Dead Poem Office

In July 2009, as my PhD thesis was in its final stages of production, I discovered that one of my chapbooks had been archived by the National Library of Australia. But it had never been published. In fact, the NLA’s copy was the only exemplar of Dead Poem Office ever printed.

I hadn’t intended to publish Dead Poem Office at all. Its title was a tongue-in-cheek reference to REM’s Dead Letter Office (1987), an album of ‘b-sides compiled’. The idea was to collect together a chapbook’s worth of poems, published previously in journals, that had not made the cut for We Will Disappear. It was a mockup, which I never got around to printing.

After launching We Will Disappear in Melbourne and Brisbane, I travelled to Newcastle, where I did a reading at the National Young Writers Festival. I also attended the book fair, where I sold some copies of some of my other chapbooks. In the noise and bustle of the fair, I must have sold the mock-up of Dead Poem Office to someone, possibly for as little as a dollar.

How it came to reside in the NLA’s collection, I’m not entirely sure. The person I sold it to might have been an undercover collector or a roving NLA staff member, snapping up copies of zines and chapbooks for archival purposes. Whatever the reason, the book has been catalogued, is available for reading by the general public, and is now even available for digital download, for a price. I’ve also received emails from book distributors inquiring as to its availability.

The irony of this is clear: despite my best efforts to present to the world an ‘authorised’ version of my poetic output, in the end individual authors have little or no control over which of their works will be remembered or archived. I now know, if only on a trivial level, something of what Patrick White must have felt all those years ago when he discovered a copy of his book The Ploughman in the NLA.

While I could always simply print up another copy (I still have the text and the cover image on file), I decided to pay the $13.20 required to have someone at the library scan Dead Poem Office electronically and then send it to me via email. I included a copy of this scan as part of my PhD Artefact because it symbolically both represents and erases me as a ‘self-publishing’ author.

Dead Poem Office represents and archives me by way of the Dewey Decimal number Np A821.4 P912 de hand-written on its front cover. However, the scanned copy is of such poor quality that my name, originally printed in silver ink on the cover, is unreadable, as is the image used for the front and back cover. My name does not appear on any other page of the book. All that is left is the title and the poems themselves.

In the end this is fitting: for many poets, libraries also constitute a ‘Dead Poem Office’, a final resting place for poems that may sit unread, just like undelivered letters, for many years. While this represents a cautionary tale for any poet distributing their works in public, it also shows that books continue to have an uncanny ability to outmanoeuvre their authors.

Self-published chapbooks are indeed actors within a field of books whose only real enemy is that ‘bonfire of the vanity presses’ all writers fear. For this reason alone they should be celebrated, discussed and remembered.

My thesis demonstrated that various publishing activities can indeed constitute a performance, a ‘publishing of the self’. Publishing, in the literary field at least, is a word that describes a multitude of public and private acts. The reinvention of old formats for books, including the chapbook format, is indeed just one aspect of this multiplicity.

While many forms of publishing and dissemination are possible, when poets use traditional formats, they are in fact entering a conversation with older fields of prestige. The five other chapbooks presented in my PhD thesis represent a performance of self-publishing, rather than a simple denial of mainstream publishing.

We Will Disappear, by contrast, is a performance of ‘mainstream’ publication that nevertheless bears some hallmarks or characteristics of other kinds of publishing, including self-publishing.

Re-examining the fields in which these poetry books were produced involves recognising the role of books as signifiers of prestige. The spaces between fields of publishing are likewise occupied by a variety of actors, and their creative works (in this case poems, chapbooks and other book objects). Despite differences between fields of publishing, books can also be read as a performance of struggles within the field(s) in which they are produced.

Despite technological changes in the way poets communicate their works to the world, older book forms such as the chapbook still play a significant role in poetry publishing. The performance of poetry book objects can tell us a great deal about the way the field of publishing works. In doing so, they inspire a more sophisticated reading of the literary field, and of the importance of books as signifiers of literary and cultural prestige.

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).

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The 2012 reissue

In 2012, as part of a spate of reissues, I reimagined and republished Dead Poem Office online via Scribd, where it remains despite my best efforts to delete it. Like its 2007 forebear, the 2012 reissue compiles poems which previously appeared in journals and magazines.

However, while the 2007 version was conceived as a companion volume to my first full-length poetry collection, We Will Disappear, the reissue bore no resemblance to the original. It featured a completely new cover and interior design which was, ironically, much closer in look and feel to the style used by Papertiger Media in designing We Will Disappear.

In fact, the cover image is one of two photographs I took with a disposable camera in an old carpark on Dudley Street in West Melbourne, Australia in 2000. I used the other one on the cover of We Will Disappear.

At the same time, Dead Poem Office (2012) labels itself as a collection of ‘B-sides compiled’, thus reinforcing the original pun in the 2007 chapbook’s reference to the 1987 R.E.M. compilation album, Dead Letter Office.

The ‘b-sides’ compiled in Dead Poem Office previously appeared in a number of venues, including FourW, Meanjin, Island, Famous Reporter, Going Down Swinging, The Age, Overland, PFS Post (USA), Snorkel, The Otoliths, Textbase, Eyewear (UK), Luzmag (Spain), Cordite Poetry Review, nthposition (UK), JAAM (NZ), Gutcult (USA), ABC Radio National, Vibewire, Gangway (Austria), Slope (USA), The Red Room Project, Divan and Voiceworks, as well as in Future Welcome: the Moosehead Anthology X (Canada).