Nemo

This incessant effort to wring interesting language out of a pointedly banal and disaffected activity-looking out a window on to a residential street in Los Angeles-is never anything more than futile, however proudly so. Although Vangelisti-an important publishing figure on the West coast and co-founder of Invisible City/Red Hills Press and a veteran poet-seems to vie for the nonchalant, demotic poesis of Ron Silliman or Bob Perelman, this fiction-poem pictures him as an indolent neighbor (``living on an NEA grant,'' the publisher notes) waiting for something to walk by. Nemo, which consists of a single text, playfully deploys sentences and sentence fragments but manages to do no more than conjure a ``Captain'' persona who chides the narrator, rather archly, about his window-box perspective. One question is posed: ``What's twenty feet off the ground looking downtown at a ridge of palms and two-thirds of a skyline.'' We know the answer. (Jan.)