The Post-Apollo Press Blog

Denise Newman Reading February 28th

2012-02-17T15:20:00.000-08:00

Denise Newman, author of Post-Apollo's The New Make Believe will be giving a reading at CCA's Oakland Campus on Tuesday, February 28th. She'll be reading from her collaborative work with the artist Gigi Janchang

Looks to be an exciting event!

New Poetry from The Post-Apollo Press!

2012-01-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

THE POST-APOLLO PRESS is pleased to announce the publication of,

Vision of the Return
by Amin Khan
Translated by Dawn-Michelle Baude

Poetry $12 62pgs 978-0942996-75-3

Please join us in welcoming the newest member of our Contemporary Poetry Series and our latest translation, Vision of the Return, into the world! This collection marks poet, Amin Khan’s first U.S. Publication and Dawn-Michelle Baude’s return to The Post-Apollo Press (her own collection of poetry, Egypt was published in 2002).

To read an interview with Amin Khan, visit the post-apollo press blog at : http://postapollopress.blogspot.com/

Praise for Vision of the Return:

...Khan’s meticulous phrasings show us how language thinks experience into a multiplication of itself—which is multiplied yet again as the poems leap from French to English. Baude’s exacting and seamless translation does what all translation dreams of doing: it lets us think with a different mind. —Cole Swenson

Amin Khan proposes a poetry without illusions & in need of a tabula rasa—ambitious work that wants to reinvent a space of writing (& breathing). Weary of earlier generations’ lyrical excesses, Khan thrives on the quasi-laconic statement & proposes a language conscious of, & carefully focused on, its own movements... —Pierre Joris

Amin Khan was born in Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence in 1956. He grew up in a revolutionary family, writing poetry, and nurturing interests in philosophy and politics. Studies at the University of Algiers, the University of Oxford and the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris followed. As a diplomat and international civil servant, he held positions at the United Nations (New York), The World Bank (Washington, D.C.) and UNESCO in Paris, where he now lives with his family. His books include Les Mains de Fatma (Sned 1982) and Archipel Cobalt (MLD 2010), as well as the forthcoming Arabian blues (MLD 2012).

Dawn Michelle Baude is an international author, educator and Senior Fulbright Scholar with seven volumes of poetry, including Egypt (The Post-Apollo Press, 2001) and Finally: A Calendar (Mindmade, 2009). She currently resides in Las Vegas, Nevada, where she authors the blog, “Mind in Vegas” www.lasvegasmind.com.

Order: online from Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org or directly from the press by phone: (415) 332-1458 mail: 35 Marie St. Sausalito, CA 94965
email: postapollo@earthlink.net. Publicity contact: Lindsey Boldt, lindsey@postapollopress.com

An Interview with Amin Khan Author of VISION OF THE RETURN, forthcoming from The Post-Apollo Press

2011-08-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

Here at The Post-Apollo Press, we are eagerly anticipating the publication of our newest book and latest addition to our Small Series, which has featured such gems as Leslie Scalapino's It's Go/In Quiet Illumined Grassland, Lyn Hejinian's Happily, and most recently, Denise Newman's The New Make Believe.

Forthcoming in February of 2012 is Amin Khan's Vision of the Return, translated from the French by Dawn Michelle Baude, author of Post-Apollo's Egypt.

Amin Khan is an Algerian born poet who now lives in France. He and our publisher, Simone Fattal have known each other for upwards of 20 years. Simone first read Vision in its original French many years ago and has wanted to publish it ever since. Vision of the Return will be Amin's first book published in English, and to help us get to know more about him and his life, Amin generously arranged an interview with a long-time friend, Ahmed Djebbar.

An Interview w/ Amin Khan

by Ahmed Djebbar

Paris, July 31 2011

AD: At what age did you start writing poetry and it what circumstances?

AK: I started writing at the age of 10, one afternoon in the fall of 1966. I wrote a poem from beginning to end, without hesitation, the only poem I still remember and can, to this day, recite from memory. It was titled The Desert. At that time, I was attracted by large spaces. That attraction has remained an essential dimension of my imagination. I have always been fascinated by the desert and by the sea, which incidentally, are major landscapes of my country.

AD: Your first published collection?

AK: My first collection is called Colporteur. It was published in Algiers in 1980. It brings together poems written in the 1970s, poems of a young man…

AD: What was then the place of poetry in Algiers?

AK: A mixture of several things. The end of an era, of a system, which strictly controlled citizen expression including in literature and poetry. At that time, most Algerian writers published in Paris or Beirut. The Sned, which was a public enterprise, played its part in the censorship exercised by the State. However, thanks to the competence of the people who managed it, and of their skills in the literary and editorial fields, the books published by the Sned were of quality. There was a demand for quality and a real professional rigor. I remember when Colporteur came out, I had had with the director of the publishing house a real discussion about my manuscript, which had already been read by people such as the Poet Djamal Amrani. The discussion was about the opportunity and the “right” to a neologism in my first collection. I insist on this particular point because unfortunately, this quality of people has since disappeared… We were at the junction of a time of controlled freedom but also of competence and respect for the written word. It was also a time marked by the brutal power of money, of alienation and the decline of the ethics of the managers, and all this, within the same political and cultural system.

AD: Apparently, your poetry wasn’t subversive enough to be censored.

AK: This may be true. On the one hand, the national cultural scene gave a very modest place to literature in general and to poetry in particular. At that time, important Algerian writers were altogether excluded from that scene. Mohamed Dib lived and published in France. Kateb Yacine wasn’t writing any more poetry or prose and had started to write for the theater in “popular” Arabic. The new generation of poets, in the wake of Jean Sénac, either published in a marginal manner. And this included Tahar Djaout’s generation, which is also mine. Literature and poetry were marginalized. It is in this that Kateb Yacine’s approach was revolutionary. He quickly understood that people who would read his poetry or prose written in French wouldn’t be very many, but that on the contrary, the people would be reached through the usage of “popular” Arabic and by the medium of the theater. The regime perceived a greater danger coming from him than from any other poets even if they could also have a critical or rebellious discourse, which was confined to the margins of an already marginal and controlled cultural scene. I believe that the decision to not censor me was primarily due to the marginal status of poetry.

AD: You mentioned Djamal Amrani. What was your relationship to him?

AK: My relationship with him was episodic. He was in Barberousse prison during the war of Independence at the same time as my mother who was arrested in February 1957 (four months after I was born), during the Battle of Algiers. They didn’t know each other. I met him while at the university of Algiers in the 1970s. I then didn’t know much about his militant past. He was one of the readers of my first manuscript.

AD: What is your conception of poetry?

AK: The poetry I aspire to is limpid, understandable by most, and a poetry that translates a human experience, whether it is a historical, personal and/or collective one. Poets I admire the most, like Nazim Hikmet, speak of a total, complete, concrete reality with a clear point of view and a strong sensibility. For me, true poetry is capable of producing and projecting thought, has an intellectual quality to it, and is carried by an emotion without frills, flourishing, and mannerisms. I don’t like “poetry for the sake of poetry”. I don’t like formalisms or poetry as a political and ideological discourse. Poetry is a link established between the self and others by a same movement of emotion and thought.

AD: Have you ever thought of placing your poetic discourse in an existing school? And have you told yourself: I am part of an “intimate” or a “nationalist” school of thought?

AK: I started to write when I was a child, for reasons that are personal and mysterious, but without a poetic culture or knowledge of the existence of styles, schools and so on. I continued to write that way. Later on, influences and admirations came about. I consider my poetry to be neither intimate, nor nationalist, or any other “ist” for that matter. There is this personal approach which is for the most part inspired by my country, its history, its landscapes, by my personal story which is very closely linked to my country’s history in so that on both my mother’s and my father’s side, I come from a tradition of people who fought for the freedom of our people. I was born and I grew up in Algeria. My poetic images formed there. My travels allowed me to develop a wider vision, but that was also through the prism of my first poetic experience, hence my affinity, my passion, my dreams, on the side of the weak, the oppressed, the ones who fight for justice and liberty throughout the world, for Africa, my kinship to the blues.

AD: Now a question on the alchemy of the poetic discourse. My question came about after having seen images of you in China. I was interested in a remark that someone made in an account of your visit: “from time to time, Amine Khene stopped to attentively contemplate the gardens, the lotuses, and the medlar trees from Japan… Before he left he praised the exquisite Suzhou gardens...” How does the alchemy of your poems come about?

AK: I believe that when you are a poet, you have a certain way of looking at things. A personal view, that you never lose, that is always present and can manifest itself in many ways. Today, I can say that poetry is my real identity because it is through it that I see things and people… which has actually led me to make some mistakes… And of course, this doesn’t always translate in a poem. So, sometimes, you have a Chinese public servant, who probably is poet himself, who perceives that. I never thought however, that my emotion in front of the lotuses was so visible…

AD: You used the word freedom…

AK: I love freedom. However, more than freedom, I love justice. And so, I am not in an insoluble dilemma in how I live my poetry, my everyday life and my convictions. There is an interior harmony, perhaps a precarious equilibrium, which permits me to live these different dimensions – not without tensions, but without contradictions.

AD: What is the role of the deliberate lack of punctuation?

AK: Non-punctuation is a discipline. This discipline is a reflection of my conception of a poetic text, which should, in a spontaneous and natural way, have a rhythm and musicality without the need for punctuation.

AD: Your country is present through what constitutes a geography, but not a topography.

AK: Yes, this responds to a necessity of the poem. Most of my poems seem to not need the mention of any particular place.

AD: But they need references to impressions and general scenery?

AK: Yes because a historical and geographic context is present, though filtered by the junction of thought and emotion, which results in an abstraction level, more or less defined in the poem.

AD: Ok. What is your poetic “path “?

AK: I published Colporteur in 1980, poems of the 1970s. Les Mains de Fatma in 1982, poems of the 1980. Vision du retour de Khadija à l’Opium in 1989, poems written between 1980 and 1985, years in Algeria, as I perceived them anyway, which were a prelude to a catastrophe. The sudden irruption of money as a universal value was henceforth a dominant and was quickly destroying what had been built since the Liberation. Behind the so-called liberal discourse, there was a will to keep the worst of the regime, namely repression, authoritarianism, bureaucracy. And, the combination of the two materialized with corruption. This was on my mind when I wrote these poems. It was also a time when I was young, full of optimism, energy, love, and I had believed that Algeria was going to react and that my compatriots wouldn’t be led like that, to slaughter. I wrote within that contradiction: in a moment where I was in the upward curve in my life, while in front of my eyes, the future was collapsing.

AD: Here are a few statistics I made. I took the words you use. The words that come up the most pertain to the cosmos and the sidereal. When you have more human references, they are intimate and non-societal. Do you confirm this tendency?

AK: It is not conscious but at the same time, I take responsibility for it because, although not having a real culture in the domain, I am mystical. I think that’s what shows in some of my poems.

AD: You didn’t want to go there earlier.

AK: Because it’s not easy to talk about it. In my poetry, I am in, and I want a harmony, which is that realm, with elements of the cosmos, of the earth and the sky, and of humans, which are more or less abstract…

AD: This is confirmed in the 2^nd category of statistics where what is linked to the human is tragic.

AK: It is in that sense that historic experience is filtered though personal expression. When I think blood, it is not necessarily mine. Maybe I’m thinking of the blood of certain martyrs. Or when I think sorrow, it is not necessarily mine, or mine only...

AD: Last question. Why this personalization with a name, Khadija, which is so historically marked?

AK: I chose the name Khadija because at the moment I wrote the poem, it was for me the face of Algeria. I wrote it in 1985 with an intuition that Algeria was going back to a very unfortunate and very sad past. It is the vision of the return of Algeria to a time of stagnation, of despair, a tragic regression in history. This poem is a one on one between two lovers. It is also a terrible disappointment, a time of mourning, a promise, a country…

* Amin Khan was born in Algiers during the Algerian War of Independence in1956. He grew up in a revolutionary family, writing poetry, and nurturing interests in philosophy and politics. Studies at the University of Algiers, the University of Oxford and the Insitut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris followed. As a diplomat and international civil servant, he held positions at the United Nations (New York), The World Bank (Washington, D.C.) and UNESCO in Paris, where he now lives with his family. His books include Les Mains de Fatma (Sned 1982) and Archipel Cobalt (MLD 2010), as well as the forthcoming Arabian blues (MLD 2012).

*Ahmed Djebbar is currently Professor Emeritus at the Sciences and Technology University of Lille (France). He is a renowned Historian of Mathematics, a former Algerian Minister of Education, and an avid reader of poetry. Amin and Ahmed have known each other for about 20 years.

Upcoming Events for Etel Adnan

2011-08-19T16:40:00.000-07:00

* In contemporary world the political and financial conditions have not only diminished and deformed fundamental virtues of art, but have also rendered extremely difficult the substantial meeting and the flourishing dialogue between the artists of different cultures. Within the outside edges of contemporary political and financial reality, the 3rd International Meeting of Ancient Drama in Sikyon aspires to encourage the articulation of a free voice, to defend the significance of tradition, but also to support the demand of research and experimentation on theatre stage, within the framework of the contemporary dynamics. The 3rd International Meeting of Ancient Drama in Sikyon through the fundamental virtues of dynamism multi-centralism and theatrical polymorph looks at the future not nostalgically but decisively.

-Theodoros Terzopoulos Director, Artistic Director of the 3nd International Meeting of Ancient Drama.

Thursday August 25th
12:50-13:05
PODIUM
Etel Adnan (France)
Poet, Painter, Playwright
T o l e r a n c e
First Presentation // Read by Savvas Stroumbos
13:05-13:20 Discussion with Etel Adnan
13:20-13:30 Spyros Stamatopoulos, Mayor of Sikyonion
Praise
The Municipality of Sikyonion honours Etel Adnan

*DIONYSUS IN EXILE*
Dionysus in Exile
The Theatre of Theodoros Terzopoulos
International Conference
organised by the Dept. of Theatre Studies, Freie Universität Berlin
23 - 24 September 2011
Griechische Kulturstiftung Berlin, Germany

For more than thirty years, Theodoros Terzopoulos has been producing a deeply political theatre, characterized by a persistent resistance against established norms and perceptions of body, space and meanings. In their performances, Terzopoulos and the Attis Theatre employ disconcerting tactics, seek to destabilize and create ambivalence. Terzopoulos stages the representational instability as an uprooting and aims at a theatre in wandering that deprives the objects from their trivial positions and settings and mobilizes feelings of inquietude. As the familiar is absent, significations become suspended allowing the development of multifocal and centrifugal arrangements. In this sense, Terzopoulos’ theatre is in exile. The symposium will explore the wandering of Terzopoulos and his theatre in space and time, in order to describe the way in which the director and his theatre destabilizes the given and displaces forms and significations, to think about the »aesthetics of the exile« as a political act of entrenchment of the unfamiliar.

dOCUMENTA 13 : Featuring Publications by Post-Apollo Authors: Etel Adnan & Jalal Toufic

2011-04-29T14:22:00.000-07:00

“100 Notes – 100 Thoughts.” Now available: The first 17 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions

As a prelude to the 2012 exhibition, dOCUMENTA (13) and Hatje Cantz have initiated a series of publications driven by the logic of the mind-at-work, presenting, writing, and drawing scenarios that point outside the normative bounds of academic text production. In the form of facsimiles of existing notebooks, commissioned essays, collaborations between artists and writers, and conversations, they present models of connection-making between the private and the public, between the pre-stage of intuitions, the naming of ideas, and the key-chain of arguments that provide the reader with a singular insight into working methods. The series is formed through interconnections, so that the notebooks could be described as an “interregnum,” a temporary rupture in discursive intelligence; they do not direct us towards reason as such, but towards a different understanding of the role of consciousness. They appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and they are between 16 to 48 pages long. The contributors come from various fields such as art, science, philosophy and psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature studies, and poetry.

They include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison, Erkki Kurenniemi, Lars Bang Larsen, György Lukács, Christoph Menke, Paul Ryan, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Vandana Shiva, G. M. Tamás, Michael Taussig, Jalal Toufic, Ian Wallace, and Lawrence Weiner. Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)’s Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Agent, Member of Core Group, and Head of Department Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke. The “100 Notes – 100 Thoughts” series will be launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project.

006: Etel Adnan : The Cost for Love We Are not Willing to Pay

In her poetic reflection, artist, poet, and essayist Etel Adnan (*1925) describes various forms of love: the love for ideas, for God, for things, and for nature. However, today we have distanced ourselves from a higher form of love that drove Nietzsche into madness and the Islamic mystic al-Hallaj into martyrdom. The love for nature, which Adnan describes through her own experience, even seems to have given way to contempt—how else could the ecological catastrophe toward which we are steering be explained? The price to stop it would be too high, as it would involve a radical change in our way of life—similar to the experience of conventional love between two people, which involves such intensity only a few are ready to endure it.

English/German
20 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2855-3
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3035-8

Etel was born in 1925 in Beirut and lives in Sausalito, Cal., and Paris. She studied literature at the Sorbonne, Paris, at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley University. In 1984, she worked with Robert Wilson on his opera CIVILwarS and has exhibited internationally. Her recent publications include Master of the Eclipse (2009), Seasons (2008), In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (2005), and In/somnia (2002). 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 006: The Cost for Love We Are Not Willing to Pay photo: Franck Guérin, 2011

Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically

In the second edition of his book (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (2003), Jalal Toufic notes: “I was for years concerned with schizophrenia and with schizophrenics, who appeared in my Credits Included: A Video in Red and Green, 1995; and I am now interested in ‘the little girl,’ whom I expect to appear in my coming vampire film. . . . At one level, the Thirteenth Series in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, 1969, ‘The Schizophrenic and the Little Girl,’ can thus be retrospectively viewed as a program for the work of a decade on my part.” In this new essay, he writes on the portrait of the pubescent girl, including in Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” “The successful portrait of a pubescent girl is not a rite of passage but a rite of non-passage; what needs a rite is not passage, which is the natural state (at least for historical societies), but non-passage, the radical differentiation between the before, in this case a pubescent girl, and the after, a woman.” From the portrait of the pubescent girl, Toufic moves to the portrait in general and its paradigmatic relation to the angel; thus the title of this notebook: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically. — Most of Jalal Toufic’s books are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com > .

English/German
24 pp., 1 ill.,
14,8 x 21 cm, paperback
€ 6,– [D], CHF 9,90
ISBN 978-3-7757-2860-7
E-Book
c. € 4,99 [D]
ISBN 978-3-7757-3040-2

Jalal Toufic, writer, artist Born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad, Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He is the author of, among other books, Graziella: The Corrected Edition (2009), The Withdrawal of Tradition Past a Surpassing Disaster
(2009), Undeserving Lebanon (2007), Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell
You (2005), Forthcoming (2000), (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (1993; 2nd ed., 2003), and Distracted (1991; 2nd ed., 2003). Most of his books are available for download as PDF files at his website www.jalaltoufic.com. He is a guest of the 2011 Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD. 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts No. 011: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”—Angelically Welcome to the info section of the dOCUMENTA (13) website. ... http://d13.documenta.de/panorama/#participants/participants/jala...
1

For more information about dOCUMENTA 13 visit their website.

WINNERS!

2011-04-11T13:07:00.000-07:00

The Post-Apollo Press' very own MARIBOR won the 2011 Northern California Book Award (NCBA) for best Poetry Translation this Sunday!!!

The Northern California Book Awards were established by NCBR (formerly the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, or BABRA) in 1981 to honor the work of northern California writers and recognize exceptional service in the field of literature here in northern California. They are co-sponsored by Poetry Flash, the Center for the Art of Translation, the San Francisco Public Library, the Friends of the SF Library, the Mechanics Institute, and PEN West. The awards recognize excellence in newly published fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translation, and children's literature. The Translation Awards are sponsored by the Center for the Art of Translation.

Heartfelt CONGRATULATIONS to Maribor's translators, John Sakkis & Angelos Sakkis. This award represents much deserved recognition of their refreshing and contemporary approach to their work with poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis.

You can read more about Maribor here at our website.

You can order your own copy of Maribor, directly from us by by:
email : postapollo@earthlink.net
phone : (415) 332-1458
fax : (415) 332-8045
mail : 35 Marie St., Sausalito, CA 94965

Or online via our fantastic distributor, Small Press Distribution.

The Phenomena Pre-Publication Special Offer from Your Two Favorite Small Presses : Litmus Press and The Post-Apollo Press.

2011-04-08T14:00:00.000-07:00

In 2010 both Litmus Press and The Post-Apollo Press had the honor of working with poet Leslie Scalapino on what were, sadly, to be her last two books. The first, an epic work of prose poetry, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, published in August, 2010 by The Post-Apollo Press and now, forthcoming May 2011 from Litmus Press, a new and expanded edition of How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets in 1989). This new version includes twenty-three new essays (only three of which have been published in previous collections) and seven additional poetic pieces.

During the Month of April take advantage of this pre-release deal by ordering both titles How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (in advance of its publication in May) and The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom via Litmus Press for only $30*. Through this deal, you’ll be buying Dihedrons and getting Phenomena for $1. Such a deal!

Checks payable to Ether Sea Projects, Inc may be sent to:

Litmus Press
925 Bergen St. #405
Brooklyn, NY 11238

Please include a printout of the announcement, or write "Phenomena Pre-Pub Deal" on the memo line of check.

*Domestic orders add $3 shipping; international orders add $10 shipping.

You can also follow this deal on Facebook

How Phenomena Appear to Unfold
Leslie Scalapino
May 2011 • ISBN: 978-1-933959-12-2 • $24
Litmus Press

In “Eco-logic in Writing” one of many brilliant essay-talks in this volume, Leslie Scalapino asks, “Seeing at the moment of, or at the time of, writing, what difference does one’s living make?” What more crucial question for those concerned not only with writing but with poethics: composing words into a socially conscious wager … Scalapino’s Steinian strategy of recomposing the vision of one’s times, “altering oneself and altering negative social formation,” is her artfully problematized project of writing ourselves into a better future …
Joan Retallack

Praise for the 1989 edition:

“Where critics used to debate, as if it were a real thing, a difference between form and content, so now they would separate "“theory” from “practice,” and thus divide a poet from his or her own intentions and poetry from its motives. But in fact poetic language might be precisely a thinking about thinking, a form of introspection and inspection within the unarrested momentum of experience, that makes the polarization of theory and practice as irrelevant as that of form and content, mentality and physicality, art and reality.

Leslie Scalapino is one of a certain number of contemporary poets who have engaged in the struggle, not against distinctions but against the reification of false oppositions … these essays (works) are an essential testament to poetry and to its embodiment and the book is an important contribution to the singularity and wholeness of her project.” Lyn Hejinian

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
Leslie Scalapino
August 2010 • ISBN: 978-0942996-72 • $29

Described by the author as referencing a cyber Alice in Wonderland … composed by process of alexia, (word blindness) : unknown words were chosen by leafing through Webster’s Dictionary at random; these generate characters and events that cohere as a sci-fi novel in which the characters are apparently divided from their senses . . . ; by virtue of this dysaphic quality they act to heal mind-body split visibly demonstrated by the dihedrons and the gazelle-dihedrals, humanlike creatures — who inhabit the emerald dark . . .

The Divine Comedy for our age, with, if one could say, more humanity and
more derision.
Etel Adnan

This is not a poem or a story but a mystical vision.
Fanny Howe

Scalapino’s jewel book that has come out of the spagyric hinterlands of
purest imagination. . . . it zooms with the elegance of a gazelle or a wolf . . .
Virginia Woolf.
Michael McClure

Cross Cultural Poetics : An Interview with Demosthenes Agrafiotis

2011-04-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

Demosthenes Agrafiotis, author Maribor (Post-Apollo, 2010) and Chinese Notebook (Ugly Duckling, 2011) in conversation with host Leonard Schwartz on the Cross Cultural Poetics radio program.

Demosthenes reads two poems aloud from Maribor in the original Greek, followed by readings in English by Leonard Schwartz and discusses the process of translation through his work with translators Angelos Sakkis and John Sakkis.

A true delight!

Listen at Penn Sound : http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/XCP.php

Dunagan on Guston

2011-03-14T14:12:00.000-07:00

Patrick Dunagan, author of There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk : A GUSTONBOOK, with a write up for The SF Bay Guardian on a special screening of the 1980 documentary "Philip Guston: A Life Lived and Discussed" that will happen tonight in San Francisco. Dunagan will also give a talk at this evening's screening along with poets Clark Coolidge and Bill Berkson, friends and colleagues of Philip Gustons. See article for details.

Post-Apollo : News & Upcoming Events

2011-02-25T13:52:00.001-08:00

Exciting times for The Post-Apollo Press. See below for the newest-latest news and events.

N E W S :

Post-Apollo's most recent work of translation, Maribor, has been nominated for a Northern California Book Award in the category of poetry translation. Huzzah!

The award will be presented on behalf of On behalf of the Northern California Book Reviewers and the Center for the Art of Translation at The 30th Annual Northern California Book Awards. Here are the details:

When: Sunday, April 10, from 1:00–2:30 pm, with a book signing and reception immediately following in the Latino/Hispanic Community Room.

Where: in the Koret Auditorium at the San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin Street at Grove. The Awards Ceremony is held from 1:00–2:30 pm. The ceremony and reception are free and open to the public, so come on by to support John and Angelos Sakkis!

Good luck to John and Angelos! We will be rooting for you.

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E V E N T S :

MARCH 12th

John Sakkis, co-translator of Maribor will be reading as part of 'Lectric Collective'sthird installment of Ekphrastic! Here are details:

Join us big time for our third installment of Ekphrastic! a multimedia reading series.

Poets reading are:
Steven Lance
John Sakkis
C.S. Giscombe

Exhibiting Artists:
Shannon May
Jae Lauren Payne
Jon Stich
Ben Belknap
Peter Schulte
Misako Inaoka
Sarah Ratchye

These artists have been asked to create original pieces in conversation with these poets. This night will act as a culmination of our project, joining the art with the writing that inspired it.

Additional hours for viewing artwork will be held Sunday afternoon, March 13.

Reading material will be for sale, there will be wine.

The 'Lectric Collective is:
Jillian Roberts
Sarah Rothberg
Kelsa Trom

lectriccollective.blogspot.com

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MARCH 14th

Patrick James Dunagan, author of Post-Apollo’s “There Are People Who Say That Painters Shouldn’t Talk : A GUSTONBOOK” will introduce a special screening of a documentary honoring the life and work of painter Philip Guston:

PHILIP GUSTON: A LIFE LIVED + DISCUSSED
Clark Coolidge + Bill Berkson, in dialogue

Monday March 14th, 7:00 pm
Balboa Theatre, 3630 Balboa Street, San Francisco

Poets Clark Coolidge and Bill Berkson will discuss the life, work and influence of one of the most intellectually adventurous and poetically gifted of modern painters, in light of the newly published Collected Writings, Lectures and Conversations of Philip Guston (UC Press). Over the course of his life, Guston’s wide reading in literature and philosophy ever deepened his commitment to his art — from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works.

This event is presented by Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization housed at Bird & Beckett Books and Records in San Francisco.

$10 admission.

For more information, please call 415-586-3733, email events.birdbeckett@yahoo.com, or check www.birdbeckett.com .

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MARCH 23rd

Patrick James Dunagan reads at Moe’s Books in Berkeley:

Patrick Dunagan and Julien Poirer, Wednesday, March 23rd
Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Ave.
Berkeley CA 94704

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APRIL 4TH

Patrick James Dunagan reads at Bird & Beckett Books and Records in San Francisco:

POETS Patrick James Dunagan & Jason Morris, plus an open mic. Jerry Ferraz, MC

Date:Monday April 4, 2011
Time:7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Bird & Beckett Books and Records | 653 Chenery St. San Francisco, CA 94131 | (415) 586-3733 | birdbeckett@yahoo.com | Design and logo by Jack

Simone Fattal : Sculpture Show in Beirut

2011-02-21T12:37:00.000-08:00

SIMONE FATTAL

Opening : March 2nd 2011
From 6 to 9 pm
The exhibition will be on view until April 20th 2011

Opening hours : Mon to Fri from 1 to 7pm
Sat 12pm-5pm

Espace Kettaneh Kunigk (Tanit)
Clemenceau - Hamara area
Gefinor Center - Bloc E - GF
Phone : 961 1 738706
Email : espacekettanehkunigk@cyberia.net.lb
espacekk@gmail.com
website : www.galerietanit.com <http://www.galerietanit.com>

Post-Apollo Mailing List

2011-02-21T11:44:00.000-08:00

Hello friends,

We are in the process of revamping our mailing list, both email and snail mail. We use these lists to send announcements about new titles, events and special offers. If you would like to be added to our list or if you are already on our list and would like to update your information, please send us an email with your email and/or mailing address to: postapollo@earthlink.net. Please include the subject line: Mailing List.

Thanks very much!

BOOK RELEASE PARTY !!!

2011-02-07T12:50:00.000-08:00

So, as many of you know, Patrick James Dunagan's "There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk : A GUSTONBOOK" is now officially out in the world, and officially released as of last Friday's book release party at Lake Gallery in San Francisco. Simone Fattal our dear publisher wasn't able to join us this time as she is currently preparing for an exhibition of her sculptures in Beirut (more about that as the exhibition approaches), but she was there in spirit and in the intriguing figure of her line drawing featured on the cover of A GUSTONBOOK, and in the book's design. Many fine folks were in attendance. I especially appreciated the explicit and implicit interactions between literature and visual art made manifest in the event itself, truly in the spirit of Philip Guston himself. So, in this spirit and in the celebratory spirit of the book and of last Friday's event, I would like to use this blog to say, "Let's do this more often!"

The handsome fruits of our labors.

The handsome book and co.

The postcard for the Lake Gallery show we piggy-backed upon.
Big THANK YOU's to Dan Johnson, the curator of Lake Gallery, and to Corey French & Ryan Coffey for welcoming Post-Apollo and sharing their opening night reception with our book release party.

Sneaky photo of Patrick James Dunagan (fellow in glasses).

Sneaky photo of P.J.D. and Ava with party go-ers in foreground.

The gallery featuring artworks by Corey French & Ryan Coffey. Ryan was quoted by Patrick in A GUSTONBOOK saying, "Guston is a god". He commented that the book's cover design (by our dear publisher, Simone Fattal) reminded him of old Grey Wolf Press books--a nice compliment from an artist/bibliophile. Gobs of paint were still WET on Corey's paintings, looking good enough to EAT. And that's David Highsmith (with friends), writer and proprietor of Books & Bookshelves one of the best poetry bookstores in San Francisco with an exceptional collection of chapbooks. B&B carries Post-Apollo books, including A GUSTONBOOK.

Gorgeous Lake Gallery interior with PLANTS and evidence of a great turnout. Lake Gallery occupies the space above PlantIt Earth. There were flats of basil and other plants growing all around us under white and even purple grow lights. Super attractive.

Drew Cushing, writer and publisher of Bent Boy Books, perusing the merchandise.

John Sakkis, poet and translator of Post-Apollo's Maribor represents.

CODEX Book Fair: Etel Adnan's "Seasons", "The Spring Flowers Own" and "The Linden Trees Cycle"

2011-02-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

This week artist books featuring the work of Etel Adnan will be showing at The CODEX Book Fair on the UC Berkeley Campus. February 6-9. (see below for details)

From Despalles Editions: Seasons with wood block prints by Johannes Strugalla. Click here to view pages from the book.

From Editions Al Manar: Printemps que les fleurs possèdent / Linden Trees, français / anglais, de Etel Adnan, rehaussé d'une aquarelle de l'auteur/peintre. (The Spring Flowers Own, and The linden Trees Cycle) with watercolors by the author.

The CODEX Book Fair, February 6-9

The third biennial CODEX International Book Fair will take place February 6-9, 2011 on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley.

The bookfair will be held in the Pauley Ballroom located in the Martin Luther King Student Union, at the top of Telegraph Avenue.

The price of admission to the fair for the general public for Four days is $20. A single-day ticket is $10. A FOUR-day ticket for students (with I.D.) is $5.

The public hours are:
Feb. 6: 12:00 – 4:00
Feb. 7: 12:30 – 6:30
Feb. 8: 12:30 – 6:30
Feb. 9: 12:30 – 4:30

For further information, please visit:
http://www.codexfoundation.org/bookfair.html

Now Available from The Post Apollo Press

2011-01-24T11:59:00.001-08:00

There Are People
Who Think That
Painters Shouldn't Talk

A GUSTONBOOK

by Patrick James Dunagan

Poetry $15 96pgs 978-0942996-73-9

GUSTONBOOK is a workman’s notebook of sorts sketched out in response to years spent contemplating the work and life of painter Philip Guston in relation to the ongoing world, i.e. exhibitions, books on/about Guston, other books/art works amid daily walks, drinks, and talks. More explorations than explanations, the entries contained situate the eye of memory as witness to the immediate surrounds of now: day to day, hour by hour, the concern never (always) changing. As Guston once said, gesturing out the window, “Who wants that? And you can’t have it anyway.”

Sometime in the late 1960s, the mode of thought and talking known as Pondering with Guston became a frequent option for poets, most of them far younger than Guston himself. Aside from his prodigious genius as a painter, Philip Guston was an adept reader of modern poetry and prose, philosophy and art history; an ardent conversationalist and a sharp writer on his own and others’ works. His multifarious Romance of Doubt was an ongoing and fructifying virtuoso performance of irony and dialectic, conscience and devilish enjoyment, sublimity and near-sublime despair. In this provocative sequence, Patrick Dunagan—who never met the artist but knows his work cold, so to speak—has caught the fever. Unlike others so inclined, he engages Guston’s thought very much on his home turf: Poetry, subsuming all matters of “art” (as well as other parts of daily life), is where they join. As Dunagan says, “Person is assemblage…so many comprise a whole.” The book is a form of open conversation; the reader is welcome. —Bill Berkson

Dunagan writes, “A form is that which beckons.” Not only did this poem beckon, it put me in a state of reverberation with my own haunts. Guston’s legacy is paid homage to though the creation of a speculative (or in Guston’s term, baffling) environment. Steps forward in the world of the poem can provide “a longed for /sense of fucked up” because it’s whatever the opposite of numb is—it's the gong an artist rings to make us know that our bodies are surrounded by infinite “companion volumes.” —Stacy Szymaszek

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library Geschke Center for the University of San Francisco. A graduate of the Poetics Program New College of California, his writings have appeared in: Amerarcana, Art-voice, Big Bell, Chain, Critical Flame, Fulcrum, Jacket, ON, Polis, Rain Taxi, SF Bay Guardian, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Try!, and Vanitas. Recent chapbooks include: from Chansonniers (Blue Press, 2008), Spirit Guest & Others (Lew Gallery Editions, 2009), Easy Eden w/ Micah Ballard (PUSH, 2009) and her friends down at the french cafe had no english words for me (PUSH, 2010).

Art as Place Holder for the Mind

2011-01-17T10:44:00.000-08:00

A Conversation Between painter Will Yakulic and Patrick James Dunagan, author of the forthcoming book from The Post-Apollo Press,"There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk" : A GUSTONBOOK.

Will Yackulic: Hey Patrick some thoughts: "There are people who think painters shouldn't talk". I was one of those people, AND I am a painter. But I may have changed my mind, or at least I'm open to it. A friend, and fellow painter, Tommy Burke said the other day "Sometimes you gotta lead people around a bit" because people have a hard enough time with their own every day to have to try and understand where you're coming from. Life is contingency and negotiations between always-moving parts. We expect that it's a balancing act between the known and the unknown, but we forget that what we know is always in flux.

This is hard for people to come to grips with. The rug gets pulled out over and over from beneath us, and the stumble that follows is a source for art. "Need to organize / occupy and hold / the space is there / ever to escape", a human impulse, knowledge; but it's the second half that's a more cogent argument for leading the artist to the blank canvas, the writer to the blank page, etc. To this space I send "outposts". It’s research, asking questions, perhaps questions with no answers. To paraphrase Picasso "Answers are for computers". Thankfully, there is always the unknown. A world which would be absolutely quantifiable would be, besides impossible, horrifying.

Patrick James Dunagan: Hey Will, your “outposts” are the small chapbooks I’ve seen?

Yackulic: Anything I send out in the world is an "outpost".

Dunagan: . . . which appear to be the mixing of your original writing and drawing with found text and image— often from out of “official” sorts of publications like ‘how-to’ manuals or dictionaries or travel guides.

I’ve always thought of the “outposts” as a sort of one shot quickie takes of whatever’s round in your thoughts and/or work and living space, in the moment. Thought through, but not fully deliberate. An element of the come upon by way of, if not chance, perhaps a virtue of the quick glance, or succession of...& it is this kind of off the cuff “what if” which draws me to Guston, over and over…a sorta serial approach to getting at the problems of living, what to do, where to go, who to talk to, what to say, day after day…through the activity of Art…not that one doesn’t know or wouldn’t if not busy with the creating of the thing, but that the concern already present finds itself formed by way of the making. That nothing is without an interest already formed about it.

Yackulic: Well those things are whims, they require whittling and stacking, but we are ultimately driven by whims that we choose to take seriously. If "a form is that which beckons" then it's true; ideas are forms. But I don't want my words in stone, I want to change them rearrange them, make up new meanings: this is closer to what life is like anyway, not much stays the same. Oscar Wilde said something like: The more inconsistent we are the truer we are to ourselves. However, the forms help us as placeholders for the contingency of life, the chaos, to my mind, in the German phrase "Es schwimmt mir vor den Augen" (literally: it swims before my eyes). This tack is subverted in the phrase "Environment is inherent fact" objectively perhaps, until Robert Moses bulldozes your apartment to make a highway to the suburbs. But I'd like to suggest that that's one thing that makes art interesting; the way in which we experience it is, like feelings, subjective, thus personal, and ultimately unknowable.

Dunagan: And that kind of line, when and how any such a thing turns to stone, is one possible enticement bout art, along with the odd paralleling and sometime apparent co-propelling relationship of the image to the text, poet to painter: erasing boundaries while exploiting the experiential phenomenon…attempting an understanding that ultimately leads nowhere save back into the self.

Yackulic: A considerable amount of energy has been spent in the last 30-40 years making "knowable" art, didactic stuff that is illustrative in terms of its relation to theory. It's academic and of a particular style, but "Just because you have a style, doesn't mean you have Style". To bring it back to Guston: what we remember him for is the work he did in the last decade of his life. Before that he had a style (abstract expressionism), but then he ditched that and painted and he had Style. De Kooning was one of the only people at first to recognize the importance of the late work; of course he had a figurative streak, too, that ran counter to his abstract tendencies.

Dunagan: But Guston also said something like, “there is no progress in painting.” That the painter is always painting the same painting…which is like, yeah, when in that last decade he’s headed off into this terrific territory, but all the same he was always already there.

Yackulic: When I speak of Style (capital "S") I'm thinking it's something like having no illusions about your limitations and playing to your strengths and weaknesses. Or even the classic "let your weaknesses be your strengths". He wanted to tell a story. He has said that his pictures all come from anxiety (which would make him the Woody Allen of Painting, I guess) and I take it he's speaking of the later work and while it may be where they come from we shouldn't get that confused, as some have, for what they give to us.

Dunagan: Which is simply far more than Woody Allen ever gets up to. Certainly, you walk away from gazing at a Guston with a certain shock of recognition that lasts longer than a chuckle and a shrug. Perhaps that’s a form of an anxiety inducing experience, but for one thing it’s far and above merely a personal anxiety. It’s like talking bricks over pigeon-shit.

Yackulic: He has been criticized for not being a "generous" painter, which is hogwash. Honesty is a sort of generosity regarding truth, and this late work is nothing if not honest, remember that his figurative work was almost universally hated when he presented it at first. He must have known that it would be (I'm headed for what I think will be a similar reaction.) Furthermore, after giving up on abstraction he spoke of how miserly it was (is)

Dunagan: Yeah, again: The making of the thing. That’s like what allows for anything to be possible. What is is because of. Things like Charles Olson’s using that “FIRST FACT” as an opening launch of sorts in his book on Herman Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Laying it down in broad strokes, even the smallness of shapes takes on huge scope. That which matters is…

Yackulic: However, when we experience spaces that appear (remember however, appearances can be deceiving) to have stood as rocks within the swirling eddy of time we become MORE aware of the contingent nature of reality. As in "history is something / ideally we'd touch" said Gustaf Sobin (I'm using his phrase to my own ends here, but what else can one do? after all, so do you quoting him in the book), who was a teacher of mine when I studied in Lacoste, France and lived in a building over a thousand years old.

Dunagan: Man, did you really study with SOBIN? Is that what you’re saying? That’s crazy...I just dissed his Collected Poems in a review but I do adore his books about the landscape of Provencal … from which I took that quote. It is the idea of getting to touch a thing that is so compelling about artists, like living with a painter or sculptor seems like it’d be such an incredibly jealous fueling experience, particularly if the relationship was of a romantic nature. O’Hara is fabulous in capturing this in writing I think. How cool it is to have a thing which you is produced from things, the materials used, etc

Yackulic: He introduced me to Patchen and I think I really rankled him in my, at the time, serious persistence of non-seriousness (he showed me Patchen, so what gives?) and probably, more-so, for standing up to him but he remembered me years later for it. But in Lacoste I came to FEEL, for the first time, truly my sense of passing through history. You don't feel this growing up in NYC because the city changes as fast as you do, which strangely undoes your sense of change. You need this slippage, this friction is the measure of things we need if we wish to hold on to our mind, that is, in terms of having perspective.

Dunagan: Haha… yeah, Sobin strikes me as lacking in an appreciation of the anything this side of the non-seriousness… and when serious being non-serious is sometimes the only way to get things done which will matter. It all adds up and that weighs something heavy once you take a look long enough to feel it—which sometimes doesn’t take any longer than a second. That sorta drag of awareness which accompanies any kinda knowledge. The idea of getting through the day: “Time is a bitch” like the t-shirts used to say. All of life being this accumulation of experiences, the numerous encounters with this and that, a vast piling which you end up hanging out in.

Yackulic: And then we put it to the page.

Happy New Year! Updates!

2011-01-03T10:59:00.001-08:00

Greetings from The Post-Apollo Press, ready to get crackin' in 2011. First, we would like to let you know that we area currently in production on Patrick Dunagan's There Are People Who Think That Painters Shouldn't Talk : A GUSTONBOOK . The book will feature a cover drawing by our dear publisher, Simone Fattal, inspired by Philip Guston's "Untitled" (1971)

Here is what Bill Berkson and Stacy Szymaszek have to say about it:

Sometime in the late 1960s, the mode of thought and talking known as Pondering with Guston became a frequent option for poets, most of them far younger than Guston himself. Aside from his prodigious genius as a painter, Philip Guston was an adept reader of modern poetry and prose, philosophy and art history; an ardent conversationalist and a sharp writer on his own and others’ works. His multifarious Romance of Doubt was an ongoing and fructifying virtuoso performance of irony and dialectic, conscience and devilish enjoyment, sublimity and near-sublime despair. In this provocative sequence, Patrick Dunagan -- who never met the artist but knows his work cold, so to speak -- has caught the fever. Unlike others so inclined, he engages Guston’s thought very much on his home turf: Poetry, subsuming all matters of “art” (as well as other parts of daily life), is where they join. As Dunagan says, “Person is assemblage….so many comprise a whole.” The book is a form of open conversation; the reader is welcome. -- Bill Berkson

Dunagan writes, “A form is that which beckons.” Not only did this poem beckon, it put me in a state of reverberation with my own haunts. Guston’s legacy is paid homage to though the creation of a speculative (or in Guston’s term, baffling) environment. Steps forward in the world of the poem can provide “a longed for /sense of fucked up” because it’s whatever the opposite of numb is – it's the gong an artist rings to make us know that our bodies are surrounded by infinite “companion volumes.”- Stacy Szymaszek

Look out for this one! More to come!

Secondly, we have some Maribor related updates including a new review by Amy Henry on Gently Read Literature.

Plus, Demosthenes's visual/concrete work will be posted all week at TextOfTheDay
http://textoftheday.blogspot.com/

and a new artist book has been published by Red Fox Press/ C'est Mon Dada

http://www.redfoxpress.com/dada-agrafiotis.html

PEN Oakland Award: Etel Adnan's Acceptance Speech & Sharon Doubiago on Etel Adnan's "Master of the Eclipse"

2010-12-13T16:07:00.000-08:00

Info about the PEN Oakland Award and PEN Oakland: http://www.penoakland.org/history-of-penoakland.html

Etel Adnan's Acceptance speech:

"I am extremely pleaSED TO RECEIVE THIS AWARD and thank the committee who decided to give it to me, and particularly Sharon Doubiago whose friendship I value, and whose work I particularly appreciate. I am not the recipient of many awards, but this one touches me particularly, as it comes from the Bay Area, which is home, and a place that is a major part of my thinking, and my work. I wish I were present to receive this award, but I am these times weary of airplanes, and it would have been difficult for me to travel. But I am extremely thankful, and am sending you my most friendly thoughts, ETEL ADNAN"

Etel Adnan’s Master of the Eclipse
by Sharon Doubiago

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925 of a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father. “Beirut in the thirties was itself a preadolescent city: newly installed as the capital for a nation carved out by the Allies from Syria. It smelled of jasmine and orange blossoms, and you could look at the sea from almost any street.” Master of the Eclipse is a collection of memoir stories ranging from girlhood in Beirut to adulthood in Paris and the Bay Area. (For many years Adnan taught Philosophy of Art at Dominican College in San Rafael.) The mysterious, near-omniscient narrator chronicles, in breathtaking, heartbreaking, metaphorical stories, the eclipse of not just the Arab world but of the Western one also. She has been chronicling the apocalypse (The Arab Apocalypse is one of her booklength poems) for much of her life in poetry, painting, criticism and fiction. Her novel, Sitt Marie Rose (1978) is considered a feminist classic of the Lebanese Civil War.
“What are poets for in these destitute times?” “The storyteller as poet as vigilant angel” tells us. The title story, brilliant and stunning both poetically and politically, is of the Kurdish Iraqi poet, Buland al-Haidari, and the poetry festivals at which she encountered him in Baghdad and Sicily, and his death from alcoholism in London in 1996. It is the story of the downward spiral of the poet in exile from his beloved country as it is both self-destructing and being destroyed. “I’m a living wound because I know they’re setting fire to my country because they envy its immemorial mystic power.” Credited with having brought free verse to Arab poetry in the 40s, Buland’s greatest shame is that he loved Sadam Hussein who in turn loved poetry. Who is the Master? On first reading I assumed Sadam but on subsequent readings I’ve seen Buland, then his scholar, the University of Virginia “professor-Agent…the Big Eye, the guardian of a supreme power,” the exact equivalent of the military, the bombers, the movie directors and journalists, all of us (except those going righteously mad) in our bullet proof jackets.

The ironic symbolism and metaphors, if those literary terms work here, are profound. Ibn Arabi, Walter Benjamin, the angel of history, Paul Klee’s angels (the painter who in WWI painted airplane wings), prostitutes, suitcases in Syria of counterfeit money from California, lovers driven mad for the Muse they cannot touch, and the narrator’s love of women. “American Malady” is surely one of the most ironic but lyrical pieces written in recent history: refugees trying to get to the America that’s destroying their country. “Better to be in the tornado’s eye than in its path.” The making of the movies, the making of the news: the boy who digs up, washes and delivers real corpses for the Hollywood movie mogul who refuses to pay him the small asking wage. “‘Love me,’” Um Kulthum was singing, ‘even if you have to curse me.’” “They ended up in Lebanon with only their clothes on, and Father’s black little radio.” A son dead and a father insane because of that radio, those voices in all their different languages penetrating their souls. “All the shelling and the dying…they announced everything except the sorrow.” That’s what Adnan’s stories are about most of all, the sorrow. The eclipse yes, yet: “They say ‘Palestine smells good. She’s worth our lives.’ But I’m not going to die. How can I? I’m not yet born. I will be born over there, on the road to Haifa, as in the days of my grandparents.”

2 Pieces of Great News for 2 Post-Apollo Poets!

2010-11-24T16:06:00.000-08:00

GOOD BIT OF NEWS #1
Etel Adnan, author of 11 books from The Post-Apollo Press (including "Sitt Marie Rose", "The Arab Apocalypse" and most recently, "Seasons"), has won a PEN Oakland award for her latest book, "Master of the Eclipse", published by Interlink Books this past year.

The award ceremony will take place:

Sunday December 11
@ The Oakland Public Library
Rockridge Branch
5366 College Avenue, Oakland 94168
from 2-5 pm

CONGRATULATIONS, ETEL!

GOOD BIT OF NEWS #2

Brian Unger has published a very insightful and well written review of Denise Newman's "The New Make Believe" in the latest issue (Dec/Jan) of The Poetry Project Newsletter. We hope to post the review here soon!

CONGRATULATIONS, DENISE!

...and Publisher's Weekly!

2010-11-17T14:41:00.000-08:00

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
Leslie Scalapino, Post-Apollo (SPD, dist.), $29 trade paper (176p) ISBN 978-0-942996-72-2
Scalapino, who died this past May, two months before her 66th birthday, is often clubbed together with her Bay Area Language Poet peers, and the designation is certainly not wrong. But it is beginning to be clear that Scalapino is one of the great Zen poets of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, one who reinvents the relations of poetry and practice with effortless movements of mind, sense, and sound in each book. This collection is the companion volume to Floats Horse-Floats or Horse Flows, published earlier this year. Written in prose, it has a complex "plot," which finds the diverse conflagration of "human-like creatures" from the title pivoting around the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai. Illustrations from artists Kiki Smith and Jess are interspersed, in a scene where "Day begins anywhere." The whole has a Bladerunner-ish quality to it, with avatars multiplying and "base runners" populating the "emerald dark." While Way (1988) remains the place to start with Scalapino's work, and posthumously prepared manuscripts are sure to see publication, this collection pulses with life and Scalapino's unmistakable voice. (Dec.)

Adam Robins of HTML Giant Reviews Leslie Scalapino's "Dihedrons Gazelle Dihedrals Zoom"

2010-11-17T13:46:00.000-08:00

* What a treat! Adam Robinson, a reviewer for the perma-hip and savvy HTML Giant: the internet literature magazine blog of the future has written a thoughtful, funny and spunky review of Leslie Scalapino's "The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom", released by The Post-Apollo Press in August of this year. His is a fresh, young take on the work of a master. Thank you, Adam! (I recommend going to the website to check out the comment stream as a bit of an argument ensued!)

*I would also like to make clear that Simone Fattal is the publisher of all Post-Apollo books and was the editor and driving force behind the publication of "Dihedrons". Simone and Etel were close friends with Leslie Scalapino and it was very important to Simone that Post-Apollo publish this book, which would sadly be her last.

Adam Robinson
On Reading Leslie Scalapino’s The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom

I mentioned the difficulty of reading Leslie Scalapino’s wordfall, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, to Lindsey Boldt, who published the book with Post Apollo Press. She responded generously, saying

I agree that Scalapino’s work can feel very difficult, and this book I think feels especially daunting. Its prose is incredibly tangled and slippery to an almost maddening degree, which is what makes it so taxing but also so rewarding. I felt really anxious when I first sat down to read it and really fought to understand it on a sense-meaning level. I don’t think I’d faced such a literary challenge since college. I finally caved at some point and just let it turn into a sensory experience, which turned out to be really fun.

Certainly that’s an adequate and lovely review in itself, though it hardly matches the book’s blurbs: Fanny Howe calls it a “mystical vision” and Charles Bernstein said the book “is an ekphrastic implosion inside our severed human-body/animal-mind.” Talk about whoa! Michael McClure said the book comes from the “spagyric hinterlands of purest imagination,” and Etel Adnan called it our Divine Comedy but with “more humanity and more derision.”

So how is it that these syntactically dense word sets come to matter? Even the 176-page book itself is difficult to characterize; the jacket is fuzzy, kind of ugly, an aesthetic that goes hand-in-hand with difficult work in the same way that academic journals forgo cover art for a table of contents–a de facto caveat emptor: there’s no gloss here. In spite of that, this book is glossy, and justifies its $29 price tag with heavy, bright paper and fourteen provocative images by artists like Kiki Smith and Jess (Jess Collins). It feels as dense as it is.

Accordingly, I’m interested in how the bookiness affects the work; at first it increases the austerity and limits my interaction. The artifact in particular makes the writing challenging, while the writing challenges the book’s function; how do you design a serious but inviting book? I think Scalapino and her editors were conscious of the challenge, and the integration of the pictures helps (it’s made explicit, however, that the pictures are not illustrations of the work, or inspirations for it — just representations of the same reality).

But if you check out these excerpts from the book, you’ll see the poems don’t actually seem all that hard. In fact, its language is just the sort of thing an htmlgiant reader might expect to find propped here. I bet Chris Higgs will agree that this first sentence glows: “Out of which the silent dactylology from emerald wastes little girls crossing the roads arriving the green meadows full they do the cakewalk and are celebrated with cakes for their most intricate steps.” Like Lindsey Boldt said, as a sensory experience that linguistic pile-on is a blast.

From the introductory note by Leslie Scalapino:

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom was written by leafing through Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary choosing words at random by process of alexia, not as mental disorder but word-blindness: trance-like stream overriding meaning, choice, and inhibition. The intention to bring about an unknown future was offset by this action of alexia making as it happens sensual exquisite corpses—leading to the discovery that there isn’t any future, isn’t even any present. Such an exquisite corpse, read, is in an instant yet not even in ‘a present.’ Outside’s events unite gluing to each other a single object. That which had already existed is by chance.

Even that introduction frustrated me with how much it takes for granted. I understand how choosing random words can create sensual exquisite corpses, and I’m big into theories of time, but I am not following how these strings of words illustrate that the future and the present don’t exist. I don’t even know what that means. But when I read an introduction to a process, I’m just looking for a lucid explanation of what to expect. Scalapino isn’t providing a key for the reader, just another lock.

The more I read from the collection, though, the more I understand that in a meaningful way, through sonic and syntactic recurrence, through oblique references to things-which-stand-not-for-themselves (eg. Palin, planes, deb, something complicated about the basics of baseball), the text unlocks itself. Included in this unlocking are the ideas of time that Scalapino mentions in her note, and in that way I think the book becomes more than just a fun book for Kool-Aid drinkers of langpo. There is indeed some ekphrastic implosion, though I wonder if ekphrasis is the best way to characterize it. To me it seems more eschatological, or whatever eschatology would be if it didn’t exist. (It’s a keen strength that the book deprioritizes any thesis, allowing for this kind of joyful, highfalutin response, or this one: Bernstein’s nuts! It’s not ekphrastic, it’s clearly eschatology that’s imploding!) More than anything, the Scalapino dialectic is one of openness. The book can be ekphrastic or phenomenological, sociological or even geometrical, as the title indicates.

At this point I figure I have dabbled in the book, and it has rewarded that dabbling with (yes) a fun experience and an inkling of what is possible from this literature. A couple weeks ago I mentioned to Jamie Townsend, of the New Philadelphia Poets, that I was trying to read Scalapino and he smiled, saying something like, “That’s what everyone does.” I don’t know that one has to try, though, so much as to read her twice. Now that I have sense of the topology of her writing, I’m now going to read her a second time.

Close to the end of The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, Scalapino unwrites her author’s note, enjambing the lines, deleting phrases and adding even more presumptuous ones, and by this time I have accustomed myself to her demands. What works best about this dilapidation, this uncutting of the stone, reminds me of what I like best about the second section of The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner forgoes chronology and structure the closer Quentin comes to death.

Announcing the Triumphant Return of our Dear Publisher!

2010-11-10T13:26:00.000-08:00

We at The Post-Apollo Press are so happy to say that our dear Simone Fattal, publisher, editor, sculptress, writer, and traveler extraordinaire will be returning to our Sausalito headquarters this month after a year of travel with Etel Adnan giving readings and art exhibitions in Paris, Beirut, London, Berlin and beyond.

Upon her arrival, Simone will be participating in a group sculpture show and pottery sale in San Rafael. We hope to see you there!

2 Events & 2 Post-Apollo Poets Next week!

2010-10-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

N E X T T U E S D A Y 10/12:
Denis Newman (Post-Apollo Poet Extraorinaire) & Aaron Belz
READING @ 7pm
BookShop West Portal
80 West Portal Ave
San Francisco, CA 94127-1304

Denise Newman is a San Francisco poet and translator whose two previous collections are Wild Goods and Human Forest. Her latest book, The New Make Believe, is, according to poet Norman Fischer, "more haunting than ever, and as needful of contemplation." Newman, who teaches creative writing at the California College of the Arts, is a staff editor at Five Fingers Review, and has been a Djerassi Resident Artist. Her translation of The Painted Room by the Danish poet Inger Christensen was published in 2000 by The Harvill Press. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Denver Quarterly, Volt, apex of the M, New American Writing, and ZYZZYVA. For the past decade, she has been collaborating with composers, providing lyrics for choral works.

N E X T W E E K E N D : 10/16-17

Etel Adnan & Serpentine Map Marathon
Saturday and Sunday
16 – 17 October

In London: Etel Adnan will give a reading as part of the Serpentine Gallery's "Serpentine Maps Marathon" :
Maps for the 21st Century is an ambitious two-day event bringing together over 50 extraordinary artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scholars, musicians, architects, designers and scientists to showcase possible maps for the coming decade. Read more about the event here.

Etel Adnan's Paintings at Frieze Art Fair 14-17 October 2010

2010-10-01T14:07:00.000-07:00

Semler Sfeir Gallery will exhibit paintings by Etel Adnan at the Frieze Art Fair this October (14-17) in London. (See below for more info).

Etel also wrote to let us know that she will participate in a poetry marathon in London on the 16th & 17th of that October as well.

The eighth edition of the leading international contemporary art fair, sponsored by Deutshce Bank, takes place in London's Regent's Park from 14-17 October 2010.

World's top contemporary art galleries
173 of the world's most exciting contemporary art galleries, representing 29 countries, will present new work by over 1,000 of the world's most innovative artists at Frieze Art Fair.

Galleries new to the main section of the fair include: Bortolami, New York (USA); Pilar Corrias, London (UK); Elizabeth Dee, New York (USA); Xavier Hufkens, Brussels (Belgium); Michael Lett, Auckland (New Zealand).

The successful introduction of Frame, dedicated to galleries under six years old showing solo artist presentations, sees its return in 2010. Frame is supported by Cos. The Frame galleries' selection has been advised by curators Cecilia Alemani and Daniel Baumann.

A listing of all the galleries with work that they are showing at the fair will be online in a new 'Art Finder' section of the Frieze Art Fair website. friezeartfair.com

Exciting News from Paris!

2010-09-29T11:35:00.000-07:00

Simone and Etel have been based in Paris for the past several months, excepting jaunts to Beirut, Berlin and most recently, London where Etel gave a reading at The Serpentine gallery of which we hope to have photos to share soon. The most recent big news from Paris however, is that The Despalles Editions, based in Meinz and Paris will publish an excerpt of Etel Adnan's "Seasons". The section "Spring" will be published as a special de luxe edition with wood engravings by german artist, Johannes Strugalla, and the book will be presented at the upcoming Frankfurt Bookfair.

Johannes Strugalla working on the engravings for Seasons:

Here is an excerpt from a critical essay by Mark Grimes on Seasons titled "Listen to Etel Adnan", published in a 2009 issue of Al Jadid Magazine:

Imagine a movie screen larger than her native country of Lebanon, positioned in the sky above those timeless cedars, and revealing in anguishing replay the war of 1982. Shatila? Sabra? Again, perhaps. but, we do want a sense of logic, a sense of continuity, in what we read. And this is not to be the case with Etel Adnan's Seasons. No. We are to enter an exquisitely imagined and private world, where "The oak tree is growing with anxiety," and "No object can compete with a sound's intimacy."

Stay tuned for more news from Sausalito, Paris, New York, Beirut and beyond.

Demosthenes Agrafiotis reads in New York!

2010-09-24T16:16:00.000-07:00

Contemporary Greek poet, Demosthenes Agrafiotis, author of Post-Apollo's "Maribor" will be giving a reading at Poet's House in New York to celebrate the release of his newest book "Chinese Notebook", which was also translated by John & Angelos Sakkis. We hope to get him out to the West Coast for a Bay Area reading soon!

Here's what Demosethenes has to say (swiped from translator John Sakkis' blog)

***

Dear friends
from Demothenes...

"The Ugly Duckling Press will publish my book "Chinese notebook" in september 2010.
We are going to celebrate the publication with a poetry action in the POETS HOUSE in NY
(see site below),on 6th of October ,at 07.00 pm.
John Sakkis (one of the translators -the other translator is Angelos Sakkis) will be present.
The event includes :video projections,readings in greek,english,french,performance,debate..
I will be happy to invite you for this <>.
If you distribute this information to your friends and collegues,I will be extremely grateful.
I will be in NY from the 2nd until the 10th of October .
I will stay in Brooklyn .
Thanks in advance for your attention.
all the best
da"

Upcoming Events Celebrating the Life and Work of Leslie Scalapino

2010-09-17T13:37:00.000-07:00

November 16th, Dixon Place
New York City
Flow-Winged Crocodile
A play by Leslie Scalapino
Directed by Fiona Templeton
Performed by The Relationship

December 3rd, UC Berkeley, Maude Fife Room
Berkeley, CA
Bay Area Memorial Reading for Leslie Scalapino
*Simone plans to contribute to the evening with a short reading.

December 4th, Small Press Traffic
San Francisco, CA
Celebration of Leslie Scalapino's plays

December 21st-22nd, ODC Theater
San Francisco, CA
Flow-Winged Crocodile
Directed by Fiona Templeton
Performed by The Relationship

*If you haven't had a chance to check out the extensive and inspiring 4 Day Tribute to Leslie Scalapino happening over at Delirious Hem, we highly, highly recommend you do.

Jalal Toufic Now Available Online

2010-09-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

For the past year or so we at The Post-Apollo Press have been plum OUT of two of Jalal Toufic's most engaging and sought after novels: Vampires and Undying Love, or Love Dies. We hope to be able to reprint both books in the future, but unfortunately, do not have the means do so just yet. In the meantime, there is good news: Jalal Toufic has made several of his publications including Vampires and Undying Love, or Love Dies available for download as pdfs on his website JalalToufic.com. Hooray!

I (Lindsey Boldt, assistant editor) recently read Toufic's Two or Three Things I'm Dying to Tell You, which by the bye, is one of the most frustrating,entertaining and mind shuffling works of cross-genre criticism I have ever encountered. Toufic's retelling of Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo as a mashup titled "Rear Window Vertigo", was a highlight definitely worth the price of admission. Since then I have been hot to read his other works but we honestly sold the very last copies in the office! Thank you to Jalal Toufic for generously sharing his work!

Stay tuned for reprints from Post-Apollo.

The Post-Apollo Press is Pleased to Announce:

2010-08-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Leslie Scalapino’s Masterpiece. . .

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom

Poetry 176pgs $29.00 ISBN: 978-0942996-72-2

On The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
by Leslie Scalapino

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, in short chapters usually not more than a page or half page, was composed by process of alexia, word-blindness: unknown words were chosen by randomly leafing through Webster’s Dictionary; these generate characters and events that cohere as a sci-fi novel in which the characters are apparently divided from their senses (said to be dysaphic, they are seemingly without tactile senses, without memory or seeing—though they are also said to see and touch); by virtue of this dysaphic quality they act to heal mind-body split visibly demonstrated by the dihedrons and the gazelle-dihedrals, humanlike creatures with structures opened to show their organs and muscles—who inhabit the emerald dark apparently either cyber or real space. These umbra creatures have been affected by ‘idea’ being the goal and description of everything, divided from ‘being’ itself.

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom is an endless landscape in which new characters arising from the words, with their own lives and actions that briefly refer to outside events and history (such as Sara Palin, one of the characters for an instant), access spatial-sound openings, tactile and aural sensations, the conception being that we’ve been split distorted, cut off from our present-future-past, time acknowledged as really non-existent as we conventionally define it. The characters are particularly the abandoned orphan girls (left by parents or placed in orphanages as is occurring at present in China and India but here location is not specified, is as if a futuristic everywhere), millions of whom stream through the sci-fi realms in which horses roam as in Mongolia. Leafing through the dictionary I ran across the two words “base runner”—from this, a main character arose, the base runner who is trapped in an emerald dark freezing space where he runs to reach widely separated bases, no one else present in the game from which he can’t depart (if he does he will be killed); he’s bound apparently in a cyber program possibly gulag from which terrorist actions arise or are reflected. One such event, the attack on Mumbai, is the origin and connection of all the events of the book. The avatars of the base runner are an eagle and an octopus; the latter frees the base runner by making love to a woman (another main character named the distaffer) as she is swimming in the sea after her plane with a load of orphans has crashed into the sea. The octopus and the woman “come” allowing the base runner to come to them breaking through from the emerald dark. The dihedrons (seen only sideways, they arrive without appearing to move) and the gazelle-dihedrals (different manifestation of the same creature but this version zooms only forward) are completely opened in the sense that their organs-musculature-skeletons are simultaneously displayed to be literally outside and inside at once. These creatures are either protective or threatening, akin to Tantric Buddhist figures; they are present while the human characters catch on fire in the emerald zone, the living people protected by their avatars (an octopus, a Silvertip grizzly, a white wolf-dog, an eagle).

The characters alter by their experience. Some who are the abandoned girl-orphans growing up become manifestations of characters (loosely conceived) from Greek myths. One main character is “the deb” (the debutant) who is the daughter of a slut named Chrysanthemum (a manifestation of a fiery red Mongolian wrathful deity, a figure of enlightenment); given the hardship of having such a mother, the daughter grows up to be Artemis whose avatars are a Silvertip grizzly and the Silver Wattle Tree. Another main character is a child, one of the abandoned girl-orphans, who grows up to be Venus/Aphrodite (also Venus Williams, the tennis champ). One minor character is Hera, a harridan who is abusive to one of the abandoned orphans.

The intent of this work is free rein of the imagination, as if ‘on a run’ pushing it as far as can be to break through—to have it ‘unite’ with a sense of being real. The intent is also that one as reader have the sense of seeing one’s separation from one’s own senses in living in our society—as our separation from paradise—and as reading, to have even a tactile as well as mental sense of union with that paradise. Though since it is real, paradise as the book’s reality includes also terrifying events of the actual world (as well as daily events, sometimes humorous).

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom contains images by Jess, Masami Teraoka, and Kiki Smith. Images by Jess and Masami Teraoka (an octopus sucking a woman) are part of the meaning of the text, as if the images are memories of events in the lives of the characters (who have only single memories arising occasionally, or are devoid of memories until these begin to break through). Kiki Smith has given permission to use images from her Spinster Series, included as part of my text. Her figure of a girl (from her already existing series) is used as a reference to a figure of a girl in the emerald dark. The images by these artists are thus real events already existing outside, already experienced in the text independently, neither illustrating the other—verifying each other as part of a huge background of sensory events.

The inside of action and of being in these actions at the same time—have the tactile sense that there is no present even seeing there in its midst experiencing sensations. The characters, the deb (debutant), the distaffer, and the base runner, with their avatars—so they have more than one manifestation at once—exist alongside and somehow programmed in relation to real-time events: a recent terrorist attacks on a cricket team and the recent attack on Mumbai (the two events conflated as if one). Akin to Henry Darger’s endless landscapes, narrative is from the outside always—at the same time the intent is for the writing to be the sensation of having/being other people’s sensations as well as non-human, that of flowers—not only to have the pleasure of this vivid life but the sense of not struggling for future.

This work, possibly referencing a cyber Alice in Wonderland is based in the sound of words intended to make a sensory realm, as if the characters while not having senses, have these given to them as the writing being all of the senses.

May 2010
Oakland, CA

Another great review for MARIBOR

2010-07-21T12:26:00.000-07:00

Amy Henry reviews "Maribor" by Demosthenes Agrafiotis on her blog The Black Sheep Dances.

Thank you, Amy!

Forthcoming this August!

2010-06-30T13:39:00.001-07:00

The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom
by Leslie Scalapino
~ August, 2010

Watch video of Leslie reading from "The Dihedrons Gazelle Dihedrals Zoom" and "Floats Horse-Floats or HorseFlows" shot by Konrad Steiner at Penn Sound.

Photos from our Books & Bookshelves Release Party

2010-06-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Photos from our May 26th Book Release Party for Post-Apollo's first two books of 2010 at Books & Bookshelves. Spirits were high, the store was packed, in short, we celebrated. Thanks to everyone who came and thanks especially to David Highsmith for being such a gracious and warm host. If you are not already familiar with this bookstore, go check it out. David has the best collection of new and rare poetry chapbooks in the city, probably in California, and a great selection of full-length poetry books. The bookshelves are gorgeous and the store always smells of freshly cut wood. Many recommendations!

Denise had some kind and thoughtful things to say about Simone's commitment to experimental and cross-genre literature, and to Post-Apollo's international character and support of translation. Indeed!

Denise then gave a moving reading from her new book "The New Make Believe"(Post-Apollo). It was especially enjoyable to hear this book read aloud for its often sing-song nature and play with sound.

Angelos Sakkis (left) and John Sakkis (right) read from the original Greek and from their English translations of "Maribor"(Post-Apollo) and from "Chinese Notebook"(forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse)by Demosthenes Agrafiotis. Angelos and John traded off, Angelos reading from the Greek and John from the English. "Maribor" marks the American publication debut of Demosthenes Agrafiotis, who's work as a poet, photographer and performer is well known in Europe. It is great fun to see these two, uncle and nephew read together.

And here's everyone, that's me (Lindsey, assistant editor) in the middle, all of us beaming proudly.

I know Simone and Etel would have loved to have been there for the evening. They are currently in Beirut, recovering from the celebration of Etel's homage, the opening of an exhibition of Etel's paintings and so, so much. I recommend you read this article in The Daily Star to get any idea of what Etel in particular has been up to. Simone and Etel are two truly inspiring women.

Thank you again to Denise, John and Angelos for their inspiring readings. Hooray for 2010!

A tremendous loss for poetry and for the Post-Apollo family

2010-05-29T21:42:00.000-07:00

Leslie Scalapino
1944-2010

Leslie Scalapino passed away on May 28, 2010 in Berkeley, California. She was born in Santa Barbara in 1944 and raised in Berkeley, California. After Berkeley High School, she attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon and received her B.A. in Literature in 1966. She received her M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969, after which she began to focus on writing poetry. Leslie Scalapino lived with Tom White, her husband and friend of 35 years, in Oakland, California.

In childhood, she traveled with her father Robert Scalapino, founder of UC Berkeley’s Institute for Asian Studies, her mother Dee Scalapino, known for her love of music, and her two sisters, Diane and Lynne, throughout Asia, Africa and Europe. She and Tom continued these travels including trips to Tibet, Bhutan, Japan, India, Yemen, Mongolia, Libya and elsewhere. Her writing was intensely influenced by these travels. She published her first book O and Other Poems in 1976, and since then has published thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre fiction, plays, essays, and collaborations. Scalapino’s most recent publications include a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books), and Floats Horse-Floats or Horse-Flows (Starcherone Books), and her selected poems It’s go in horizontal / Selected Poems 1974-2006 (UC Press) was published in 2008. In 1988, her long poem way received the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her plays have been performed in San Francisco at New Langton Arts, The Lab, Venue 9, and Forum; in New York by The Eye and Ear Theater and at Barnard College; and in Los Angeles at Beyond Baroque.

In 1986, Scalapino founded O Books as a publishing outlet for young and emerging poets, as well as prominent, innovative writers, and the list of nearly 100 titles includes authors such as Ted Berrigan, Robert Grenier, Fanny Howe, Tom Raworth, Norma Cole, Will Alexander, Alice Notley, Norman Fischer, Laura Moriarty, Michael McClure, Judith Goldman and many others. Scalapino is also the editor of four editions of O anthologies, as well as the periodicals Enough (with Rick London) and War and Peace (with Judith Goldman).

Scalapino taught writing at various institutions, including 16 years in the MFA program at Bard College, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, UC San Diego, and the Naropa Institute.

Of her own writing, Scalapino says “my sense of a practice of writing and of action, the apprehension itself that ‘one is not oneself for even an instant’ – should not be,’ is to be participation in/is a social act. That is, the nature of this practice that’s to be ‘social act’ is it is without formation or custom.” Her writing, unbound by a single format, her collaborations with artists and other writers, her teaching, and publishing are evidence of this sense of her own practice, social acts that were her practice. Her generosity and fiercely engaged intelligence were everywhere evident to those who had the fortune to know her.

Scalapino has three books forthcoming in 2010. A book of two plays published in one volume, Flow-Winged Crocodile and A Pair / Actions Are Erased / Appear will come out in June 2010 from Chax Press; a new prose work, The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihredals Zoom will be released this summer by Post-Apollo Press; and a revised and expanded collection of her essays and plays, How Phenomena Appear to Unfold (originally published by Potes & Poets) will be published in the fall by Litmus Press.

Her play Flow-Winged Crocodile will be performed in New York at Poets House on June 19^that 2pm and June 20^that 7pm by the performance group The Relationship, directed by Fiona Templeton and with Katie Brown, Stephanie Silver, and Julie Troost. Dance by Molissa Fenley, music by Joan Jeanrenaud, and projected drawings by Eve Biddle. This production is co-sponsored by Belladonna* and the Poetry Project.

There will be a memorial event for Scalapino at St. Mark’s Poetry Project on Monday, June 21^st.

A Zen Buddhist funeral ceremony will be conducted by Abbott Norman Fisher in about a month with the arrangements in a subsequent announcement. Tom requests that in lieu of flowers, Leslie's friends consider a charitable donation in her memory to: Poets in Need, PO Box 5411, Berkeley, CA 94705; Reed College for the Leslie Scalapino Scholarship, 3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, OR 97202-8199; The AYCO Charitable Foundation, PO Box 15203, Albany, NY 12212-5203 for the Leslie Scalapino-O Books Fund to support innovative works of poetry, prose and art; or to a charitable organization of their choice. Condolence cards may be sent to Tom & Leslie’s home address, 5744 Presley Way, Oakland, California 94618-1633.

to make my mind be actions outside only. which they are. that
collapses in

grey-red bars. actions are life per se only without it.

(so) events are minute — even (voluptuous)

--Leslie Scalapino

PRESENTING: "The New Make Believe" by Denise Newman

2010-05-07T12:18:00.000-07:00

The Post-Apollo Press is overjoyed to announce the release of the latest in our Small Series, THE NEW MAKE BELIEVE, by Denise Newman. It is a lovely book, designed with care by Amy Evans McClure. Please help us welcome this tender, ecstatic and insightful book into the world.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, MAY 5TH, 2010

The New Make Believe
by Denise Newman

Poetry 62pgs $12.00 ISBN: 978-0942996-71-5

In The New Make Believe, one is seeking a vehicle, rejecting lover, God, child, all objects, and in the process, noticing one’s accident, which was always present, as the ground of existence. Once noticed, never losing contact with it, this silent partner, the way Blaise Pascal sewed into the lining of his coat his notes and sketch made upon first encountering his accident. Touch it, dance with it, but avoid the temptation to manage it, which leads to sentimentality, or worse, brutality. So how is the new make believe different from the old make believe? “put it out put it out and try to talk about it.

A strange intelligence guides the works in The New Make Believe toward insistent, yet nearly ineffable, re-definitions of commonplace words, as if everything were, in being named, strange. “Accident,” “law,” “memorial,” “wolf,” “pants” “sex” and other such terms participate in intense proto-symbolic musicalities to reveal (or cover) what seem to be crucial yet cheerily personal insights into what it is to be alive as or in a person surrounded by a baffling world of dark beauty–and mysterious others. Denise Newman’s work is here more haunting than ever, and as needful of contemplation. -Norman Fischer

Denise Newman is the author of Human Forest and Wild Goods (both published by Apogee Press), and the translator of The Painted Room (Random House, UK) and Azorno, (New Directions)—two novels by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she lives with her husband and daughter.

Order: online from our distributor, Small Press Distribution www.spdbooks.org or
directly from the press by phone: (415) 332-458 / mail: 35 Marie St. Sausalito, CA 94965
email: postapollo@earthlink.net. / Publicity contact: Lindsey Boldt lindsey@postapollopress.com

We would appreciate receiving a copy of any review of this book that appears in your publication.

Post-Apollo + Books & Bookshelves = Reading and Book Release Party

2010-05-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

Hear ye! Hear ye!

Exciting news: Please join The Post-Apollo Press in celebrating the release of our 2010 titles, Maribor by Demosthenes Agrafiotis, translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis and The New Make Believe (out this week!) by Denise Newman, for a reading and book release party at Books and Bookshelves on Wednesday,May 26th at 7:30pm.

The three newest additions to Post-Apollo's cadre of wonderfully talented poets and translators, Denise Newman, John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis will be reading together from their respective books. Both The New Make Believe and Maribor will be available for purchase and there will be wine and snacks!

The Details:

Who:
Denise Newman-author of the newest book of poetry in our Small Series, "The New Make Believe" (out this week!). She is also the author of Human Forest and Wild Goods (both published by Apogee Press), and the translator of The Painted Room (Random House, UK) and Azorno, (New Directions)—two novels by the Danish poet Inger Christensen. She teaches at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where she lives with her husband and daughter.

John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis- translators of Post-Apollo's newest translation, "Maribor" by Greek poet, Demosthenes Agrafiotis. John Sakkis’ is a poet and translator living in San Francisco. He is the author of the book Rude Girl (Blaze Vox 2009). Angelos Sakkis is a translator and painter living in Oakland, California.

What: A reading and book release party!

Where: Books and Bookshelves @ 99 Sanchez Street in San Francisco

When: Wednesday, May 26th @ 7:30pm

An Interview with Denise Newman

2010-04-28T14:26:00.000-07:00

Check out this insightful interview from Suite101.com with Denise Newman, author of "The New Make Believe", forthcoming from Post-Apollo next month! We are very excited about Denise's new book and about Denise in general.

Suite101.com Interview

Attention, Reviewers!

2010-04-16T11:25:00.001-07:00

If you are interested in reviewing "Maribor" by Demosthenes Agrafiotis, translated by John and Angelos Sakkis, The Post-Apollo Press would more than happy to send you a free review copy. This goes for any of our titles. If you are interested, please email us at postapollo@earthlink.net. Many thanks!

How a Collaborative Translation Duo Came to Be : The Sakkis Story

2010-04-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

We asked the translators of "Maribor"(our newest collection of poetry by Greek poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis) John and Angelos Sakkis, to tell us a bit about how their unique collaborative began. Angelos had this to say in response:
Photo by Andrew Kenower

So my nephew John calls and says can you help me with some Greek words I say shoot he gives me a list of words most of them no problem on some of them I have to ask for context a few are really difficult technical terms from disciplines I am not familiar with I have to look them up in my dictionary dictionaries then some time later days weeks months there is another list no problem a breeze next time I see him I tell him when is the next list coming hurry up I like doing this then he sends me a thick manila envelope full of copied pages of a whole book I think this is more like it jump to it do the whole thing like in days a first gloss with a number of different alternatives for the critical words John likes that we talk about the different versions and he forms in his head the overview of the whole thing later on that becomes the pattern of our collaboration after he finishes with Siarita’s book I ask him what is next he says take a look at Demosthene’s book his had been the most exciting presentation at the Paros Symposium last summer so I take a look and I am completely nonplused perplexed bewildered not the kind of thing I usually read by choice still the specificity of the language keeps me hooked I struggle with it word by word line by line all the while thinking hey I can read Greek but what is this guy saying here where is he going with this the ellipticity of it the first book we tackle is the Chinese Notebook I am thinking pretty much this is Chinese to me the Greek version of an American’s this is Greek to me sometime later we meet with John and talk about it through our conversations I start to see the sense of the whole thing the logic of it feel the delight of the language sometimes we are stumped by its sudden turns taking us to unexpected directions we work at it revising and revising until we are fairly confident of having arrived at a good equivalent of the original in the translation the next two of Demosthenes books we work on Maribor and Now1/3 are relatively easier both of us more familiar by now with his work the operative word being relatively we go through many many revisions burnishing and polishing the language to get to something approaching the sparseness of the Greek original I usually do the first draft on which we work until John is satisfied with the English text in this sense I am the junior partner fine by me I get plenty out of it.

Our Newest Title

2010-03-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

Maribor
by Demosthenes Agrafiotis
Translated by John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis

Poetry 86 pgs $15.00 ISBN: 978-0942996-70-8

“who assigns names? // the name itself” Demosthenes Agrafiotis’s name assigned him a superb origin myth. He was born in the Agrafa, a region historically so remote its inhabitants eluded conquest and were thus undocumented or “unwritten” in the records of the empire, a place that consequently became a refuge for forbidden Greek literacy. Agrafiotis translates the paradox of his inheritances into poetry that collaborates brilliantly with the autonomy of the sign, animating its multiple lives and orchestrating the resonances of its indeterminacy. Mining the opaque strata between “epigrams on the gray marble” and what is “written with chalk…/ on the banks of subterranean cause”, Maribor gives us both artifact—of the ephemera of communication, institutions, power—as well as blueprint for imagining an “alphabet of the future.” A master of the contemporary hermetic, Agrafiotis can bring to light in one stroke both the evanescence and endurance of the writing on the wall, the play between these inherent to reading. John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis have performed a great service to English readers with this precise, dynamic translation of one of the most important experimentalists working today. --Eleni Stecopoulos

As a North American I can only nod in awe at the dark mystery these poems offer, and the chastening, steel-eyed precision of European thought. In the hands of a master poet like Demosthenes Agrafiotis—“how many images can the species endure”—an old world emerges that is both bone-tired and on the cusp of renewal. The Europe of cafés, fashionable clothing, insane nationalist wars, & razor-edged critical thought is crisply present; while beneath it all beats a spiritual pulse as archaic as the Magdalenian caves. Into the tiny fractures of modern economy, philosophy, personality, and history, leak the structures of myth. Maribor is Slovenia’s second largest city, riddled with beauty & tragedy, & one site of the ethnic conflicts of the twentieth century. It is also a city that sits at a spiritual center—a center this poem, composed during the tumult of the 1990s, managed to reach. John and Angelos Sakkis are to be congratulated for having brought us a living poem in American-English. They manage to navigate not just contemporary Greek, but French, Italian, Latin, German, and such stunning lines as “the sparrow comes and perches / on the chair and leaves a dropping / all words are available / and suitable.” --Andrew Schelling