
Monday, December 28, 2009
Saturday, December 12, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK IN THE NEW ISSUE OF SCYTHE

Tuesday, December 01, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK FEATURED @ MIPOESIAS: THE FIRST 10 YEARS
Thursday, November 12, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK IN THE NEW OUROBOROS REVIEW
Sunday, November 08, 2009
POETS & ARTISTS (O&S, Sept. 2009): SELF PORTAIT ISSUE
Friday, November 06, 2009
My 2ND PERSONALIZED REJECTION FROM THE NEW YORKER

| hide details 8:10 AM (1 hour ago) |
We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material, in spite of its evident merit. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Thursday, October 29, 2009
ZERO SUMMER NOMINATED FOR 2009 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD
Saturday, October 03, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK + SSION = CREDIT IN THE STRAIGHT WORLD
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
DOUBLE REVIEW OF MY BOOKS @ WILDE OATS E-ZINE
Monday, August 10, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK @ "WHY DO I WRITE" SERIES
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I Was Born Doing Reference Work In Sin Why Do I Write ~ Andrew Demcak WHY DO I WRITE ~ Andrew Demcak As Joan Didion says: "In many ways writing is the act of saying I of imposing oneself upon other people of saying listen to me ..." I am now part of Dustin Brookshire's series "Why Do I Write" |
Thursday, August 06, 2009
HARVARD UNIVERSITY BUYS ZERO SUMMER
Monday, July 06, 2009
MP3 OF ANDREW DEMCAK READING @ MOE'S BOOKS BERKELEY, CA 06/09/09
Thursday, June 25, 2009
WHAT DO AMAZON CUSTOMERS BUY FROM ANDREW DEMCAK
What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?
![]() | 56% buy Zero Summer 5.0 out of 5 stars (3)$16.00 |
![]() | 44% buy the item featured on this page: Catching Tigers in Red Weather 5.0 out of 5 stars (3)$13.95 |
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
SUNY BUFFALO BUYS COPY OF ZERO SUMMER
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK SAYS BUY KAYA OAKES NEW BOOK

Monday, June 22, 2009
AMAZON CREATES AN AUTHOR PAGE FOR ANDREW DEMCAK
Sunday, June 21, 2009
ZERO SUMMER'S AMAZON.COM SALES RANK SOARS
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PURCHASES ZERO SUMMER BY ANDREW DEMCAK
Saturday, June 06, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK READS @ MOE'S BOOKS BERKELEY, CA 06/09/09 7:30PM

Readings and Events at Moe's
Moe's literary events began as a weekly poetry reading called Monday@Moe's. Over the years Moe's Books has become one of the premier Bay Area venues to hear novelists, poets, activists, and scholars read from their works. We archive our events in audio and video files that can be accessed from our webpage.
Unless otherwise mentioned, all events begin at 7:30pm. |
Upcoming events:
Tuesday, June 9th, 7:30p: Andrew Demcak and Garrett Lambrev
Andrew Demcak is an award-winning poet whose poetry has been widely published and anthologized, and whose books have been featured at The Best American Poetry and Oranges & Sardines. His latest book, Zero Summer, was published by BlazeVOX [Books], NY, 2009. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Lambda Award, Thom Gunn Poetry Award, both theCalifornia and Northern California Book Awards, Best of the Web, and others. He has an M. F. A. in English/Creative Writing from St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA , where he studied with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Michael Palmer, Carol Snow, Frank Bidart, Gary Snyder, Charles Wright, and Sharon Olds. Andrew is also a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, where he studied with Galway Kinnell, Richard Howard, and Lucille Clifton. His poems, including Young Man With iPod (Poetry Midwest, #13), are taught at Ohio State University as part of both its English 110.02 class, "The Genius and the Madman," and in its "American Poetry Since 1945" class. At the age of 23, Andrew published his first chapbook, The Psalms (Big 23 Press), which was favorably reviewed by Dr. Clifton Snider in the Small Press Review (issue 226, vol. 23, no. 11.)
Garrett "Garry" Lambrev started writing poems as a rite of puberty and hasn't stopped yet. Following his graduation from Peoples Temple in 1976, he joined the Cloud House movement in SF, engendered by Kush, and began reading on the streets and in the parks of Berkeley with fellow poets Clif Ross and Bob Rivera as The Rosa Luxemburg-Dorothy Day Cultural Brigade, coming to rest each Friday afternoon in the mini plaza in front of Cody's. Though he's published only intermittently over the last few decades, mostly in small and ephemeral literary magazines, early last year Berkeley's Beatitude Press published his first book length work, Dogstar and Poems from Other Planets: 1964-1989. He is presently completing a second collection, Galaxies Inside the Heart: 1990-2009 from which he will also be reading.
http://www.andrewdemcak.com
http://www.ad1968.blogspot.com
Thursday, June 04, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK READS @ BOOKS INC SF
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK SUPPORTS MARRIAGE EQUALITY
Sunday, May 24, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK NEW POEM @ LISTENLIGHT #19
Thursday, May 21, 2009
3 MORE UNIVERSITIES BOUGHT ZERO SUMMER BY ANDREW DEMCAK
According to OCLC's WorldCat, The University of Arizona, The University of Maryland, and Indiana University have all just recently purchased my book Zero Summer for their permanent collections. This is great because it took over a year before the Ivy League Universities began buying Catching Tigers in Red Weather. Zero Summer has only been out since Feb 2009.
5.0 out of 5 stars Ignite to a Color,
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5.0 out of 5 stars |
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK ONE OF 40 POETS ON TWITTER

FROM COLLIN KELLEY'S BLOG:
Saturday, April 25, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK PINK NARCISSUS & NARCISSUS RESISTS

FROM MATTHEW HITTINGER'S BLOG:
Narcissus Resists and Pink Narcissus
Demcak has approached Hittinger's superb work much the way music composers pay homage to colleagues, e.g. Brahms' 'Variations on a Theme by Haydn', Rachmaninov's 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini', among others. In doing so he enriches our experience with Hittinger's work while continuing to prove his own important standing as a poet unafraid to explore shrouded psyches. An excellent accomplishment and an exciting poetic response to a current colleague! And it is stunningly set off by the art of Didi Menendez who also published this fine work.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK @ BOOKS INC. 4/21/09



Thursday, April 16, 2009
ZERO SUMMER OUTRANKS BIBLE ON AMAZON.COM
Friday, April 03, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK'S FIRST REJECTION FROM THE NEW YORKER!

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The Editors
Thursday, April 02, 2009
MAJOR INFLUENCE ON ANDREW DEMCAK'S POETRY
Piet Mondrian (1872 - 1944)
Excerpts from Mondrian's essay Plastic Art & Pure Plastic Art, which first appeared in 1937 in the British journal Circle.
"Although Art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same, nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the esthetic expression on oneself, in other words, of that which one thins and experiences. The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively. Thus we see in every work of figurative art the desire, objectively to represent beauty, solely through form and color, in mutually balanced relations, and, at the same time, an attempt to express that which these forms, colors, and relations arouse in us. The latter attempt must of necessity result in an individual expression which veils the pure representation of beauty."
"The laws which in the culture of art have become more and more determinate are the great hidden laws of nature which art establishes in its own fashion. It is necessary to stress the facts that these laws are more or less hidden behind the superficial aspects of nature. Abstract art is therefore opposed to a natural representation of things. But it is not opposed to nature as is generally thought. It is opposed to the raw primitive animal nature of man, but is one with true human nature. It is opposed to the conventional laws created during the culture of the particular form but it is one with the laws of the culture of pure relationships.
First and foremost there is the fundamental law of dynamic equilibrium which is opposed to the static equilibrium necessitated by the particular form.
The important task then of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one. Non-figurative art demands an attempt of what is a consequence of this task, the destruction of particular form and the construction of a rhythm of mutual relations, of mutual forms or free lines. We must bear in mind, however, a distinction between these two forms of equilibrium in order to avoid confusion; for when we speak of equilibrium pure and simple we may be for, and at the same time against, a balance in the work of art."
"In order that art may be really abstract, in other words, that it should not represent relations with the natural aspect of things, the law of the denaturalization of matter is of fundamental importance. In painting, the primary color that is as pure as possible realizes this abstraction of natural color. But color is, in the present state of technique, also the best means for denaturalizing matter in the realm of abstract constructions in three dimensions; technical means are as a rule insufficient."
"According to our laws, it is a great mistake to believe that one is practicing non-figurative art by merely achieving neutral forms or free lines and determinate relations. For in composing these forms one runs the risk of a figurative creation, that is to say one or more particular forms.
Non-figurative art is created by establishing a dynamic rhythm of determinate mutual relations which excludes the formation of any particular form. We note thus, that to destroy particular form is only to do more consistently what all art has done."
"In general, people have not realized that one can express our very essence through neutral constructive elements; that is to say, we can express the essence of art. The essence of art of course in not often sought. As a rule, individualist human nature is so predominant, that the expression of the essence of art through a rhythm of lines, colors, and relationships appears insufficient. Recently, even a great artist has declared that 'complete indifference to the subject leads to an incomplete form of art.'
But everybody agrees that art is only a problem of plastics. What good then is a subject? It is to be understand that one would need a subject to expound something named 'Spiritual riches, human sentiments and thoughts.' Obviously, all this is individual and needs particular forms. But at the root of these sentiments and thoughts there is one thought and one sentiment: those do not easily define themselves and have no need of analogous forms in which to express themselves. It is here that neutral plastic means are demanded.
For pure art then, the subject can never be an additional value, it is the line, the color, and their relations which must 'bring into play the whole sensual and intellectual register of the inner life...,' not the subject. Both in abstract art and in naturalistic art color expresses itself 'in accordance with the form by which it is determined,' and in all art it is the artists task to make forms and colors living and capable of arousing emotion. If he makes art into an 'algebraic equation' that is no argument against the art, it only proves that he is not an artist."
"It is therefore a mistake to suppose that a non-figurative work comes out of the unconscious, which is a collection of individual and pre-natal memories. We repeat that it comes from pure intuition, which is at the basis of the subjective-objective dualism.
It is, however, wrong to think that the non-figurative artist finds impressions and emotions received from the outside useless, and regards it even as necessary to fight against them. On the contrary, all that the non-figurative artist receives from the outside is not only useful but indispensable, because it arouses in him the desire to creative that which he only vaguely feels and which he could never represent in a true manner without the contact with visible reality and with the life which surrounds him.
...
That which distinguishes him from the figurative artist is the fact that in his creations he frees himself from individual sentiments and from particular impressions which he receives from outside, and that he breaks loose from the domination of the individual inclination within him.
It is therefore equally wrong to think that the non-figurative artist creates through 'the pure intention of his mechanical process,' that he makes 'calculated abstractions,' and that he wishes to 'suppress sentiment not only in himself but also in the spectator.' It is a mistake to think that he retires completely into his system. That which is regarded as a system is nothing but constant obedience to the laws of pure plastics, to necessity, which art demands from him. It is thus clear that he has not become a mechanic, but that the progress of science, of technique, of machinery, of life as a whole, has only made him into a living machine, capable of realizing in a pure manner the essence of art. In this way, he is in his creation sufficiently neutral, that nothing of himself or outside of him can prevent him from establishing that which is universal. Certainly his art is art for art's sake ... for the sake of the art which is form and content at one and the same time."
![]() Broadway Boogie Woogie, o/c, 1942-1943, |
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
ANDREW DEMCAK NOW A SEARCH OPTION ON GOOGLE
2 NEW REVIEWS FOR ANDREW DEMCAK @ AMAZON.COM

An "R. Fields" posted two new reviews of my books on Amazon.com:
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing, creative, poetry colllection, I bough this book at a friend's recommendation. It is superb! What a talent. I like Randall Mann's work, too, but sometimes his forms seem a little bit too clever and evasive. Andrew Demcak's poems have both formal control and heart. A great collection from an emerging American poet. |