Six poems find a new home …

Back in October I decided that I’d no longer post new poems on this site, choosing instead to set up a poem of the week newsletter (subscribe today!). One of the reasons for this decision was that despite the fact that not many people visit my site (no, this is not a plea for hits) I still felt slightly awkward sending poems off to magazines under the assumption that they were ‘unpublished’.

In fact, pretty much every poem of mine that’s been published over the past decade has appeared first on this site in some shape or form. So it seemed like a good time to stop doing that and to instead concentrate on writing new poems for my subscribers.

Of course, there remained a handful of poems I had submitted to magazines in the weeks and months leading up to my ‘tabula rasa’. This month I’ve received the great news that six of my little babies have found new homes – four of them in Jacket2, another in the Swedish journal Shipwrights Review and the sixth in online zine Stillcraic.

The poems in Jacket2 are part of a much larger feature on contemporary Australian poetry curated by Pam Brown. Pam’s decision to post poets in reverse alphabetical order means that I’m nestled between Peter Minter and Gig Ryan – a rare thrill! Of the poems, ‘Algae’ first ‘appeared’ in Southerly and is taken from my as yet unpublished collection Leaves of Glass.

‘TL;DR’ and ‘Övergången’, on the other hand, were both written while I was living in Karlskrona and also appeared in my chapbook Övergången. Lastly, ‘Sunshine for Kim Dae-jung’ was in fact composed in Seoul, on the day that the former President of the Republic of Korea died. Read all four poems at their new Jacket 2 home!

I discovered the website of Swedish journal Shipwrights Review quite by accident but was taken by the editors’ emphasis on second-language (by which I assume is meant ‘non-Swedish’) writers. On this basis, I decided to send them some poems, of which they chose my free transliteration of the famous Macedonian poem ‘Т’га за југ’ (‘Longing for the South’). I wrote this poem after returning from the Struga Poetry Evenings in August 2011, and it’s an attempt to describe my own mixed feelings of homesickness and ‘longing’ when it comes to Australia. Read ‘Т’га за југ’ on the Shipwrights Review site!

Finally, my poem ‘Cute’, which is also a part of Leaves of Glass, and which recently found a home in Best Australian Poems 2011, has now been reposted over at Stillcraic, a NZ-based site currently curated by Jennifer Compton. It’s nice to think of my version of Walt Whitman kicking around the online traps …

Apart from one or two forthcoming poems, these are the last to have been published first here on daveydreamnation.com. In the future, I’m hoping to be a little more generous when it comes to journals, and will be sending them only fresh poems that have not previously been ‘read’ by either human eyes or crawling bots.