In 2013, two years after leaving Karlskrona (where I undertook postdoctoral research on electronic literature), I compiled a chapbook featuring 10 poems written in (or about) the town.
‘Fem kronor’ means, literally ‘five kronor’ (the krona, or SEK, being the Swedish unit of currency). In today’s terms, 5 SEK is around EUR 50 cents.
The chapbook’s title poem refers to an actual incident that occurred when I attempted to board a bus at Ronneby airport (about 50 kilometres from Karlskrona).
Dead Poem Office (2012) is the successor to Dead Poem Office (2007), which never ‘appeared’ as a printed chapbook.
Dead Poem Office (2012), originally published via Scribd in late 2012, contains thirty-odd poems in English, all of which previously appeared in journals and magazines.
While the 2007 version was ostensibly conceived as a companion volume to my first full-length poetry collection, We Will Disappear, it bore no resemblance to the latter in terms of layout, and was not really comprehensive in any similar way.
The 2012 reiteration sought to address this by using a completely different cover and interior design, which is much closer in look and feel to the style used by Papertiger Media in designing We Will Disappear.
The cover image for Dead Poem Office, taken with a disposable camera in an old car factory on Dudley Street, West Melbourne, Australia (Credit: David Prater, ‘Dudley Street 1’, 2000).
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.
REM, Dead Letter Office (1987)
Perhaps even more pertinently, Dead Poem Office (2012) labels itself as a collection of ‘B-sides compiled’, thus reinforcing this echoing in terms of the original pun in the chapbook’s title, a reference to the 1987 R.E.M. compilation album, Dead Letter Office.
The contents of the chapbook are actually reverse chronological in terms of the date of writing and/or publication. I’m not actually sure why I made this decision at the time, as I think a reader gets a stronger sense of poetic development with a chronological ordering.
At the same time, the ordering of the poems in We Will Disappear is not chronological either, and was in fact largely decided by the editor, Paul Hardacre.
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).
Dead Poem Office (2012)
Great Big Star Nieuw Holland Yer Morningness New Space Seasons The Day Britney Died More Sun Than Clouds/Sprinkles Early Chmod R-X-W b.a.s.e. She’s an Autarky A821.4 Snowy Insurgency The Boys Who Eight Miles High Why Do You Cry Run Lola Run Dead Poem Office The Night I Met Beck Paladin Code Pervin’ Last Night Betty the Sprawl Kate’s Photograph Xanana’s Dog Mother Russia
In 2012, as part of a weird burst of activity, I decided to reissue The Happy Farang, my first self-published chapbook.
I self-published The Happy Farang in 2000, at a time when I was just finding my feet, both literally and figuratively, as a poet. One version of the story of how that book ‘appeared’ ended up in my PhD thesis, but the real story remains (for the moment) untold.
In 2012, I cleaned up and reformatted the text (which was originally coloured blue, by mistake) and added some scans of original (mostly unpublished) handwritten drafts.
I also produced a new cover for the book, featuring a photograph of a figure painted on a temple that I took, from memory, in Chiang Mai. Just to, you know, seal the cultural appropriation deal.
The drafts included in the digital version are for the poems ‘happy farang/amazing farang’, ‘monk-lovers’, ‘folk song don’t stop’, ‘sea gypsies’ (incomplete), ‘the reggae house’, ‘hi-fi walkam CL 931’ and ‘under the pavement laos’. These drafts hopefully give an idea of the creative process involved when writing while travelling.
A scan of the original handwritten draft that would become ‘The Happy Farang’. Written in Thailand in 1999.
As The Happy Farang is also a white-label production, there is only one print copy of the book in existence. The handwritten drafts in the white label version differ from the digital version. They include ‘folk song don’t stop’, ‘sea gypsies’, ‘the reggae house’ and ‘hi-fi walkam CL 931’ as well as three additional poems: ‘leaves give way to needles’, ‘takraw monkey’ and ‘how’s the serenity’.
I can’t actually remember why I changed the selection for the digital version. It could be that the white-label version was really just a test printing. This could explain why I was experimenting with the insertion of scanned images.
But as far as I can tell, all of the original handwritten drafts are now lost. If and when I do find them again, I might post them online.
In any case, The Happy Farang will always be my favourite book, and I hope that the revised edition manages to preserve some of the flavour of the original.
Tjugotvå contains 22 poems in English, all but one of which were first published via an email newsletter.
In 2011 I set up an email-based newsletter project, ‘Poem of the week!’, with a total of 21 poems sent to subscribers during the project’s most active period, between October 2011 and April 2012.
In 2012 I compiled the poems in a chapbook entitled Tjugotvå: Twenty-two poems.
I still think it’s a great little book and have my subscribers (around 60 by the time the project wound down) to thank for helping make it possible, through their words of encouragement and our interactions via the newsletter.
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.
The legendary Mead wide-ruled composition notebook.
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.
A scan of the original draft of ‘Between Empires’, a poem which appeared virtually unchanged in Southerly (2004) and, later, my debut poetry collection, We Will Disappear (2007).
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 cover of the 2012 reissue of Between Empires features a photograph I took of Niagara Falls in 2002.
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).
The first draft of ‘faßbar’ [comprehensible], which was later published in the online journal Gangway (Austria/Australia).
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).
Between empires (2012)
Access a PDF version of this chapbook by clicking on the link below. The PDF file will open in a new window, from where you can read it or download it for offline viewing.
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.
‘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).
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.
