In 2006 – six years after the release of The Happy Farang – I made my second truly self-published chapbook, entitled Abendland. Again, its contents had been written while travelling, this time through the United States and Europe in 2005. The word ‘abendland’ or ‘evening-land’ is sometimes used to refer to the West and/or Europe.

I originally wrote 70 poems in a diary in longhand but then, at the end of my summer trip, I travelled to Seoul and entered the text directly into a content management system (Blogger) and published the poems on the web. In fact all of the poems can still be read in their original context on the Blogger site where they were first ‘published’.

When I returned from Korea, I compiled the best 20 poems into an A5 format chapbook. I arranged the contents using MS Word, photocopied the colour cover at a local printing shop and stapled the pages together myself. In total, the look and feel of the book was pretty much the same as The Happy Farang.

I printed 15 copies initially but knew that I could print up more any time I liked, at a unit cost of $1. The look and feel of the chapbook is not quite as minimalistic as my previous efforts but still fairly rudimentary. On the cover, the name of the author and title appear vertically, with the green title dominating the smaller, grey name. The cover image is a detail from a photo I took in Ljubljana.

On the acknowledgements page, we see the copyright statement, followed by references to magazines in which some poems first appeared, a link to my now-defunct blog, my email address and some acknowledgements. There are no human traces on the book, no numbering or classification apart from the number ‘1’ printed on the final page of each copy.

Prater’s poems flow like the text on CNN, but beautifully.

Derek Motion

There was no launch as such for Abendland, although I did give a guest workshop at Frankston TAFE where I read poems from the book and even sold a few copies. Indeed, you might almost say that the workshop was a performance of the book’s DIY construction, with the lecturer (the bulk ace alicia sometimes) helping to staple copies together while I spoke with students.

I posted a notice about Abendland on my blog and over the next few months began to send out and give away to friends the few copies that I had printed. This process ended up gernering two reviews: one by Adam Fieled, and the other by Derek Motion.

I avoided offering the book to bookshops on consignment, due more to the hassle of going in there than anything else. Looking back now I can’t really explain my lack of enthusiasm. It may have had something to do with the fact that I felt it really was time for me to seek out a ‘proper’ publisher for my work.

Prater might be called a Neo-Formalist, or a satirist or an elegist. Whatever you want to call him, the sharpness & jagged edges of his poems make for a compelling read. He’s an “Outsider” who is happy to stay that way.

Adam Fieled

As of 2006 a significant number of my poems had been published in magazines, I had been successful in applying for grants and residencies, and I had compiled several manuscripts worth of poems, none of which will ever see the light of day. In this context, I suppose I had essentially explored as many of the possibilities of self-publishing in the chapbook tradition as were then available.

It seemed pointless to sell, circulate or distribute Abendland as a valuable ‘piece of art’, when I knew very well that with a unit cost of $1 or less, its significance in the eyes of readers would be minimal at best.

Several poems first published in Abendland went on to have second lives in other publications: “Walt Whitman Service Area” graced the pages of The Age newspaper, “18 Fields” and “The Two Faces of Zlatyu Boyadziev” appeared in Mirage #4/Periodical (USA), while “Dürer: Innsbruck 2005” appeared in Cordite Poetry Review as part of the Children of Malley issue.

Im 2012 I edited and re-published the Abendland chapbook digitally. A further 20 poems formed a companion volume, Abendland II, also published digitally in 2012. 

One day I may even get around to producing a complete version but for now the two separate artefacts serve as a cool reminder of my travels during the northern summer of 2005.

An earlier version of this text was originally published as part of my PhD thesis, “Bonfire of the Vanity Presses: Self-Publishing in the Field of Australian Poetry” (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, 2010).