“Cultural Poetics”
(Bonds, modalities-tropes)
Demosthenes Agrafiotis
Erato Publications
Athens, 2012
ISBN: 978-960-229-244-0
Pages: 420, 14×21 cm, bound, hardcover
Foreword by Dr. George Arabatzis
Epilogue: Dr. Charalambos Magoulas
Literary edition: Helen Mavrakaki – Polyviou
Drawings and visual poems: D. Agrafiotis
Charles Bernstein believes that poetics is poetry using other means. In this spirit, this book aims to highlight the cultural conditions for the emergence of modern poetry and the cultural coordinates that influenced the poetic production of Demosthenes Agrafiotis.
The poems are approached as warning signs, messages, meta-messages of cultural change locally and globally. In the same perspective, the poet (through a choice of codes and poetic devices) appears to attempt the formation of his poems as an idiosyncratic pre-reading/pre-dicting of system-level changes in the ways human beings coexist in a globalised world.
The book is composed of essays, articles and poems-essays, published in Greek magazines, reports, newspapers, websites and books, as well as unpublished texts. The book also includes texts published in English or French that have then been translated into Greek by Dr. Charalambos Magoulas.
The texts were selected to formulate a first conceptual perspective on the term “Cultural”, but at the same time they are the minimum clarification and the necessary introduction to use and then to test the term “Poetics”. Among the issues discussed is the fate of contemporary poetry or modern poetry and the “misunderstanding” of postmodern poetry. The status of poetry in an environment of incessant reversals, requiring a dialogue between poetry and other artistic activities (painting, music, video, photo …), and finally, the cultural legitimacy of poetic production in the era of generalized ‘’crisology’’ are also clarified in the book.
Finally, it is hoped that the cultural signs and poetic explanations given in the book will allow a more coherent reading of the books of poetry, videos and other visual works of Demosthenes Agrafiotis. With this aim in mind, the site www.dagrafiotis.com will be extremely helpful.
ERATO Editions
Valtetsiou street 39, Athens,10681,tel: 00302103830323
email:eratobooks@gmail.com
