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.