Abendland first appeared in 2006, and contains twenty-one poems written while travelling through North America and Europe in 2005.
The poems in Abendland were written between July and August 2005. The text of this second edition was reformatted and revised.
‘Walt Whitman Service Area’ was first published in The Age. ‘18 Fields’ and ‘The Two Faces of Zlatyu Boyadziev’ were first published in Mirage #4/Period[ical]. ‘Dürer: Innsbruck 2005’ first appeared in Cordite Poetry Review.
Thank you Katie, Liam, Keiji and Andrea.
Cover image: ‘Zmajski most, Ljubljana’ (2005), by the author.
Cordite Poetry Review was established in 1997, and is Australia’s premier Internet poetry journal, with a reputation for publishing experimental and innovative works by both established and emerging Australian poets. Cordite initially received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, the federal government’s peak arts funding body, and boasts a large and varied readership.
Cordite was founded by Adrian Wiggins and Peter Minter in 1997. It began as a broadsheet, with six full issues of the journal published in print. I was Managing Editor of Cordite Poetry Review between 2001 and 2012. During that time, I produced 30 full issues of the magazine, plus 10 mini-issues, in an online format.
My appointment as Managing Editor coincided with a decision to switch to an online format. The first online issues featured hand-coded HTML pages. Later iterations made use of Movable Type and, briefly, Blogger. Since 2005, Cordite has been produced using WordPress.
In 2012 I stepped down from the Managing Editor position, handing over the reins to Kent MacCarter.
Cordite Poetry Review has been indexed and archived by the National Library of Australia’s Pandora Project.
Below is a list of links (in progress) to issues I produced as Managing Editor.
I met Kwame Dawes, the editor of Lincoln, Nebraska-based journal Prairie Schooner, at the Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia in 2011. Following the festival, Kwame invited me, as the editor of Cordite Poetry Review, to collaborate on a joint issue, to be published online.
Our collaboration became the first of what would become known as Fusion, a new online series features collaborations between Prairie Schooner and interesting, innovative online literary entities from around the world that seek to create dynamic fusions in literature and art.
A detail from ‘Army of Mirriams’, by Michelle Ussher.
The Cordite–Prairie Schooner Fusion, with the theme of ‘Work’, featured poems from Cordite Poetry Review by Tom Clark, Lorin Ford, Derek Motion, Brendan Ryan, Adrian Wiggins, Jennifer Compton, Ivy Alvarez, Barbara De Franceschi, Liam Ferney, Peter Coghill, M. F. McAuliffe, Benito Di Fonzo, Esther Johnson, Geoff Page, Emily Stewart and Margaret Owen Ruckert, plus audio poems by Sean M. Whelan & the Interim Lovers, Maxine Beneba Clarke, komninos zervos and Benito Di Fonzo.
It also featured poems from Prairie Schooner by Hedi Kaddour (translated by Marilyn Hacker), R. F. McEwan, Ander Monson, Linda McCarriston, Toi Derricotte, Marvin Bell, Marcella Pixley, Ted Kooser, Moira Lineham, Sandy Solomon, Jenny Factor, John Engman, Gary Fincke, Dannye Romine Powell, John Canaday, James Cihlar, Nance Van Winckel, Floyd Skloot and Roy Scheele.
Illustrations were provided by Michelle Ussher and Watie White.
In addition, the feature included interviews with Derek Motion, Jennifer Compton and Nance Van Winckel, plus eight more interviews on the Cordite site.
‘Övergången’ is a Swedish word for ‘transition’. What better word, then, for a chapbook featuring 10 poems originally written in English and translated into Swedish?
Övergången was self-published as a limited-edition chapbook in Sweden in 2011. I’d been invited to attend a poetry festival in Stockholm by Swedish poet Boel Schenlaer, whom I had met at the Struga Poetry Evenings in Macedonia earlier in the year.
I was living in Karlskrona at the time but travelled to Stockholm to participate in the festival. In order to prepare, Boel had 10 of my poems translated into Swedish, and I printed 50 copies of the chapbook at a print shop in Södermalm before performing at the Stockholm City Library.
Special thanks to Boel and Linda Bönström for translating my poems, and to Kathleen Asjes for taking the cover photograph out the window of our apartment in Björkholmen, Karlskrona.
The poems translated from English to Swedish for Övergången constituted something of a greatest-hits package at the time.
‘Spring*’ was first published in Southerly (Australia, 2005). ‘Abstract Moon’ was first published in Mirage/Periodical#4 (USA, 2006).
‘We Are Living’ first appeared in my collection We Will Disappear (papertiger media, 2007). ‘Cute’ was first published online in Blackbox/Manifold (UK) and later in print in Best Australian Poems (Black Inc, 2011).
‘TL;DR’, ‘Övergången’ and ‘Sunshine For Kim Dae Jung’ were first published online in Jacket2 (USA, 2011).
‘Kus’ was the winner of the 2007 June Shenfield Poetry Award (Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne).
An audio version of ‘That’s Buddha’, performed live at the Festival Voix d’Amériques in Montreal in 2009, appeared in Going Down Swinging (Australia, 2010).
‘Come with me, through’ first appeared in a privately distributed chapbook made as part of the Final Friday readings series in Sydney, Australia (2010).
This 24-page A5 chapbook was published privately by sydneypoetry.com and launched at a Final Friday reading in Newtown, Australia (October 2010).
Both sydneypoetry.com and Final Friday were initiated by Adrian Wiggins, co-founder of Cordite Poetry Review.
The launch event was pretty intimate: a group of people crowded into Adrian’s lounge room paid me the ultimate compliment by listening to me rant on for about an hour, and then subjected themselves to a Q&A with me as well!
As only 15 copies of the book were ever printed, you can access the poems below.
My PhD thesis, entitled Bonfire of the Vanity Presses: Self-Publishing in the Field of Australian Poetry, was approved in 2010, and was undertaken at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia between 2005 and 2009.
Here’s the abstract:
This thesis explores the practice of self-publishing in the field of Australian poetry. Self-publishing today can be seen as part of a long tradition of alternative publishing. Despite changes in the technologies of self-publishing, including the continuing reinvention of non-book publishing activities, poetry remains an area of the arts where the self-published book contains both symbolic and social capital. Rather than offering a basic defence of self-publishing or a textual analysis of self-published works, the Exegesis ‘reimagines’ self-publishing within what Bourdieu might term the ‘field’ of Australian poetry. The thesis also incorporates an Artefact composed of published, self-published and privately-published books. Despite technological changes in the way books are published, it argues that non-mainstream print publishing forms such as the chapbook still play a significant role in fostering innovation in poetic forms. In doing so it seeks a more sophisticated understanding of the literary field, and the role of books as signifiers of prestige within that field.
‘Steam’ is a series of prose fiction pieces I wrote while living in Gangnam, Seoul, in 2009, where I was undertaking my second Asialink residency.
‘Steam’ is set in a fictional future Korea, and features a young male Korean by the name of Duck-young Moon. The story describes his search for the truth about his grandfather’s disappearance during the Korean War.
Duck young’s quest also features a cast of mostly Korean characters, including Duck-young’s brother, Hyun woo, the elusive Doctor Kang and his assistant, Gilmo.
‘Steam’ is a story which may one day become a novel, but started out as a sequel to ‘Smoke’, a much shorter story about an Australian woman living in Melbourne.
The benefit of the Asialink residency in terms of the writing of ‘Steam’ cannot be over-stated: the characters, places, historical events, incidents and dialogue of the story are all a result of my being able to spend three months living in the place I was describing.
As was the case with ‘Smoke’, the 31 prose pieces that form ‘Steam’ were posted consecutively to this website, without further revision.
While the full text of ‘Smoke’ remains online, I’ve decided to take down ‘Steam’ from this site for the time being, as the text requires a great deal of revision.
In November 2007, while living in Melbourne, I began writing prose poetry pieces about a girl named Jet Fader and her mysterious Korean boyfriend, and posting them, unedited, on this website.
By February 2008, what had started out as a meditation had morphed into a 31-part series with a vague narrative arc and potential for plenty more.
These pieces would later be compiled as ‘Smoke’, and would serve as a foundation of sorts for ‘Steam’, another story featuring the same characters, which I drafted while living in Seoul in 2009.
Vagabond Press published my chapbook Morgenland in 2007 in a limited edition of 100 copies.
‘Morgenland’ is an archaic German word for ‘the East’ which translates literally as ‘morning land’.
The poems in Morgenland were all written in the Republic of Korea and Japan in 2005–06 as part of an Asialink residency.
Thanks to the University of Melbourne, the Australia Council for the Arts and the Australia-Korea Foundation for their generous support.
An earlier version of ‘Alone In An Airport II’ appeared in this chapbook’s companion volume Abendland (2006). ‘Hoju Bihang-gi’ first appeared online in Peril. ‘Back to the Tourist III’ first appeared online in Softblow.
Image: The original front cover for Morgenland (2007), featuring a custom-made illustration by Kay Orchison.
Thank you Nikki Anderson, Michael Brennan, Keiji Minato, An Sonjae, Sang Kee Park, Joseph, Tan, Larissa Hjorth, Alexie Glass, Moon Sun Choi, Joo Young Lee, Kathleen Asjes, Anouk Hoare, Andrew Cook, Sean Heaney, Hiroshi Sasaki, Steve Riddell, Kevin Puloski, Young Eun Pae and Bridget O’Brien.
Morgenland (2007)
ALONE IN AN AIRPORT II JETLAG WORLD SOUND OF VITALITY WHITE SPACE SNOW GROCER HOJU BIHANG-GI NAGASAKI CROWS TRANS* THE HANOK FIELDS DRUNK AS KO UN MAKKOLLI MOON MOKOCHUKCHA SAIHOU JODO IMAGINARY MAO SNOW SEA SWAN LONELY PLANET ICEBERGS MORIAPO BACK TO THE TOURIST III
