the other till meaning is obliterated, till the words break open and the letters are released. The words explode and letters find themselves liberated to explore their original visual and/or verbal functions. The letters unmoored from their word captor is my visual poetry.
My new book, Collected Staring, is out.
The book’s focus? it’s an exploration of vispoetics, language, and the act of staring as compositional practice.
“In COLLECTED STARING, Nico Vassilakis reprises subjects that have long been central to his engagement with visual poetics. Drawing on his own inventory of writings to create a condensed and pointed text, he investigates the basic relationship of letters to words and their identity as the atomistic elements of language. Few writers have so thoughtfully engaged with the alphabet, or paid attention to the tension between its appearing and disappearing in the service of writing. This is a book rich with ideas and reflections from one of our most creative visual practitioner/theorists.” –Johanna Drucker
Nico Vassilakis is a visual and textual poet. His latest book is COLLECTED STARING published by Sandy Press. His recent books include VOIR DIRE (Dusie Press 2020), LETTERS of INTENT (CyberWit 2022) and WONDERMENTAL (Pulley Press 2024) along with other pamphlets and booklets. He was co-editor of THE LAST VISPO ANTHOLOGY: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 (Fantagraphics Books 2012). Nico is a contributing editor for UTSANGA and has had his work exhibited globally. He lives in the middle of nowhere in Greenville, Illinois with his wife and animals.