My second full-length poetry collection, Leaves of Glass, was released by Sydney-based poetry publisher Puncher and Wattmann in 2013.
Inspired by actual correspondence between Walt Whitman (1819–1892) and Bernard O’Dowd (1866–1953), Leaves of Glass features re-imaginings of both poets’ works.
Leaves of Glass was launched at two Puncher and Wattmann events: the first took place in the Bella Union bar in Trades Hall, Melbourne, on 1 December 2013. The second launch took place at the Balmain Town Hall in Sydney on 14 December 2013.
In 2013, two years after leaving Karlskrona (where I undertook postdoctoral research on electronic literature), I compiled a chapbook featuring 10 poems written in (or about) the town.
‘Fem kronor’ means, literally ‘five kronor’ (the krona, or SEK, being the Swedish unit of currency). In today’s terms, 5 SEK is around EUR 50 cents.
The chapbook’s title poem refers to an actual incident that occurred when I attempted to board a bus at Ronneby airport (about 50 kilometres from Karlskrona).
Dead Poem Office
B-sides compiled
36 pp.
Publisher: Stippen Press (Gustavsberg, Sweden)
Publication date: 2012
Format: Digital (PDF)
Status: Available
Dead Poem Office (2012), originally published via Scribd in late 2012, contains thirty-odd poems in English, all of which previously appeared in journals and magazines. It’s the successor to the original version of Dead Poem Office (2007) which never ‘appeared’ as a printed chapbook.
ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature
Editors: Maria Engberg, Talan Memmott and David Prater
Publisher: ELMCIP
Publication date: 2012
Format: Digital (Website/USB)
Status: Online
In 2011, I moved to Karlskrona in Blekinge, Sweden, to take up a 12-month post-doctoral researcher position with the ELMCIP project team based at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (BTH).
ELMCIP stands for Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, a 3-year collaborative research project which ran from 2010 to 2013, funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area (HERA) JRP for Creativity and Innovation.
ELMCIP involved seven European academic research partners and one non-academic partner who investigated how creative communities of practitioners form within a transnational and transcultural context in a globalized and distributed communication environment.
Focusing on the electronic literature community in Europe as a model of networked creativity and innovation in practice, ELMCIP studied the formation and interactions of that community and also helped further electronic literature research and practice in Europe.
A screenshot from the ELMCIP Anthology of European Literature
The ELMCIP Anthology of European Electronic Literature was an output from the ELMCIP researchers based at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola (Blekinge Institute of Technology) in Sweden, namely Maria Engberg, Talan Memmott and myself.
The anthology is intended to provide educators, students and the general public with a free curricular resource of electronic literary works produced in Europe. It consists of hypertext works, video art, pedagogical materials on electronic literature and references.
ELMCIP also includes an online Knowledge Base mapping the ongoing field of electronic literature.
The Happy Farang was my first self-published chapbook, and was released in 2000, at a time when I was just finding my feet, both literally and figuratively, as a poet.
In 2012, as part of a weird kind of burst of activity, I decided to reissue the book, cleaning up and reformatting the text (which was originally coloured blue, by mistake) and adding some scans of original drafts handwritten while travelling in Thailand and Laos in 1999.
The Happy Farang will always be my favourite book, and I hope that the revised edition manages to preserve some of the flavour of the original.
