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X E R O L A G E 4 6
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Xerolage 46 – STARINGS by Nico Vassilakis
http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage46/by/nico_vassilakis
This is what an alphabet does when the books are closed and the
letters are off duty. The characters cavort, mate, replicate,
coagulate, instigate, insinuate, explode… Free of responsibility,
the alphabet dances.
– Rosaire Appel
Nico Vassilakis’ STARINGS occupies us by combining radically
different registers of meaning — violence and play, destruction and
creation, character and scatter. And we are occupied when we enter
each image, as in taken over or filled up, concentrate on or in, we
have control or have lost control of meaning here. Not that there need
be an either/or in these pages. There is only is. So dwell a while.
– Jenny Sampirisi
from the introduction:
Dear Alphabet’s Demur,
You take lines and shapes and given possibilities and make alphabet.
You use it to make sounds and you map out trajectories of thought. You
make names and call your children by them. This is done everywhere.
And it’s been done for thousands of years until you became bored with
this method — until you surrounded and suffocated yourself with these
products of your creation.
More here: http://xexoxial.org/is/xerolage46/by/nico_vassilakis
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
