The last time a poem of mine appeared in a journal was back in 2013. But in the intervening years, the dim flame of my poetic muse has been sustained by the appearance of some of my published poems in a number of anthologies.
Suddenly, these old poems have a new agency. They just “hit differently” the second (or sometimes even third!) time around. Sure, there’s only five of them, but that’s, like, one every two years. And in the absence of any other kind of engagement with the publishing space, I’ll take those odds.
For this reason, I’m very grateful to the team at Vagabond Press (Sydney) for choosing to include my poem “Jetlag World” in its forthcoming Living Systems: Poetry from Asia Pacific anthology.
“Jetlag World” first appeared in my chapbook Morgenland (2007), published as part of Vagabond’s Rare Objects series in a limited edition of 100 signed copies. The poems in Morgenland were written while undertaking an Asialink residency in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 2005, with the support of Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council for the Arts).
During my residency, I worked as a visiting lecturer in the English Department at Sogang University, wrote “live” poems about imaginary cities in PC Bangs (PC방, Internet gaming cafes) and read a lot of Korean literature. I may also have imbibed modest quantities of soju and makkolli over the course of those four life-changing months.
I recall writing the poem, perhaps unsurprisingly, while suffering the effects of jet lag after arriving in (or maybe it was returning to) Seoul on a very crisp autumn morning. Reading the poem now, I am back there again, drinking a can of warm coffee in a convenience store and then heading straight to my campus office in Sinchon, as referred to in the poem’s last lines:
Catch the subway. The morning mist
Has not yet cleared. This day in the
Land of the morning calm is already
Several hours older. Sit in front of
The monitor. Work. Write this poem.
Taking a look back at the original draft of the poem, I’m now kind of glad I chopped out the two final lines:
Welcome to my brain. Every day is
Like a night in deepest jetlag world.
Hits different, don’t it?
Quite apart from the fact that the anthology provides me with the opportunity to take another trip down my own personal Amnesia Lane, I’m very much looking forward to reading the works of some 170 contributors from Australia, Japan, Korea, China, Viet Nam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Singapore, the United States, New Zealand, Mexico and elsewhere.
Cross-posted (and slightly edited) on LinkedIn.
