2 Events & 2 Post-Apollo Poets Next week!

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.

An Interview with Denise Newman

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

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

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

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