Sheila E. Murphy
September 2026

Collected Staring
Nico Vassilakis
Sandy Press, 2026 

In this highly original volume by master visual poet and co-editor of the iconic The Last Vispo Anthology, Nico Vassilakis confirms the vitality of the creative act of “staring” as sustained observation. He states that “starists” discover “a buffer-staring into nothing” (p.25), ultimately freeing themselves to perceive creatively and to create. Vassilakis frames this volume by calling the work “neither a manifesto nor a set of definitions, but a constellation of possibilities.” Building upon Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the author’s staring at letters and parts of letters opens the way for discovering as inventing a new reality. For Vassilakis, the act of looking takes the form of active artistry in stark contrast to passive receiving. 

What I found immediately attractive about this volume is the immediate accessibility made possible by a clear and simple structure: the use of letters of the alphabet beneath which are numbered observations on visual poetry. The inclusion of notes and examples of visual poetry enriches the volume, affording the reader yet more material for observation and engagement. 

Among the most compelling parts of this book are the Notes, as in “My watching letters discorporate letters are liberated from the confinements of the word, becoming simple accumulations that serve as decorative elements in visual poetry. This is usually followed by design logic, visual pun, and other compositional templates” (p.63). “Where do letters go after they’ve been liberated from the word?” (p.64). “Pleasure in viewing is the pleasure of thinking freely, visually, without destroying it with ulterior chatter” (p.68). 

This quite freeing set of statements lift the reader from the inherently stuck place of limited looking that Vassilakis’s staring transcends. Visual poetry, let’s face it, looks interesting in the first place. Why disrupt or destroy such an achievement? 

Vassilakis draws the reader in by sharing the importance of first having learned to draw letters of the alphabet before writing them, supporting the point that letters and fragments of them should not be relegated to mere functions at the service of hegemonic words and poetry. For letters deserve a microbial engagement with their shapes and entity, rather than simply serving as parts of words that own the sole status. 

Throughout this volume, Vassilakis shares stunning and original ideas in a natural manner, honoring letters and fragments inherently having their own being and agency. 

There are all too few books about visual poetry. As Nico Vassilakis shares his own philosophical and practice-based immersion in visual poetry he prompts further philosophical and conceptual engagement. He teaches/reminds us to read letters, read them aloud, read sound. Having taken his prompt, I find myself looking at letters and portions of letters more slowly, only to discover a different kind of inflective beauty. 

And how has the author arrived at this not-manifesto? “Optical landmarks continue to form and disintegrate,” (page 13), we learn, acknowledging that “It’s easy to understand how someone might be simultaneously lost and found” (page 13). With design thinking always, Vassilakis shares that “We will find new designs to thwart their word captor” (page 16). After all, “Writing, or alphabet, is a forced societal construct” (p.17). With that, “The eye becomes complacent and sensory transduction freaks out when the unprecedented comes in contact with our body” (page 18). Such resistance reflects a deeper structural and cultural issue beneath his discoveries in this book: Letters (and with them the parts of letters) are generally perceived in the literary culture and beyond as existing at the service of something presumably larger, presumably more important in itself. Readers are thereby conditioned to ignore the granularity of letters, functioning in the larger sphere as dutiful little ingredients consigned to perform their work to support larger texts. 

Throughout the book we absorb the engagement Vassilakis experienced as he became immersed in finding, creating, and being with visual poetry. “Vispo,” he tells us, “is writing that exploded and reconvened as another form of seeing” (p.20). We join him in celebrating visual poetry as a distinctly vital way of perceiving and creating. Starists are in a position, he suggests, to allow themselves freedom to avoid the trap of an either/or position of becoming dragged into an unnecessarily warlike bandwagon. “I see no reason to destroy word, I simply want to undo word so the letters become revealed” (page 21). Letters, after all, “have a life unto themselves” (p.22). 

This book is rife with lovely phrases starists see, such as “a modernist quintet in the rain” (p.31); “You resolve the noise of your eyes.” (p.33); and when “seeing seeing” (p.35), we hear “I’m not fully in charge of this activity. I’m not willfully in charge. I’m not directing the seeing” (p.35). Further, “My brain connects the dots before I even see what I am seeing” (p.37). The luxury of thought constantly comes through as I read and reread this book. “When you stare at one fixed point you are incorporating surrounding information that includes that fixed point plus everything else around it” (p. 38). 

Quite interestingly, the author notes “Each letter contains a history that is both personal and communal” (p.41). “If you dissect a letter and stare at it further, you find nature—the bits, the parts, the shapes are a product of nature” (p.41). “Vispo is a byproduct of staring” (p.42). “Watching my thinking think” (p.45) responds to an obsession of my own. Thinking about thinking becomes the freest of gestures, and Vassilakis emphasizes this. “Finding your aleatoric self among the pencils” (p.46) lifts itself off the page as I read it, with “A kind of Staring Poetics” (p.46) at the core. 

Another welcome moment brings forward “Letters are typically unwanted things” (p.49), acknowledging “the visual potential of each letter” (p.46). “Vispo takes from the blurred periphery of language, and language material, and brings it front and center” (p.54). “Someone asked me if I could read a shag rug, so I got down and began articulating a width, length, direction, color, etc. of each tuft/thread in sound units” (p.55). Talk about the palpable reality of letter and parts of letter forms! How logical then to read “I think vispo is a kinetic mirror” (p.55). 

Such an assertive seeing and claiming of the language vispo represents is replete with surprise that surely transcends denotation as it embraces a broader recognition of a broader and deeper world. 

Nico Vassilakis assures us that there is significant yield from his ongoing act of staring, energizing the raw material that becomes a different entity, vast, and muscular, that is welcome to trespass on verboten territory. While allegedly not a manifesto, the statements plucked from this most welcome volume do function as a brave new means of approaching visual poetry at the molecular levels of the letter and its parts. 

All of this wealth encapsulated in this brief impression of a marvelous book is capped off by yet more marvels, the examples of Vassilakis’s own visual poetry, always a subject of deep admiration. I highly recommend that you purchase this book and keep yourself staring at it. My prediction is that you will find much surprise and delight and sources for thinking herein. 

 

For more info about Collected Staring by Nico Vassilakis published by Sandy Press →

Sheila E. Murphy. A Pushcart-nominated poet, recent appearances include Gargoyle, Poetry Bay, Poetry,Lana Turner, Seam Allowance, Poetose, Volta, and others. Newest book publications are I Want to Be Your Radio (Unlikely Books, 2025), Escritoire (Lavender Ink, 2025), and Permission to Relax (BlazeVOX Books, 2023). Recently performed at Piper Writers Center Arizona State University and the New Orleans Poetry Festival. Won the Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Letters to Unfinished J. (Green Integer Press, 2003) and the Hay(ha)ku Book Prize for Reporting Live From You Know Where (Meritage Press, 2018). She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

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