Abendland

In 2006 – six years after the release of The Happy Farang – I self-published my second chapbook, entitled Abendland. Again, its contents had been written while travelling, this time through North America and Europe in 2005.

As was also the case with The Happy Farang, the poems in Abendland dealt with my travel experiences, and although there was no ‘happy farang’-style narrator, the poems are preoccupied with the fleeting glimpses of meaning or significance that occur while travelling, at pace, through foreign lands.

The term ‘abendland’ or ‘evening-land’ is sometimes used to refer to Western Europe. This concept became the guiding principle for the collection as it grew in size.

In the end, I wrote seventy poems in a diary in longhand over the course of two months. Then, at the end of that summer trip, I travelled to Seoul where I undertook a four-month Asialink residency and wrote poems for a companion volume, Morgenland.

During my first weeks in Seoul, hunkered down in the Internet room in a backpacker hostel, I typed up and published the poems on the web. In fact all of them can still be read in their original context on the Blogger site where they were first ‘published’.

Format

When I returned to Australia in early 2006, I compiled the best 20 poems from my Abendland manuscript into a chapbook and laid it out in A5 format, arranging the contents using a publishing software package, photocopying the colour cover at a local printing shop and folding the pages myself.

The look and feel of the book was pretty much the same as The Happy Farang. I printed fifteen copies but knew that I could print up more any time I liked, at a unit cost of $1. The design was 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 when I was in Ljubljana, the place where I wrote ‘Pink City’, my poem for du papa editor Michael Farrell.

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.

Launch

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 inestimable alicia sometimes) helping to staple copies together while I spoke with students.

I’d categorise Abendland as a classic self-publishing performance that riffs off some aspects of The Happy Farang, most notably its A5 format. On the other hand, it is not so casually put together, and shows a more advanced understanding of page layout and design.

Also, it is clearly presented as a self-published book, sans fake publisher. In fact, at no point is an actual publisher specified in the text, apart from the copyright statement’s acknowledgement of ‘David Prater’ as its owner.

The ease of the book’s construction also suggests the small-scale possibilities of Print-On-Demand (POD) techniques and yet this method of construction is not referred to in the book’s ‘text’ at all. It’s a secret performance.

Circulation

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. I avoided offering the book to bookshops on consignment this time around, 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.

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 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.

Reception

I did send a copy to a friend and fellow-poet in the USA and another to a NSW poet and blogger, both of whom wrote reviews of the chapbook.

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

Derek Motion

For this reason I would make a connection between Abendland, 8 poems and Re:, all of which were essentially publications ‘performed’ for an audience of fellow-creators.

What can ultimately be said about the symbolic significance of these kinds of performances? Is it enough to say that they are ‘apprenticeships in publishing’?

On the one hand it is true that acquiring skills and knowledge in formatting and book layout is essential for any poet wishing to publish their works in the public sphere.

On the other hand, these semi-private acts of non-publishing do also reflect the lack of capital attached to poetry in general and poetry books in particular. Hence the cheap, stapled, DIY format and the amateurish typography and layout further entrench a particular image of the self-published book.

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

Archival

Despite the disengagement of the named author from a specific reader, Abendland is dedicated to a real person, who does exist.

Further, despite the fact that very few copies of this book object were actually printed, the potential for any number of copies to come into existence at any moment suggests that the making of Abendland was not just an act of vanity, but also an important step in my evolution as a publisher of my own work.

Abendland was not constructed in the same way as The Happy Farang. It may never really have been truly ‘published’ at all. The copy that is included in the Artefact attached to my PhD was created to stand on its own as a book object just like any other book.

In this sense, every copy is the first copy, and maintains an equal rarity, of an infinitely small degree.

Republication

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.

One other poem from the original manuscript, ‘Travelling Types’, appeared in Overland.

The 2012 reissues

In 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.

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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).