Wondermental by Nico Vassilakis

 

Nico Vassilakis is one of those little known U.S. poets who has been doing fascinating work for years. Written poems, visual poems, the areas in-between. He has also done fine editorial work as well. Wondermental, his new book, is one of my favorite works of his that I know of.

The writing is spare and to the point, full of surprising and meaningful shifts. Ideas and images balance and teeter in ways that always draw me in. The casual tone works to hide but then sometimes to highlight the complexity. Vassilakis comes across as an ordinary working guy with a vision for the experimental, which tends to blow apart the (always blatantly false) idea that avant garde explorations can come only from the well-off and the well-credentialed. The poems have awareness of politics and the limits of politics. They show the foibles of people and their daily troubles and contradictions close up. And they are especially attuned (as all his literary art has been) to word work as a physical and not merely intellectual endeavor.

Here’s the opening of “Causality Report:”

Graffiti on silos

Shopping portable radiation
detectors online

I’m getting absorbed

I know it’s related to my outlook

But I don’t have the strength to stop
feeling absorbed

Like many of the poems I’m most interested in, the poems in Wondermental move from thing to thing and place to place, taking in many contexts and situations and rarely focusing a poem on a single topic.

The world of U.S. poetry remains as unattuned as it always has been to what happens beyond the context of its prize winners and New York Times reviews and institutionally prominent figures. Vassilakis has never had a big system of opportunity to push him along. He’s just out there, living and working and managing somehow to make great new writing and art all the time.

A Secret History of 1968 by Ryan H. Walsh

 I was fascinated by the chapters (three of them) and other occasional mentions of Van Morrison in Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968, but the rest of this book mostly bored me. I guess the chapter on The Velvet Underground in Boston, and occasional paragraphs on Jonathan Richman, and a few of the other stories, were okay. But the narrative of counterculture Boston in 1968 (and before and after) that is the overall focus of the book ran thin quickly.

The many chapters on Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Collective were tedious and served mainly as a reminder that for a certain portion of the counterculture, the difference often got lost between being a revolutionary and being a self-absorbed asshole (usually white male), a description that fits Van Morrison well enough too, but at least Morrison had a real genius to develop and protect. It was hard for me to find anything of much interest in the portrayal of Lyman, who started a local newspaper and regularly declared himself God in it, facts that are more interesting than any elaboration of what happened as a result. His self-proclaimed Messiahood seems to have allowed him to make wild and ludicrous statements but rarely insightful ones. It’s hard to know what to think about the people who followed him. As the cliche goes, I guess you had to be there?

Those who love the history of the counterculture, or of Boston, or both together might find the mix of nostalgia and criticism running through this book enjoyable, but I kept wanting to get back to Morrison, wacko that he is. Given how the book is organized, Walsh himself seems to have realized that Morrison is the most interesting part. Morrison’s visionary genius and manic lunacy both come across clearly. His time in Boston was a particularly rough portion of his career as a musician, and he came out of it with one of the greatest and most unique records in the history of rock and roll, if you think Astral Weeks is rock and roll at all, something Morrison himself has always contested, like he contests just about everything anyone ever says to or about him.

I was glad also that the book gave me a chance to understand the point of view of his wife during that time, Janet Planet (real name Janet Rigsbee). I used to sympathize with the romantic melancholy on display in Morrison’s work after the breakup of their marriage, and still love how it sounds in the songs, but after reading this book, my sympathy is entirely with her. “Being a muse is a thankless job, and the pay is lousy,” she’s quoted as saying, and it’s clear that she knows all too well what she’s talking about.

Fever Dream by Samantha Schweblin

 

Fever Dream (2017) by Samantha Schweblin turned out to be an exciting surprise. I first read about it on a list of recent horror fiction. While I expected it to be fun, I didn’t really think that it would also turn out to be good.

It’s much more than just a straight horror novel, although its near-future eco-sci fi and horror elements are clear. But it’s also surrealist and experimental, with a lyrical collapsing of human character and identity and difference and a vivid use of repetition and circularity. Its multiple perspectives and distortions, as well as the way it plays with uncertain and frightening boundaries between the objective and the subjective, lead to constant disruptions of understanding just what might be going on. It’s both easy to read and difficult to grasp, an accessible combination of genre pop lit and experimental extremes.

Originally from Brazil, Schweblin currently lives in Berlin. The geographical location of the events in the novel is another one of its fascinating uncertainties. Fever Dream is a book about disorienting surfaces and speculation about what lies under those surfaces. If ultimately it’s a book that dwells mostly on those surfaces, with not as much below them as it perhaps promises, it is nonetheless disturbing and beautiful and powerful. It’s a book about a planet in which people are falling apart as much as the land on which they find themselves, but not in a way that anybody can expect or understand.

Meritocracy and the coming Rule of the Vicious

 

One of the problems with Meritocracy, which depresses nearly everyone and makes them resentful, and which in the USA is about to be replaced to some degree by something much worse, for how long who knows, comes from its limited imagination on how to deal with opportunity. A person wins a key award and then starts being given nearly all the available awards; wins a key opportunity and starts being given nearly all the opportunities; has been given enough money so that they can’t help but make more unless they’re utterly foolish.

These people often are (but not always are) worthy people, but they’re not worthy of receiving everything, while meanwhile other worthy people often barely get enough to keep going and do things that go unrecognized and unrewarded. Of course the winners of worthiness are people who win because they fit an already determined profile of worthiness, not because they are inherently better at what they are doing, although some of them are indeed impressive at what they do. And we should never ignore that “profiling” also has its opposite, dangerous side that highlights, even more unfairly, the concept of unworthiness and who gets tagged with it.

Resentment of Meritocracy in the USA, often but not always deserved, because Meritocracy has become so extreme in this country, is one of the causes of what we’re about to see: the rule of the vicious, the corrupt, the abuser, the colonizer, the racist and sexist, the paid or random assassin. And of course The Rule of the Vicious is not entirely the opposite of The Rule of Meritocracy. Meritocracy is at best a restraint placed on the Rule of the Vicious, not its opposite but something that gives it rules and boundaries.

Those who resent Meritocracy because they feel (often rightly) that it has left them out, and those who hate it because it restrains their viciousness, have combined, by no means always intentionally (in fact the latter have greatly manipulated the former), to give us the Rule of the Vicious that this country is about to see. Of course, only the second of these two groups will benefit from what is on the way, which all of us who believe in democracy and the possibility of equal opportunity should work together to resist.

Mole Fizz (2007-2012) by Michael Ball, winner of The End of America Poetry Award

 

The End of America Poetry Award is given by me, occasionally, just because I feel like it. It confers no authority or monetary benefit upon the awardee, and it represents no more than my personal opinion. The goal however is laudatory: to highlight books which explore the neglected or forgotten undersides of American poetry and life, books which explore or come from the strange corners and dreams of American behavior and its consequences, or that take on topics that, on their surface, do not seem like they could offer any kind of edification or value, yet nonetheless they do.

These books are often remarkable for the surprise they bring to the well-trodden gardens of American poetry, and no book of poetry I read in 2024 surprised me more than Mole Fizz (2007-12) by Michael Ball (RIP), a poet, literary organizer, and sporadic part-time laborer based in Baltimore and who passed away in 2015. Mole Fizz deserves The End of America Poetry Award as much as any book I can think of. It was published by Lack Mountain, the publishing project of Zero Degree Writing Program.

Copies of Mole Fizz can be found here:

https://zerodegreewritingprogram.com/?p=56

Where I Began: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

 

This book became the basis of my independent life as a reader and a writer. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, edited by Phyllis Cerf Wagner and Herbert Wise and first published in 1944 by Modern Library. Before it came books that my parents read to me, or gave me to read, many wonderful works, children’s books, but this one I chose myself from my father’s shelves and read through and through repeatedly. I must have read Poe stories at around the same time too. I don’t remember now how old I was, some time between third grade and fifth, I can’t be more accurate. I read them many times for years. These stories set my mind off on all sorts of journeys and gave me a list of writers to read.

This photo isn’t of the original copy I had. That fell apart long ago.

The best thing you can do for some children is to give them the keys to their own imagination.

Happy Halloween to those who celebrate it. 

Some Thoughts on the Essays of William Bronk

 

I’ve loved for many years the poems in William Bronk’s Collected Poems from North Point Press, and I’ve long wanted to read the companion Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays (1983). I somehow never found the right time although I’ve carried the book around for about three decades. The prose is beautiful and precise and also requires a lot of close attention, something I rarely have time for but finally found (let’s say “made”) over this last summer.

It’s really as remarkable a book as I hoped it would be, made up of three sets of essays. And worth the wait. These are essays with a long shelf life of relevance.

The book’s first set of essays, from the 1970s and collected under the subtitle “The New World,” reflects on Bronk’s travels to Palenque, Trikal, Machu Picchu, and Copan, and discusses Mayan and Incan culture and artifacts. Different cultures have created different concepts of time and space, Bronk shows in lucid detail, and those concepts change or vanish over time and can be hard to recover.

And it’s crucial to understand that they are in fact concepts, not realities. Bronk is a cultural deconstructionist (is there a better way to put that?). For humans, the so-called “realities” of the world are themselves only graspable through the concepts we have available to us, and we understand ourselves and the world from inside those concepts, but those concepts never represent any kind of metaphysical truth. They are just approaches we develop for experiencing a world that cannot be described except through cultural fictions, all of which are limited and subject to change. Bronk never says that the world doesn’t exist, since it clearly does, although in what way it does is another issue. However, all human descriptions of it are fictions, even when we tell ourselves that they are grounded in physical conditions. And our fictions not only can change, they do change.

The second set of essays in the book, “A Partial Glossary,” consists of two short pieces discussing costume and desire. And again, Bronk shows how human use and descriptions of things and ideas that we tell ourselves are fundamental reveal changing human cultural values, not ideas grounded in transcendent truth.

Whereas some writers would use the limitations Bronk recognizes as focal points for cultural comparison, or ideas about cultural relativity or intersectionality, and Bronk nods in the direction of such approaches, Bronk instead focuses mainly on the limitations of all human knowledge whatever its cultural context. We never know anything from outside our fictions of it. The world and experience of it remain unknowable. That fact brings a kind of intellectual vertigo (even reading this book can bring that on) yet also an awe that has nearly spiritual dimensions. Existence is a mystery, and while humans often hide from acknowledging that mystery, again and again we find ourselves facing it. And ultimately, disappearing into it.

The final set of essays, "The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States," is a collection of essays originally written in 1946, about 30 years earlier than the other essays in the book. This final section contains several essays each on Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, all of which are fascinating, and all which show Bronk’s own developing philosophical perspective.

The essays on Thoreau made Thoreau seem, in some ways, definitively pre-modern, in that he never seems to have been quite able to imagine that the structure of a society might shape the actions of individuals irrevocably. For Thoreau, individual thought and action, whether his or that of others, were the essential components of human experience. The realities of huge interconnected human societies were ones he could see only from the perspective of an individuality that had to struggle for its independence but could do it, even if most people didn’t find it in their interest to try.

Whitman’s engagement with the concept of the oceanic, on the other hand, as Bronk explores it, points to a perspective more like that of Bronk’s of the 1970s. In the ocean, Whitman finds himself in touch with all that is larger than the human and the social, all that is unknowable and mysterious, something that one can encounter but never really understand. It’s possible, Whitman imagines, to meld with that mystery, but it’s not possible to understand it.

Melville’s paradoxes around the subject of justice form a fitting conclusion to the book. Melville understood that the law and any social contract, and human use of those things, are filled with corruption, oppression, and delusion. On the other hand, especially as he got older, Melville did not seem to have believed that there was any absolute system of truth against which those human failings could be accurately measured. Our cultural concepts of morality are all we have. Bronk shows Melville, in his short novel Billy Budd, acknowledging both that justice is often a fantasy and that humans still need a concept of it to live by, even when that concept fails them. And crucially for Melville, they need it even when they know it’s failing them.

Sentence after careful sentence, the essays in Vectors and Smoothable Curves show Bronk’s development as an essayist in something close to reverse order, with the most recently written essays coming first in the book. After all, linearity and chronology are themselves no more than fictions. Bronk shows that meaning resides in the individual, or in the culture, or both, but that ultimately it’s meaning itself that is the limitation that we have to live with and fail with, since mostly all we know are the ramifications of that limitation.

Still, awe, mystery, and the unknowable are what we also have to live with, no matter how hard we might try to avoid their presence in our lives or call on them only when we think we need them. If Bronk is not really a religious or even a spiritual writer, that’s only because the power (or the presence, or the absence, choose whatever word best fails you) he is trying to acknowledge is much larger than anything we can possibly say about it.