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Translator: John Sakkis
Translator: Angelos Sakkis
Poetry | $17 ($15 direct from UDP)
Perfect-bound. 148 pp, 5 x 6.5 in.
ISBN 978-1-933254-68-5
Publication Date: September 28, 2010
Distribution: SPD
Read Press Release (PDF)
Composed in a red-and-black notebook that was made in China, Demosthenes Agrafiotis's Chinese Notebook addresses the act of (mis)communication in a world held sway to consumer capitalism and globalization. The conceits of abstraction, fragmentation and disjunction are employed here as a means to an end, as the language of corporate legalese begins to build, through accretion and overlap, into a personal metaphysics. Within these short, spare poems, Agrafiotis demonstrates the ways that language can formulate networks—or, in his words, "ensembles of meaning interacting with the flow of things."
"For years I have known Demosthenes Agrafiotis, personally & by reputation, as a prolific & esteemed figure in the international literary & artistic avant-garde. Reading him now in a splendid translation, there is no doubt of where he ranks & what his moves are as a poet – an exciting & always surprising venture into the cultivated wilds of poetry & of language as a medium for art." —JEROME ROTHENBERG
From Chinese Notebook:
museum-night
unexploited by lamplight
no appeals
motions become
difficult
and the blood
is conducted to sheet music
without passing through vessels
every smile
is challenged
by the statistics of the indigenous
the traces
breed representations.
NEWS AND REVIEWS
08.26.11 | Chinese Notebook by Demosthenes Agrafiotis reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books
04.11.11 | John Sakkis and Angelos Sakkis win the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Maribor
02.03.11 | Demosthenes Agrafiotis reads from and discusses Chinese Notebook on PennSound
01.25.11 | Demosthenes Agrafiotis, author of Chinese Notebook, is interviewed in Greek News
LINKS
Poems from Chinese Notebook performed by the poet and musicians (video)
Demosthenes Agrafiotis' Website
Demosthenes Agrafiotis is an experimentalist who deftly combines poetry, painting, photography, multimedia, and performance with the written poem. He has authored more than 13 books of poetry and essays and exhibited his photography, paintings, drawings, and installations internationally.
John Sakkis is the author of Rude Girl (BlazeVOX Books, 2009) and the chapbooks Rave On! (Lew Gallery, 2010) Gary Gygax (Cy Gist Press, 2008), Rude Girl (Duration Press, 2007), The Moveable Ones (Transmission Press, 2007) and Coast (Dusie Press, 2006). He is the translator of Siarita Kouka's sequence Benthos (Silas Press, 2004). With Angelos Sakkis he translates the work of Athenian multimedia artist/poet Demothenes Agrafiotis, their translation of Agrafiotis's Maribor was published by The Post-Apollo Press in 2009. He received BA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and an MFA in Writing And Poetics from The Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. He lives in the Lower Haight district of San Francisco and works for Small Press Distribution.
Angelos Sakkis was born in Pireus, Greece. He studied design at the Athens Technological Institute and, afterwards, worked for a time as an assistant to the painter Spyros Vassiliou collecting materials for a monograph on Vassiliou's work, which was published 1969. Sakkis immigrated to U.S 1970 and got his BFA San Francisco Art Institute in 1989. His work has been shown in one-man and group shows and is in collections in both Greece and California. Working alongside John Sakkis, he has translated the work of poet/multimedia artist Demosthenes Agrafiotis. He currently lives in Oakland, California.
