Cross Cultural Poetics : An Interview with Demosthenes Agrafiotis

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

Happy New Year! Updates!

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

Demosthenes Agrafiotis reads in New York!

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"

Our Newest Title

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