Local poet Nico Vassilakis has lately been working primarily with
what he calls visual poetry. You can find much of it on YouTube, and
it’s less a work of grammar and words than an experiment with
typography. This work can be enjoyable but maddening for a book
critic—it’s hard to look at a mass of letters repeated over and
over until the page is black and figure out where to gain critical
purchase, no matter how striking the image may be.
Disparate Magnets marks a return to more conventionally
formed poetry for Vassilakis. There are stanzas (and sometimes even
paragraphs) here. But it’s just a trap: He still fussily works at the
words, shoving them together and seeing what they do to each other when
placed in close proximity. It’s better to circumvent the
poetry-book/poet line of thinking and instead consider Magnets to be a lab and Vassilakis a scientist.
In the middle of a moody poem titled “The Fog Line,” he writes:
Shift happens
You attend to change
To parts that are changing
Moving back the surface
Appears untouched
No notice of activity
Before sound’s sound
Before sound intends
“The Fog Line” is possibly the best poem in Magnets: There is
the solidity of nature to return to, if Vassilakis’s words become too
opaque. But even here he’s playing with the words—shift and change, down to three very different uses of sound to
evoke silence—to see what happens. But there’s a lot of good
stuff if you’re willing to join Vassilakis in his experimentation: He
tries his hand at local satire—”What Seattle” wonders about the
language of alienation—and, with “Cordially,” he sings a lament
that feels surprisingly (and pleasantly) melodramatic compared to some
of his more recent work. Magnets isn’t the kind of poetry book
you can pull open at any page and find a pithy line to explain the
human condition. You’ve got to sit with it, stare at it, and try to
prize the poems apart to see what’s inside of them. It’s some of
Vassilakis’s best work to date. 