the very huggable Stan Apps has written a great reading report on me and Lindsey's PRB debut...check it out here...
Nov 24, 2009
Nov 20, 2009
Nov 18, 2009
Nov 12, 2009
Kevin KILLIAN reviews Rude Girl...
Lately I've been noticing a lot of new poetry being written here in the Bay Area that seems like Gary Snyder or Kenneth Rexroth could have written it fifty years ago. Actually I like some of this retro-eco-writing, but when it comes to a new twist, John Sakkis is my go to guy. The tidal basin of the Bay Area has left its mark on every aspect of the region, and everywhere you look you see some lovely vestige of nature, and Rude Girl is filled with the names of landmarks, towns, neighborhoods (Fulton Street, Oakland, the "Panhandle standing on one leg"): I imagine a computer might graph out the spots named in the book and produced a complicated cats cradle of string on pins that would show you Sakkis' trajectory with more accuracy than I can. If you have been waiting to see if Rude Girl is worth buying, I'm here to tell you to lift your finger, press the button and order now. It is a beautiful book full of hope and promise.
Though I will say that Sakkis neglects not the dark side of life either. (You can imagine, since his last book was called Gary Gygax!) I don't go much by blurbs but I do like Brandon Brown's suggestion that Rude Girl reflects today's financial crisis with its evocation of "broken economies." One could write a paper on the way Sakkis' verse slips and slides across pages nimbly avoiding ruin, like the protagonist of a disaster film: "the East Bay/ is running out as we climb in/ I jump up to the floor," etc. First book of poetry composed in Parkour?
It's divided into three sections, but they are fairly fluid and elements of each appears in the others. In the beginning piece, Sakkis gives us the "two kinds of hills: the first slow and/ shuffling, the second fast and frenetic." In part two, "Rude Girl" itself, the two kinds of hills are seen again, as if by another viewer--maybe the child grown older? Or the adult recalling the visions of childhood?---the hills, now "baited with maggots," are "red or yellow fish/ out of the green ground." You can see that Sakkis's syntax is slithery, far from straightforward, and there may be some extra difficulty because of this factor, but the book as a whole hangs together better than most such project. "These operations," he decides, "belong together." A play runs through Rude Girl like a river, a cantata of voices from real life and its outer rings. The final section is "The Breakable Ones," when it was published originally I thought of it as a track by Prince (like "The Beautiful Ones (They'll Hurt You Every Time") but now I think in terms of advice I got when I was a teenage wanna-be poet, from the august Paul Blackburn, on the subject of metric in poetry. "There are only two sorts of rules about prosody, and some are set in stone, but the fun ones are the breakable ones."
Though I will say that Sakkis neglects not the dark side of life either. (You can imagine, since his last book was called Gary Gygax!) I don't go much by blurbs but I do like Brandon Brown's suggestion that Rude Girl reflects today's financial crisis with its evocation of "broken economies." One could write a paper on the way Sakkis' verse slips and slides across pages nimbly avoiding ruin, like the protagonist of a disaster film: "the East Bay/ is running out as we climb in/ I jump up to the floor," etc. First book of poetry composed in Parkour?
It's divided into three sections, but they are fairly fluid and elements of each appears in the others. In the beginning piece, Sakkis gives us the "two kinds of hills: the first slow and/ shuffling, the second fast and frenetic." In part two, "Rude Girl" itself, the two kinds of hills are seen again, as if by another viewer--maybe the child grown older? Or the adult recalling the visions of childhood?---the hills, now "baited with maggots," are "red or yellow fish/ out of the green ground." You can see that Sakkis's syntax is slithery, far from straightforward, and there may be some extra difficulty because of this factor, but the book as a whole hangs together better than most such project. "These operations," he decides, "belong together." A play runs through Rude Girl like a river, a cantata of voices from real life and its outer rings. The final section is "The Breakable Ones," when it was published originally I thought of it as a track by Prince (like "The Beautiful Ones (They'll Hurt You Every Time") but now I think in terms of advice I got when I was a teenage wanna-be poet, from the august Paul Blackburn, on the subject of metric in poetry. "There are only two sorts of rules about prosody, and some are set in stone, but the fun ones are the breakable ones."
Nov 10, 2009
upcoming events...this Saturday...
Just a reminder to head on over to Oakland this Saturday for two of our local darlings.
John Sakkis and Norma Cole on Translation
Saturday November 14th, 2009
Nahl Hall, Oakland Campus of CCA
5212 Broadway at College
Small Press Traffic is at the heart of where experimentation and community intersect. This season presents multi-disciplinary conversations that investigate vital areas of contemporary poetics and politics. Poets Norma Cole and John Sakkis continue the season with a reading focused on “Translation.”
John Sakkis’s first book, Rude Girl, is just out from BlazeVox Books. With Angelos Sakkis he translates the work of Athenian multimedia artist/poet Demothenes Agrafiotis, their translation of Agrafiotis’s Chinese Notebook is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse as well as Maribor forthcoming from The Post-Apollo Press.
Norma Cole’s books include Collective Memory, Do the Monkey, and Spinoza in Her Youth and Where Shadows Will: Selected Poems 1988—2008, among others. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert’s Journals, Fouad Gabriel Naffah’s The Spirit God and the Properties of Nitrogen and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France.
upcoming events...couple weeks from now...
The Poetic Research Bureau presents...
Lindsey Boldt & John Sakkis
Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 4:00pm
@ The Poetic Research Bureau
3706 San Fernando Blvd
Glendale, CA 91206
Doors open at 4:00pm
Reading starts at 4:30pm
$5 donation requested
Lindsey Boldt lives in San Francisco where she is a practicing poetess, cultural worker, vaudeville-style entertainer, elementary after-school teacher, human jukebox and assistant editor with The Post-Apollo Press. She is the author of the chapbook Oh My, Hell Yes and is currently working on two prose projects related to two very dated 80's movies.
John Sakkis's first full length book, Rude Girl, is just out from BlazeVox Books. He is the author of numerous chapbooks including most recently: Gary Gygax, The Moveable Ones and Rude Girl. With Angelos Sakkis he translates the work of Athenian multimedia artist/ poet Demosthenes Agrafiotis; their translation of Agrafiotis's Maribor is forthcoming from The Post-Apollo Press as well as Chinese Notebook forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse. Recent work has appeared in Area Sneaks, Action, Yes and Octopus. He lives in the Lower Haight and works at Small Press Distribution in Berkele
Nov 9, 2009
upcoming events...this Thursday...
Jason Morris says...
***
THIS THURSDAY 11/12
come by my house 445 hampshire
(between 17th & mariposa, right off the 33 stanyan or the 22 fillmore)
for a reading featuring
SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX
& JOHN SAKKIS
plus to hang after & before, byob
drop by around 7, , the door'll be open
***
Oak Grove Middle School, Concord CA
these were the girls of my dreams...i let all of them borrow my black Georgetown Starter jacket. i would wear lot's of Draakar Noir to lure these girls into my black Georgetown Starter jacket. i would go to the Sunvalley Mall twice a week to hit up the Macy's cologne booth to get samples. CK One was popular but i liked Draakar Noir and Cool Water. i would go to Champs Sports to steal toggles. i would go to school in my black shorts overalls, my flat billed Georgetown baseball hat, the tag still attached at the top, my pinstripe Georgetown Starter jersey, my Elise shoes...and i would talk to these girls, or try to, and they would ask if they could borrow my black Georgetown Starter jacket for the day. and onetime this kid named Jude Capili came up to me and said "hey dude, you wanna battle...?" and i thought he meant with swords and battleaxes...
these were the girls of my dreams...i let all of them borrow my black Georgetown Starter jacket. i would wear lot's of Draakar Noir to lure these girls into my black Georgetown Starter jacket. i would go to the Sunvalley Mall twice a week to hit up the Macy's cologne booth to get samples. CK One was popular but i liked Draakar Noir and Cool Water. i would go to Champs Sports to steal toggles. i would go to school in my black shorts overalls, my flat billed Georgetown baseball hat, the tag still attached at the top, my pinstripe Georgetown Starter jersey, my Elise shoes...and i would talk to these girls, or try to, and they would ask if they could borrow my black Georgetown Starter jacket for the day. and onetime this kid named Jude Capili came up to me and said "hey dude, you wanna battle...?" and i thought he meant with swords and battleaxes...
Nov 5, 2009
Nov 4, 2009
Grendelwulf from a D&D website reviews my Gary Gygax!
"Whether he means it as sincere homage or quick cash, I can't say. But as a poetry lover (from Poe to Shakespeare to Chaucer to Maya Angelou to Robert Frost and everything else in between) I can agree with you that it is not very good...at all...not even a little...seems like he is a grade school teacher who had his students all write a poem and then he published them under his own name... Course, that's just my opinion."
you hear that Mark Lamoureux? quick cash! where the hell is my quick cash dammit!
Nov 3, 2009
Nov 2, 2009
upcoming events...
Thursday, November 12- 8:00 p.m.
Jason Morris's house reading series with John Sakkis and Sunnylin Thibodeaux details TBA
Saturday, November 14- 7:30 p.m.
Norma Cole and John Sakkis on Translation
VENUE CHANGE TO NAHL HALL, CCA CAMPUS, OAKLAND
Sunday, November 22- 4:00 p.m.
John Sakkis and Lindsey Boldt
Poetic Research Bureau 3706 San Fernando Los Angeles, CA
Saturday, January 16-
John Sakkis, John Coletti, Brandon Downing, Niina Pollari
SPACE SPACE/ Poetry Time
390 Seneca Ave Ridgewood Queens, NY
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