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.
an exciting & always surprising venture into the cultivated wilds of poetry
Jerome Rothenberg
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.”
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.
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
John Sakkis is a poet and translator. His books include Psychopomp (BOTH BOTH Books), RAVE ON! (BOTH BOTH Books), The Islands (Nightboat Books), and Rude Girl (BlazeVOX Books), as well as numerous chapbooks and ephemera. From 2005-2015 he edited BOTH BOTH, a magazine of poetry and art. With Angelos Sakkis, he has translated five books by Athenian poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis: Y’es and Diaeresis (Dusie Press), “now, 1/3” and thepoem (BlazeVOX Books), Writing Dimensions (Green Integer), Chinese Notebook (UDP), and Maribor (The Post-Apollo Press), which was awarded the 2011 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation. He lives in Oakland and works from 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.
ISBN: 978-1-933254-68-5
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 148 pp, 5 x 6.5 in
Publication Date: September 28 2010
Distribution: SPD