In 2002 I spent three weeks travelling in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. During my travels I wrote a series of poems, which I later decided to compile under the title Between Empires.

The poems in Between Empires were originally written in longhand in a Mead Composition Notebook (wide-ruled) that I bought in New York City, and then published digitally on the precursor to D/DN in early 2003.

While many of the poems in Between Empires went on to be published individually, the collection itself remained otherwise secret for a decade.

The order of the poems as published online is not the same as the order in which they were written. For instance, the first poem written in longhand was ‘Holding Pattern’, and the title poem (sometimes titled ‘Empires Between’) was actually composed last.

Looking back at the handwritten drafts now, it’s kind of striking how little some of them have changed. The draft text of the poem ‘Between Empires’, for example, is almost identical to the version published two years later in the Australian literary journal Southerly.

Other poems, of course, were subjected to substantial revision. But there’s something comforting about the feeling you get when you know something’s pretty much finished the first time you attempt to write it down.

Several poems in the longhand manuscript (including ‘Express train to yer love’) were not included in the HTML version (and therefore constitute prototypical ‘b-sides’). One page bearing the title ‘Maple Lanes’ has no text at all. There’s also a Nirvana sticker on the back cover of the Mead composition notebook. No idea where that came from.

After ‘self-publishing’ Between Empires online, I submitted a number of the poems in the collection to various journals (see notes below) but then pretty much forgot about it.

Nevertheless, a total of 11 poems from Between Empires, including the title poem, ended up in my debut poetry collection, We Will Disappear (2007). Which is actually quite a lot for a ‘forgotten’ manuscript.

In 2012, in a fit of self-analysis and critcal reappraisal, I reissued a selection of the poems that make up Between Empires, both in full and as two separate digital chapbooks: Peace Falls (chiefly preoccupied with the United States) and Forever Wende (focussed on Germany).

The poems I wrote in Germany drew heavily on my very limited knowledge of the German language, acquired at university in the early 1990s. I only spent a few days in Berlin and a couple more in Lübeck, a city I was keen to visit due to my obsession with marzipan.

As with the ‘American’ poems, there’s something about the clean certainty with which I drafted them that strikes me now as supremely fatalistic. It’s clear that I was writing in the kind of flow state that’s very hard to replicate (let alone remember).

I was also leaning heavily on the miniature German-English dictionary I’d brought with me (which I had kept since my university days). See, for example, ‘faßbar’ (a word which, funnily enough, translates as ‘comprehensible’), another poem which survived, relatively unscathed, the journey from draft to published form (in the bilingual journal Gangway).

Overall, as hinted at in my post reflecting on the 2012 reissue process, the travel poems in Between Empires raised a number of questions I was not able to answer until I returned to the northern hemisphere in 2005 to write what would become two new chapbooks: Abendland (2006) and Morgenland (2007).

But looking back on the collection now, I suspect it may also hide the seeds of another kind of explanatory text, about the real nature of my journey, the places I visited and the people I met.

Such a text might dwell on how the poem ’empire state (icehouse)’ is really about an Icehouse album I picked up on cassette in New York City, and the experience I had listening to the track “Hey Little Girl” over and over again while riding a train from Berlin to Lübeck.

Or how I wrote ‘bloody hollys’ after attending a free punk rock festival in Buffalo, upstate New York, and witnessing a band of that name shred in the streets. Or how I’d only stumbled on that festival after being stalked by a suspicious character through the dark streets of Allentown.

Or all of the things that didn’t even make it into the poems: about how, on the return to trip to NYC from Buffalo, the passenger next to me on the train, having learnt I was from Australia, showed me an article in the New York Times about the Bali bombing, which had occurred the previous night.

It looks like I’m already writing that über-text . . . and while it might only be of interest to me as a memoir-of-self, perhaps it could also succeed in conveying the kaleidoscopic thrills of that all-too-short solo vacation I took in 2002, when I truly was living between empires.

Between Empires (2002/2012)

new composition*
america
(on the tomb of) the unknown waitress*
bloody hollys
exhale on main street
empire state (icehouse)
bustling*
peace falls*
stars & spirals
paladin
a tourist in your own life
slam!
rattle & bum
small town fsu
identikit nation*
we miss you!
unmarked harlem*
thrashed
holding pattern

empires between*

freuen
forever 1980
öd(e)*
faßbar*
bleistiftspitzer
birnensaft
tor
euronap
ich bin ein tourist*
halo
alles klaar?
giuseppe
tüchtig
entgegengesetz*
stables of the reconstruction
genau
berlin zoo
bullet pencil

Notes

All poems written in the northern autumn of 2002 and published online via my personal home page in the southern summer of 2002/03. Digital chapbook/white label edition compiled and made available online in 2012.

Individual poem credits: ‘small town fsu’, ‘exhale on main street’, ‘alles klaar?’, The Otolith (USA, 2007). ‘Empires Between’ and ‘Bustling’, Southerly (Australia, 2004). ‘America’, Gutcult (USA, 2004). ‘We Miss You!’, Big Bridge (USA, 2004). ‘Paladin’, Vibewire (Australia, 2004). ‘Tor’, ‘Ode’, ‘Ich bin ein Tourist’ and ‘Fassbar’, Gangway (Austria/Australia, 2003). ‘entgegengesetz’, hutt (Australia, 2003). ‘identikit nation’, Fusebox (USA, 2003).

* Republished in We Will Disappear (2007).

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