Splog
21 May
Since opening its doors as the Fremantle Arts Centre Press in 1976, SPUNC member Fremantle Press has published over 700 books. Having adopted a new name in 2007 it continues to publish a wide range of titles, from poetry to non-fiction to children’s literature. It has stayed committed to West Australian writers by bringing readers from around Australia and abroad the high-quality books that form the backbone of Australian’s independent publishing industry. This year marks a new chapter for the Press so Splog spoke with Fremantle’s Claire Miller about achievements past, the Press’s future direction and the wider Australian publishing landscape.
It has been 35 years since Fremantle Press came into being. A considerable amount of time to not only keep a business running but to carry on an idea of what that business ought to be. What would you say is the central idea behind Fremantle Press which has seen it continue to publish exciting books for a number of audiences over the years?
For 35 years we’ve been finding new and talented Western Australian writers and getting their books into bookshops everywhere, even globally! What keeps the company going are the great stories that come through our little black door. If writers in Western Australia dried up tomorrow, then so would Fremantle Press.
The heart of the company is the people and our passion for Australian books. If you were a fly on the wall you’d hear a lot of laughs (and a lot of terrible puns) but you couldn’t mistake the pleasure we get out of working with books.
We get inspired by the continued success of authors, many of whom we were the first to publish such as Sally Morgan, Kim Scott, Craig Silvey, John Kinsella, Elizabeth Jolley, Gail Williams, Brenda Walker, Kate McCaffrey, and by those who are just starting out, like Alan Carter, Natasha Lester, Jon Doust, Jacqui Wright, Annabel Smith, Peter Docker, Mark Reid, Dianne Touchell, Kyle Hughes-Odgers … how long is a piece of string?
A number of authors published early in their career by Fremantle Press have subsequently become important figures in Australian literature. Is this in part because of a particular approach you take with emerging authors—or is it just a West Australian thing?
Oh it’s definitely a W.A. thing, we have a special supplement in our water (much like fluoride) that churns out budding Wintons and Silveys and Jolleys by the half dozen annually.
I will say that if we’re passionate about a manuscript, we’re willing to roll the dice and get behind a writer early on – even if, sometimes, it defies commonly held logic about ‘market forces’. There are plenty of authors whose debut books came to us after being rejected as too risky by other publishers. These have gone on to become critical success stories with impressive writing careers. But every publisher will have similar stories right?
I certainly think that working with a small publisher early on gives authors the opportunity to learn the business of publishing in a very personal and direct way.
Picking through 600–700 unsolicited manuscripts a year and narrowing that down to 24 titles is not an easy job and one which our manuscript assessor of 30+ years (Wendy Jenkins) does with a well-honed eye for talent. If they believe in the work, Wendy or one of our three publishers can sometimes spend upwards of two years working on the manuscript with the author before offering them a contract. As part of the publishing process, we try to involve the author in the cover image discussion, the marketing and publicity plans and then give them an overview of how sales, distribution and rights work. We try to help them understand that writing the book is just one part of the bigger picture.
The first book you published was an anthology of poetry. Has significant attention been given to ensure certain kinds of writing – of a high standard but which for other reasons may have been ignored – do get published?
Although the greater share of our annual income is earned through sales of our publications, we receive grants from the DCA [The W.A. Government’s Department of Culture and Arts] and the Literature Board of the Australia Council to assist us to fulfil our brief of providing a publishing avenue for all works literary merit across genres.
Poetry is a vital component of our program and we continue to support the careers of Australian poets.
WA-based fiction and creative non-fiction anthologies are an effective way to encourage new talent and to introduce emerging writers to the publishing process. The Kid on the Karaoke Stage and other stories and Kimberley Stories are both recent examples of anthologies that include authors who we felt deserved a publishing platform. Anthologies are also a way to highlight interesting creative collaborations such as those of the poet John Kinsella with authors Robert Drewe (Sand) and Niall Lucy (The Ballad of Moondyne Joe).
What have been some of the greatest successes for Fremantle Press?
How do you measure success? A.B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life is now regarded as an Australian classic. The bestselling Aboriginal author of all time is Sally Morgan for My Place and the first Aboriginal author to win the Miles Franklin Award is Kim Scott for Benang. In Flanders Fields won the Children’s Book Council Picture Book of the Year Award and Norman’s latest book The Last Viking has been shortlisted for some five awards this year winning the SCWBI Crystal Kite. We’re really proud of each writer who has gone on to forge national and international careers and it is worth noting that our T.A.G. Hungerford Manuscript Award for unpublished authors was the starting point for authors like Brenda Walker, Gail Jones and Simone Lazaroo. But we’re just as proud of recent books like Rainforest Country by award-winning photographers Stanley and Kaisa Breeden, All Monkeys Love Bananas by Sean E Avery or Ned Kelly Award Winner Prime Cut by Alan Carter.
Why is it your Indigenous titles have received such wide acclaim?
Our Indigenous list was a particular passion of former publisher Ray Coffey and we’re indebted to his dedication in bringing Indigenous stories to the page. He did this at a time when few other publishers were doing this. Ultimately, to quote Lady Gaga, whether black, white or beige – if it’s a great story people will want to read it.
More recently, Children’s Publisher Cate Sutherland, has been working with new and emerging Indigenous authors on the WAARDA series – books that introduce junior readers to modern and traditional writing.
For what reason do you think small presses in Australia are able to drive the discussions surrounding Australia’s historical and cultural identity?
Small presses traditionally take risks in the titles they publish and they are ideally placed to bring works of historical and cultural identity to the wider public. The longer we stick around the more influence we’ll have I guess. Fremantle Press is 35 this year, Magabala is 25 and UWAP is older than our combined ages.
The increasing role of digital platforms is much discussed in the industry. In what ways has it altered the way you publish?
It provides a new way to attract readers. For us, right now, it’s more about the wider distribution of our titles. We’re still monitoring the effects on the traditional industry on the introduction of the digital platforms and looking at where we position ourselves to maximise the potential of the new formats.
Can you tell us what to expect from Fremantle Press in the coming months?
The first half of this year was all about beautiful, compelling moving memoirs (like The House of Fiction, Not Drowning, Reading and When we remember they call us liars). Our second half is rich in adult fiction. The latest Hungerford winner Jacqueline Wright’s book Red Dirt Talking is delightful. Jon Doust, who was longlisted for a Miles Franklin Award for Boy on a Wire, has an exciting new novel set in 1968 PNG called To the Highlands. Annabel Smith’s second novel Whiskey Charlie Foxtrot is a cracker. We’ve also got a new young adult novelist, Dianne Touchell, who has a huge career ahead of her. Her very unusual love story Creepy & Maud is out later this year.
And finally, what was it that saw you pursue a career with an Australian publisher?
It’s a tax effective way to continue my mad, sometimes tragic, love affair with books.
03 May
Davide Cali, one of Europe’s most acclaimed kids writers, tours Australia from 16 May. His Australian publisher, Wilkins Farago’s Andrew Wilkins, explains why he took on a foreign language writer, and the impact Cali has had on his business.
Does the world really need another book? With hundreds of thousands of new ones released each year, it’s reasonable to ask this if you’re a book publisher.
When we started Wilkins Farago back in 1998, finding books to publish was a real struggle. We were determined only to publish books we were passionate about and, while there were plenty of unpublished manuscripts around, we just couldn’t find ideas that really got us excited. So we didn’t publish much.
And that was fine up to a point because, as a wise publisher once said, no-one ever went bust not publishing a book.
Then, on a trip to the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair, the penny dropped. There I found a treasure trove of fabulous, inspiring, witty, sophisticated and moving books for kids. There was only one barrier to them being publishable in Australia: they weren’t in English. Easily fixed. After publishing Slovenian author Lila Prap and the exquisite Korean book Waiting for Mummy, I came across a picture book called Un papa sur mesure. It was published in French, although the author appeared to be Italian: Davide Cali.
Reading the book, I came across two moments that made me think the person who had written it was a cut above the ordinary.
First moment. In the story, a fatherless girl is hoping for a dad who can measure up to her terrific mum. So she puts an ad in the paper stating her requirements. Then, in a twist which is both delightfully surreal but which makes perfect sense if you’re five or six, she wakes the next day to find the lawn outside her house packed with prospective dads. The mum and her girl then whittle down the candidates until they find one who can cook and who loves books. As the little girl narrates:
‘He looked kind so we let him stay.’
Second moment. The ending. Kids’ books that delve into the emotions can get smaltzy pretty quickly. But this book ended with a simple image of the new dad kissing the little girl goodnight after what has clearly been a mammoth storybook session. ‘I love my new daddy. Even if he can’t roller skate. Even if he can’t do jigsaw puzzles. He is my daddy.’ Such simple words, and yet they say everything about acceptance, family, and a child’s needs. And such emotions can surely cross language and cultural barriers. We published the book in English as A Dad Who Measures Up.
Cali has published over 40 books and writes three or four new ones each year. His collaborations with the celebrated French illustrator Serge Bloch (such as The Enemy) are perhaps the artistic high point, but the sheer breadth of his writing for kids is what impresses me most: Aesop-like fables (The Bear with the Sword), celebrations of family (What is this thing called love? and Piano Piano), playful entertainments (Santa’s Suit and I Like Chocolate), even picture books for grown ups (I Love Kissing You).
It’s both a pleasure and a challenge to publish an author who’s continually stretching his craft while at the same time doing what I think the best kids’ authors do: speaking both to the reader’s head and also to their heart. It keeps us on our toes, demanding we continually examine how we promote and market our books. We’re exporting more, and focusing a lot of effort on schools and libraries.
It also means we grow as the author grows. 10 Little Insects will be our ninth Davide Cali book and there seems no end of new ones to look at (the sequel to 10 Little Insects has already been published in Europe to great acclaim). While the world doesn’t need another book per se, I believe it will always need another exceptional children’s book.
Although Wilkins Farago is now Cali’s main English language publisher, I will only get to meet Davide for the first time this month, when he flies to Australia for a whirlwind two-week tour of Australia, taking in Adelaide, Melbourne, Geelong and Sydney (for more details, visit the website. I’m looking forward to it immensely.
You’re welcome to join us at Readings Bookshop, 328 Lygon Street, Carlton for an evening with Davide Cali at 6.30pm on 22 May. Italian wine will be flowing.
*[by-line]
Andrew Wilkins is Director of Melbourne independent publisher, Wilkins Farago www.wilkinsfarago.com.au. This post is part of a 15-day Davide Cali Blog Tour , which runs from 1 to 15 May in the lead-up to Davide Cali’s arrival in Australia on 16 May. *
28 March
Space to innovate.
INPN [in-pin] is a new network that aims to connect people in the book trade from all over the world: from the developed book industries of the UK, the US and Europe, through to emerging markets across Africa, Asia and everywhere in between. INPN will be a platform that allows people to collaborate globally, and offer on-the-ground resources and support built through local networks and knowledge-sharing.
Who is it for?
The network is for anyone working in the book industry today looking towards the ‘new’. It is for people who want to work together to break new ground and successfully adapt past models. Our mission is to connect people who want to harness the ability, energy and creativity of their peers from around the world, and make their ideas and publishing projects a reality.
London Book Fair: we want your ideas!
INPN is launching 2.30pm, April 18 2012 with an event called Innovation, Translated: A global view of tomorrow’s book industry. We’re looking for representatives from different countries to present their innovative publishing projects. The projects don’t have to be fully formed. If you have an idea that will make publishing better, we want to hear it! Each speaker can use case studies, a work in progress or a future project to present their idea. The format is called “Canon Tales” – a rapid-fire mix of images and ideas with 20 slides in 7 minutes, and each slide lasts 21 seconds. Speakers can use the platform to invite collaboration, partnership or funding.
If you don’t want to present that’s fine too – come along anyway and see what the network might be able to offer you!
Who is behind INPN?
The INPN began as a voluntary initiative to adapt the success of the UK-based Society of Young Publishers beyond its national borders. Originally founded in 2009 as the International Young Publishers network, it is now co-ordinated by a core committee with an expanding supporter network (see our Facebook page for more information).
Core committee: Jon Slack (founder), Aaron O’Dowling-Keane, Annie Rose, Lucia Sandin
FIRST EVENT AT THE LONDON BOOK FAIR:
“Innovation, Translated”
18 April 2012 2.30pm-3.30pm
Thames Room
START CONNECTING:
Twitter: @INPN_innovate
email: INPN.innovate@ gmail.com
17 February
This manifesto previously appeared in Island 127.
Poetry knows no statute of limitations, as far as I am concerned. It is bound to neither the eye nor the ear, neither page nor memory. A poem is an active space in which not only words, but ‘signs’ in their many forms, are ‘speaking’. ‘Speech’, in this sense, does not have to be audible, but it is about communication.
Publishing poetry in a literary journal is a form of articulation, and a declaration of the desire to be heard. There are no half-measures in this, no pretending one is writing for an audience of one. Submit a poem for journal publication and you’re putting your communication forward: a communication with the journal itself (and all it engenders), with the editor/s, with the readers, and with your ‘self’ as public entity. The publication of a poem necessitates the merging (and sometimes clashing) of private and public spaces. I think the intention behind offering a poem for publication is relevant. A poem will do what a poem will do, and each reader or group of readers will bring their own ways of reading to it and necessarily disrupt intention. But the act of presenting a poem for publication is a deliberate act and carries a politics. Think carefully about what you’re submitting and why. For many poets it’s as simple as getting attention and a pay cheque. But it never stops there. Poems have lives of their own beyond copyright, beyond original contexts.
Out of convenience, it is often said I favour both innovative and traditional approaches to poetry. And maybe, even more (and by my own definition), a hybridising of aspects of each. But this isn’t really true, insofar as I don’t think the innovative actually has definition outside its variation or even opposition to ‘tradition’ in the first place. They are intimately connected discourses.
Rather, for me, a poem should test both reader and poet. I can admire the well-packaged, rounded poem, but I am excited by slippages, substitutions and variations within such good order. Or I respect the controlled abandonment of good order in which risks bring great rewards through presenting different ‘ways of seeing’, challenging how we connect, say, sound with meaning. Poetry has always been about the evolution of languages for me, not about ‘best words in best orders’.
At the moment, I am working on alternative ways of ‘scanning’ a poem. Aside from alliterative and accentual verse, the accentual-syllabic – the specifying of stress value as well as syllable count in the line – aside from the syllabic, even tonal systems in which numeric values are given to the stress intensity of reading, I am thinking in terms of the quantitative qualities of words themselves – how much space they occupy in the line, how word lengths (depending on script, font, font size, kerning etc), alter the way a line might be read. How long words balance short words and so on. The poem is
an eternally active space for me in which different systems of reading make for different poems, as much as different poems themselves. In other words, I don’t just read a poem through traditional English-language or European systems.
Working on translation over many years from many languages has enlivened my sense of the instability of the most stable-seeming text as it crosses cultural and language barriers. I am excited by work in which languages themselves blur, or where other languages enliven the primary language of composition for a given poem.
Many poets look to invigorate their practice by coming up with new and surprising subject matter. In many ways this is to escape the ritualistic constraints that have made poetry such an essential part of human discourse and spirituality. Repetition, mnemonic utterance, preservation of knowledge, the need to pass information down in a stable but living form, necessitate predictability. So preserving those prosodic qualities, and enlivening (maybe too often fetishising in the capitalist sense) and value-adding the reading experience, invite the easiest option – make the surface sparkle in a different way. We all do it. We all try to freshen our own interest as much as the reader’s by trying new angles. Even the gimmick can be interesting, and is certainly a reflection of a commodified world – it can be deadly ironic (as it should be, to my mind) but too often it is just entertaining. I find poetry designed to create nothing but the value of pleasure incredibly tedious. For me, poetry is about change, challenge, and contestation much more than entertainment. Satisfaction hovers between these two points. The ‘perfectly’ realised poem that captures a glimpse of a moment, and becomes artefact in itself, might be interesting, useful and well worth publishing, but the implications beyond the poem then become the factors that concern me. No poem lives in a vacuum.
Poems all exist in fields of the page, or fields of hearing, or fields of imagining (even in a pre-cognitive sense). Poems have shape: using letters, sounds or images, or all of these. I am interested in where, say, George Herbert’s ‘Easter Wings’ (1633) merges with or diverges from a concrete poem by Gomringer (such as ‘zwei sprachspiele’, 1988), or Mary Ellen Solt’s brilliant concrete composition, ‘Forsythia’ (1966). I am interested in where Kurt Schwitters’s soundscaped formal masterpiece (of innovation), ‘Ursonate’, touches John Cage’s ‘Composition’ or maybe that archival nineteenth-century wax cylinder recording of Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. It’s not whether or not (mainly not) these texts literally inform each other in one direction or another, but what on a broader scale compels the desire for articulation and presentation.
For me, poetry has purpose. And that purpose is change. Not change for the sake of it, but because a poet feels compelled towards articulation. I don’t have to agree with a belief or an ‘atmosphere’, but I do need to see something emphatic in either the language used or the impetus behind the poem’s creation. And that might be a perfectly ‘still’ image floating in the field of the page as much as a many-page rant that defies critical gravitas. I admire risk, and all those fools who rush in where angels fear to tread.
Journal verse, like competition verse, can easily produce a great hum of pointless nothingness. I must qualify this, because nothingness is eternally interesting and essential to existence. Literature that captures nothingness has my admiration. Even a film like Antonioni’s L’Avventura, following the ennui of the wealthy middle class, becomes larger than its class profiling because it configures the all-human fear of pointlessness, of what might occupy a spiritual (or even religious vacuum). As one who rejects centralised power, who doesn’t believe in systems of authority, this is of particular interest to me. I find environment of eternal interest, and the desire to respect it counters any ennui or nothingness that threatens. But it’s there, and people need to write about it. So the poem of nothingness can be something, but not if it’s done because it’s ‘time to publish a poem’, or because there’s a competition coming up and one must enter it.
There’s a deadly epithet: ‘the competition poem’. A poem that lives in isolation, is ‘good’ enough (often by default) to win a competition, but has nothing empathic or driven about it. It’s amazing how people can tap their inner spirituality, or their sudden love of the long poem or the short poem or whatever poem, when a competition crops up. And people enter poem after poem after poem, in the same ‘comps’. This to me is meaningless. By all means enter competitions – they’re one of the few ways poets can make an income, or can at least feel they’re being read in a non-prejudicial way (but of course, we know there are prejudices – first question asked: Who is judging it?
– oh, I must send my more ‘experimental’ work because that’s to his/her taste…). I find this kind of stuff soul-destroying. Enter a poem because you believe in it. Win with dignity. Lose with (often more) dignity. What matters is that you wrote the poem. But competition as impetus is inadequate. That old-fashioned word – deservedly maligned in the contemporary sense – ‘muse’, has some ring of truth as it did for those of the ancient world for whom it was more than a way of explaining the desire to write. You need a purpose. Poems belong to life, the world, the psyche. Whether you write many or few poems (and I admire the prolific as much as the frugal), write with volition! Even if that volition comes through a belief in a surrealist trance state such as Breton so admired in the automatic texts of Robert Desnos.
In terms of a broader editorial policy, I most value diversity and difference. I want to see complementary and ‘opposing’ practices sitting side by side, talking with each other. Poems as part of a literary journal occupy an odd position. A poetry editor might select the individual poems, and indeed the batch of poems, for an issue, but rarely gets to slot them in among the other
‘genre’ pieces. That’s the overall editor’s job, and one they see as part of their remit, as part of their vision of the journal. So I think about how those poems will work as poems in this disembodied context. And my thoughts change on that with each batch of poems. Some see grouping all poems in one poetry section as a ‘solution’ to this loss of control, but I’d actually rather see the poems speak through and out of a number of contexts: the poet’s, the group of poems as spread throughout, and in terms of the other pieces in other genres. Many conversations at work.
One has to be conscious that a poem is going to be presented for the issue in one context, and likely appear in another. When I select a batch of poems, I am conscious of this – of how they become disembodied again. I say again, because when they come in they do so alone, and not in the context of other submissions. But is this entirely true? Patterns build up, of the ‘kind’ of poem that a journal publishes, and one submits a certain kind of poem thinking that’s what’s required. Thus a sameness stretches across poems submitted from all parts of the country, all parts of the world. This is understandable. I do not submit poems to overtly right-wing journals. I do submit poetry to overtly left-wing journals. But I desperately hope that poets can’t say, ‘Well, this journal only publishes this kind of poem or that kind of poem…’ You’ll never know what to expect between poems in one issue, never mind across issues. There is no set rule outside the absolute fact that I deplore bigotry in any of its forms and clearly bigoted poems aren’t going to get far with me. Ambiguity won’t save a bigoted poem from the fate of absolute rejection.
I am a firm believer in the local being enhanced by input from outside. I always respect regional integrity, and believe ‘small’ and ‘local’ are necessary and generative, but I also feel that we must keep minds open to outside voices and that pluralism is a strength. I intend to publish at least one or two non- Australian (I don’t even believe in ‘nation’, I believe in ‘community’) or should I say, poets writing outside Australia or Australianness, in each issue. I hope also to include the odd translation into English – from both inside and outside Australia. I don’t accept that Australia is only an English-speaking or writing country, despite being one that’s officially told it is. The work of Ouyang Yu in both Chinese and English has always excited me, and the fact that he can move between the two and create something fresh and vital in the process is where poetry matters most to me.
Finally, I wish to reiterate that I have never seen verity in the (false) binary of the innovative and non-innovative. Experimentation for its own sake simply becomes the future traditional if it merely promotes the values of the society which led to its creation in the first place. The compliance of an innovator such as Eduardo Kac and his ‘bio works’, I see as abusive of life rather than affirming in any way, or merely extensions of a product-hungry consumerism masquerading as critical commentary (at best). It is exploitative indulgence that complies with a de-naturing desire for control and empowerment at the cost of the living. Take point 7 of his ‘Biopoetry’: ‘Luciferase signalling: create bard fireflies by manipulating the genes that code for bioluminescence, enabling them to use their light or whimsical (creative ) displays, in addition to the standard natural uses (e.g. scaring off predators and attracting mates or smaller creatures to devour).’ It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Kac is at the ‘cutting edge’ of ‘biopoetics’ and the ‘author’ of the cruel and exploitative GFP Bunny project.
For me, this is traditional exploitative ‘science’-art. Predictable and self- aggrandising abuse. The true innovation would come in writing a poem against this project, a poem that undoes the language used in affirming the project as creative. It might even be within four-line rhyming stanzas! To be innovative, content should push against form and control, it should challenge the status quo, not embody it. And often the best way of doing that is working with and through the expected and the predictable, the received and the tried. Even the slightest variations can be radical.
John Kinsella is poetry editor for ISLAND.
18 December
An abridged version of the following first appeared in The Victorian Writer, December 2011.
Submissions. Submissions. Susmissions. Yes, those old chestnuts. They’re not talked about all that much between writers. I suspect many submissions are stealthily sent out behind the Kabuki screen of a day job or in pyjamas at 12.43am on a Wednesday morning.
I’ve done both. How about you?
In 2011, I experienced four ‘firsts’ in the endless permutations that submissions result in. Two of those were good, the other two … not so much. Equally maddening or wonderful – and, rarely, both – the net result of submitting unsolicited written pieces in to a publication is nearly impossible to predict. Turkish coffee grounds won’t help, neither will a magic eight ball. Plastic fortune telling fish curl abstractly in one’s palm …
… what does such prognostication mean!?
Not even tea leaves can predict what outcome a given submission will generate. Though I did waggle a few pouches of darjeeling over a submission once just to see if any vision blossomed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Read the first half and introduction to this piece over on Kill Your Darlings’ blog, Killings. One of those ‘firsts’ – the most ignominious – is mentioned there. I bet I’ve got you beat in the shame stakes.
One (another) first occurred after I ran across a publication with its acceptance window wide open. I had a few completed, un-submitted pieces that fit their themes, knowing the publication well. I sent them in, unsolicited. No time like the present for reverse defenestration. They were received, read and taken, all within 24 hours. Sold. It was enough to buoy the spirits enough to – you guessed it – keep submitting.
Not long after that fortuitous event, I responded to a call on a given theme for a one-off publication. What luck. I had just the item. Off it went via email, ensuring all guidelines were met. Not thirty minutes later, I received a chilly reply …
we will not be using this
And nothing more. Signed by nobody. All lower case. No punctuation. No ho-hum or even flippant ‘thanks for being interested’ rejoinder.
Gad. A first that will, I hope, also be a last. It sandbags the spirits enough to stop submitting.
But how quickly fortunes change. Not long after that abrupt event, another first occurred. I
received a Facebook message that I nearly deleted, thinking it spam. A word caught my eye in the
title: my last name. Yes. I looked. It was from an editor of a journal in Canada. My attention held. The gist was, ‘Great to finally make contact. Yes, we would love to publish them all’.
Huh? … wha? Who is this person? But I haven’t submitted anything? Finally make contact?
… um, did that message say … all?
I played along, replying that that was terrific news and thank you very much for taking them all, wondering where this non-submission caper would end up. I didn’t quite know how to couch a ‘By the way, which pieces were those again?’ comment. I lucked out, didn’t have to. The titles were named back to me in a follow-up email from the editor. Sure enough, my stuff. How four of my pieces got onto an editor’s desk in British Columbia, I will never know. But that’s manna I can get behind.
I recall once, when I first began submitting to publications, being met with a rejection and an acceptance on the same day. For the same publication. Regarding the same piece. The rejection came via email in the morning, yet in the post that afternoon was a lovely handwritten note with the words writers fang to read:
‘We’re delighted to publish …’
With trepidation, I emailed a copy of the piece back to the editors as is commonly requested. It was printed. I was paid. I never mentioned the concurrent rejection nor did the editors.
Another oddity occurred in an email I received from an editor of a major Australian literary publication. Simply, the editor replied ‘I like this. I like this quite a bit … but I don’t like it enough to actually publish it’.
Well okay then. That’s that.
I appreciated the frankness without obfuscating about there not being enough room in the publication as if it was a self-storage unit filled with eight million brooms and 8,000,001 was just not possible. No sir, no how.
Now, I have been on the receiving end of submissions. I know what’s meant when the ‘no room’ outcome is trotted out. It’s coyness irks me a bit. But what to say? It’s as good a reason as any and a totally valid comment – especially for print, where you must limit yourself to a tiny portion of what you’re given to read. I’ve sent out unsuccessful notices with the same spiel. But it is always a shade maddening that the latest ark didn’t have room for you but did – you later read when sifting through that which your submissions weren’t accepted for – some pairs of creatures as ungainly as cephalopods. Ah, that beholder’s eye.
I once submitted a piece to a longstanding New Zealand journal and was soon thereafter greeted with the good news of acceptance. Hear the good news! And I did. And the news was good and bread was broken. But in that reply, I was also greeted with a fully edited re-write of my submission accompanied by a page of scrawled notes – incorporating no less than three colours of ink, mind you – on how their version would be stronger (am I not popping enough vitamins?) than the one I submitted. Their suggested edit contained virtually no trace of what I originally sent in. Completely unsolicited re-writes: not so nice. And yet? The journal proceeded to published the piece in its original submitted form anyway. Flummoxing, that.
I’ve found that some submissions seem to get rerouted to Jupiter. Woop Woop, maybe. To Hell. Or even Oklahoma. I have a few submissions outstanding that have racked up a few years without so much as a peep of receipt acknowledgement, let alone a take or rejection notice (and this by a publication that published the very first thing I ever sent them). Some publications work under the rider of ‘If you don’t hear from us by Guy Fawkes Day, then you’ve been unsuccessful’. Fair enough. A little lazy. But putting together a publication is a mountain range of work to climb. Sending out rejection notices to submitters is never the fun-hooray! task editors vie for. It’s a valley to slog through. These outstanding submissions of mine were sent in without any such if/then logic proviso.
I hear they have many tornados in Oklahoma. In fact, I know so.
Is there a retiree in Woop Woop whom wonders why she gets so much post every day? I hope so.
As the twenty-teens approach, online submissions are becoming the norm. About time that’s the
case. I have zero love for Submishmash and similar account-based systems; one more cursed site to
try and remember a username and password for. I know they’re designed to relieve admin loads off editorial teams. And to that, I acknowledge its purpose is worthy. But from the angle of a submitter, I admit to being as curmudgeonly as Will Self. I have no qualms with uploading or attaching a document independently, I just don’t want an account to do so.
I remember once seeing an ‘opportunity to fax in your submission’ in some guidelines-er-other. No excuse for that. That’s both preposterous and tacky.
To finish: the audacity of some publications – specifically those that are online-only – requiring an international reply coupon if submitting to from overseas? Oh, please. Stop mounting your high horse without a saddle.
I’d rather go to the beach and swim in jeans.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 4 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
from our life is a box. / Prayers Without a God ~ MTC Cronin
we thought of ourselves
now we need poetry
we observed ourselves
by the water
did we drink?
we followed the line of ourselves
to where the sun marked the ground
with the beauty of the last tree
when did we write the first poem
sent out to meet the horizon?
there came slowly a day
when all vision troubled us
we turned ourselves into our words
which until then
had not lived
~
the prayer for those who speak
is sung
in the minute before the hour
in the song on the bridge
for what passes beneath
in the one shoe for the other
for the other that is spoken to
see the mouth make a brick
a bird, a plug of the ocean
in a test-tube
the striking green of the rainforest cycad
is no trouble for the tongue
it goes even to curl on those little stones
that have never existed
those imaginary stones
in the no-sun
This excerpt is from MTC Cronin’s collection our life is a box. / Prayers Without a God published by Papertiger Media.
Sutra ~ Barry Hill
The Lotusbird, before it runs on lilies
must lift its toes, along with its legs—
daddy long toes to succulent stems.
Then it must raise its head
level with the dip of its bud eye
to step again— meditative, still dry.
It’s silly, the way we are surprised.
The lilypads are its heaven, luminosity its food.
It goes as lightly as a prayer.
The red comb, rooster wild, is wisdom.
It wears its heart on the petals.
Its take off is like leaping flames
wings as vertical as falling ash:
an ascent with a splash of lotus bloom—
levitation in a shaft of lemon white.
This poem appears in Barry Hill’s collection (with paintings by John Wolseley), Lines for Birds, published by UWAP.
The Spider in the Kitchen ~ Andrew Sant
I fed the spider beef.
Summer flies
in town were oddly few.
The spider took it in her stride,
tackled the bloody meat
with her black legs and due
surprise. She liked it.
Mince, matchhead size, soon
burned in her abdomen. She thrived
and bred, though I never saw
her dark stranger call. The babies
were little monsters, big
and hungry. I obliged. Fillet steak.
No-one else now entered
the lovely kitchen until,
one day, a wise guy
– distant relative in his teens –
who’d got wind of my arachnids,
looked down on me and from
his core, swore in a baritone
it was the hormones in the meat.
His bent head proved the ceiling now
too low. The spiders stretched
themselves across wide windows.
I looked heartlessly into their eyes.
This poem appears in Andrew Sant’s collection, Fuel, published by Black Pepper Publishing.
Parts of Us ~ Thomas Shapcott
1
We are not born with shadows. They are clambering weeds
that crept up on us while we were not looking.
They do not follow us – we follow them
wondering if there are barbs as well as seed-heads.
Shadows take over whole paddocks of our childhood
but that is not to say there is comfort in numbers:
we had to learn to count.
2
The eyes are faulty interpreters. They pretend to know
the language but do not listen to accents
and are too confident for their own good.
3
Stop! But I did not stop:
neither did you. Some things
exist purely for the sake of rhetoric.
Some things simply call attention to themselves
or merely demand attention.
We are not good at obedience.
4
The tongue is a reckless speleologist;
it is quite unaware of confinement
and is perpetually eager to discover Lascaux.
5
The ears are trapdoor spiders
until the bulldozer clears the paddock
and leaves all our cleverness burried in rubble.
Bulldozers are mobile phones before technology
crept into our side pocket.
6
Never ask the nose for solutions.
Solutions are once upon a time
and smell is older than that.
Smell takes more getting used to
than the thought of a stranger’s excrement
in the corner of your own living-room
right on the carpet.
7
Laughter has horns on the underside
but it has green leaves that shine in the dark.
8
You smiled once. I caught it and held it in my hands
even though the wind was blowing in my face.
9
Tears are dry colours pretending to be a rainbow:
they own nothing but you can’t tell them that.
10
Did I commit a sigh?Breathing is always dangerous.
It is like a telephone message in a foreign language –
one that you think you once knew.
11
That was not a baby’s cry –
it was the electrical impulse surfacing from far underground,
warning the reptile brain of the death of ancestors.
12
Strange how the skin is not party to the brain’s confidences.
It tells its own story and is never truthful.
But what is truth? All things are relative
and the brain is the least reliable of witnesses.
13
To ask questions is to act interrogator.
The witness box has many exits
and witnesses for the prosecution
are not always going to get the colour right –
that is, if there really is a colour.
14
The location of God is in the navel.
The umbilical cord has been severed.
We are on our own.
15
Bones wait. It is not that they have any patience
with calendars. They remember too much, they hoard things,
and when all is said they know there is no last word.
16
Hair tells us we once loved.
Hair is almost impossible to manage
and yet it manages us most of the time.
Hair is the underside of a cloud’s imagination
but, caught in the mouth, it brings us down to earth
like a shower sink-hole after shampoo.
17
Did I say we are born without shadows?
And you believed me?
18
The word ‘dance’ is on my lips.
But dance is not music,
as if music can be notated.
Notation is the mark of our failure.
It is our mark.
This poem appears in Thomas Shapcott’s collection, Parts of Us, published by UQP.
Damage ~ T M Collins
for John Andrew Tate
The Needle and the Damage Done
Neil Young
Often I hear the
click of guns but
later I realise it’s
the tapping of the
spoon on the dish,
the vein bulging,
the fist clenched,
eyelids half shut,
trees outside shake
their leaves, cars
strut dirty paintwork
as the nick happens
and the shitter enters
along a slow blue link
to the brain.
This poem appears in T M Collins' collection, The Crooked Floor, published by Ilura Press.
The Affair ~ Lisa Gorton
Our last illicit weekend,
a little tired and driving
to some Blue Mountain
getaway or other.
On the motorway
it is the car that overheats
whoosh
I think a whale is
caught in our engine.
We wait in the car
trying to feel
absolute about each other.
They all drive past.
This poem appears in Lisa Gorton’s collection, Press Release, published by Giramondo Publishing.
dreizehn ~ Nathan Shepherdson
Trakl’s voice, a voice like a second self – Kokoschka
soaked with rain
drinking wine
you sat in the painter’s studio
a studio with black walls
the dark adding blood to colour
you watched in silence
watched the silence ( )
movement in the painter’s hand
air stained with pigment
portholes in his head
with a view to the Viennese Ocean
collapsed with broken bodies and
you drew words in your mouth
invoking poetry as an additional witness
soaked with rain
drinking wine
movement in the poet’s hand
air stained with pigment
you name the picture – Die Windsbraut
This poem appears in Nathan Shepherdson’s collection, Apples with Human Skin, published by UQP.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 3 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Migrants Dreaming ~ Peter Lloyd
— Would migrants dreaming —
would the Gitanjali Song Offering
know what to do with these exiled moments
of peacock bride-silks, waterfalls lustred with vanilla?
Purple-in-the-mist drifts over rooftops: windows melt into an Indian poem …
as ‘a lotus song in the jewel, her naked breasts play counterpoint to flutes’
and the sound of zithers drifting up the street;
— fragile — delicate as a sari of distance and silences,
Kashmir dreams itself over again, a fading light
— but outside time, another life
‘meeting the same souls and bodies that distantly were yours … ’
— until a bell rings through a falling dark of window boxes
and naked children fall into an ossuary of golden twigs
and fragile wishbones for the dead.
The surreal vanishes.
A door bangs back into reality.
And cold rain suddenly spatters through broken glass.
From a bulldozed squat in time —
hunched shadows from a window watch like cripples from the wall …
This poem appears in Peter Lloyd’s collection, A Fingerpost for Rembrandt, published by Wakefield Press
from The Mundiad ~ Justin Clemens
If philosophes of the Enlightenment
Opposed to science the religious bent,
Our catastrophic era goes to show
“To Believe” — is but the same verb as — “To Know”
And — like the Roman Empire in the days
Before it fell to crucifying ways —
Enforces such extremes of moneyed rank
As must make I.M.F. directors wank,
And blasts from every agency and channel
Its mania for bloody spectacle,
So that hard labour in the present age
Is done by those who mutely watch the stage,
For — though Marcel Duchamp’s bon mot might irk —
“It is the spectators who make the work,”
And are at once the truest and the most
Alienated of the toiling host,
Receiving not a single dollar for
The Sisyphean tasks that scrape them raw —
Whence, tirelessly dissatisfied, they range
Where nothing changes in eternal change,
From politics to love, to war, to sport
While all their yawning children hum — or snort —
Until there’s no good way to tell apart
Religion, Entertainment, Life, or Art.
So anthropos aptéros finds its ends
Bound by this Sovereign who unstopping sends
His voiceless envoys down the humming lines
That writhe and clutch like artificial vines,
To wring from flesh as if it were but grape
The wine that fires the sorrows of the ape,
Then sows those sorrows till the ape goes mad
And builds an empire on a micro-pad
Complete with Schizoid-Paranoiac traits,
Part Uncle Joe, Judge Schreber, and Bill Gates,
Where black-eyed boxes catch each sparrow’s fall,
And our bright globe becomes a disco ball
Whose beams irradiate the meanest rue,
So that the thought “Now’s Night” is never true,
And death-camps turn to service industries
Which strive to seek to find a way to please,
And never-ending webs of silicon
Become the Whole, Totality, The One —
So even Hobbes’s great Leviathan
Must tremble like the swollen lip of man
Before the New World’s Brave Principium
That money spurts as information’s come.
This excerpt is from Justin Clemens' mock-epic, The Mundiad, published by Black Inc.
Australia Day in Beijing ~ Caroline Caddy
Gas heaters in the walled compound.
Move with the crowd toast one side then the other.
The contrast makes me know how cold it’s been
meeting greeting juggling cold cans in cold hands.
Your glove takes mine from face to face
Finns Russians French Italians.
I can barely move my mouth.
You are the citizen here in my language.
You join a clutch of smokers then return.
It takes me where I thought I’d never want to be.
Then the anthem and I’m with my mob
taking pride in not knowing all the words.
I sing half-hearted your shoulder against mine
singing for me.
The babble resumes frozen air kisses.
Getting to be someone else because we are somewhere else.
I want to leave you know the way
through another and another room where the drinks are free
Then somehow we’re out together in the burning night
abreast and keeping step past walls past doors
no words no talk in the cold open streets
walking very fast.
This poem appears in Caroline Caddy’s collection, Burning Bright, published by Fremantle Press
Broad Bean Meditation ~ Tracy Ryan
The devil makes work for idle hands.
– Proverb
Firm and certain outcome of even the most slattern garden,
the uncountable counted on, pedestrian, insistent,
you force us into step, our loosest day must
grow up to embrace you the way we bend to a new
baby, image of generation and helplessness,
process compelled upon us who had no plans for this
and now by the white plastic bag-load, as if some warped
stork had cracked a joke at our expense and left a prodigious
gift in the kitchen – the whole shebang
wants blanching, wants freezing, wants dreaming up
new ways with old words, riffs on a rhyme already stuffed
down the gullet so long we’d retch if we didn’t know
we should be grateful, ought to answer the challenge,
get you in storage before it’s too late –
late for what, to resign you to compost,
faith in continuation? In the idea that there’ll
always be more? You most ancient of human foods.
I have measured out my life in broad-bean pods,
stained to the very fingerprints, that you might fix
my identity, criminality, complicit as I am in this rise
and fall thing, this giving and receiving, in no way
up to it but doing my bit.
This poem appears in Tracy Ryan’s collection, The Argument, published by Fremantle Press
Japanese Garden ~ Stuart Cooke
Take a world
and open it like a breath
in the cup of your hands.
Take some land soft as dough
and drop it
in a cool moon of water.
Take swamp hens, some ruffled swans,
let their songs shoot short bullets
over the waves of distant traffic.
Stop
while the swans’ long black necks curl
to the grass freshly growing
from the freshly laid dough.
Take lines of willow scrawled
on a creaming sky
and an exuberant breeze
to wrinkle the olive-green lagoon.
Now let their trunks rise
to tightly-woven clouds
and the wind brush the willow’s thick hair.
Take the path away from the children
chattering
like bristles of light.
Step towards a stone jetty and a dingy
with a small hole in the bow.
Take a man, half-grown, full
of conflicting sounds,
of the hiss of meat, of hair growing, of the hush
of what has already fallen.
Take this man.
Then, scratch light
from the wrinkling water
and whisper, Infinity.
Two ducks
keep diving.
Already, there are flowers whitening
for which he has no name,
and patterns slipping out
like flies dancing.
Please, take him away.
This man in sunset’s oven,
baking in time.
Take him from the noise:
that absurdly luminous lyre;
those wraiths shrieking in their graves
beneath monotonous, celestial stone.
La Serena, Chile
This poem appears in Stuart Cooke’s chapbook included in Triptych Poets 2, published by Blemish Books.
Wasting ~ Robyn Rowland
Ireland
August 1983
Your body carries
the smooth bronze of this foolish summer –
no rain in Ireland.
You are sinew, strung muscle, blithe strength
a finer study of my father’s limbs
arteries pulsing with exertion.
Nut-brown bloom is on you
and this mountain is no challenge to
your springing step,
though once the peak is attained
small crossing of its summit before descent.
Supple as the Mulcair over rocks
you move across terrain familiar as your hand and
the years tracking your eyes
beginning to furrow mortality.
Rapid urgency to move drives you
to expel, dispense
that bursting energy, danger in your flesh.
Decision made,
celibate, you fold your body away like
a best shirt
or those silk stockings my mother saved in
the war,
kept in a drawer till the battles ended
they were moth-riddled, mildewed from the damp. I
ache for this wasting,
to know age will melt you slowly to shapelessness
like old wax scraped from the frames
the honey long spun out.
Juiceless, left in the sun to soften
it will be reformed, reshaped.
no longer a container for that sweetness
but flareless candle,
life burned down inside,
wax melted inward
to lightless stub.
This poem appears in Robyn Rowland’s collection, Perverse Serenity, published by Spinifex Press.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 2 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Courthouse Afternoon ~ Fiona Wright
for Tara
A girl in coral and horn glasses
is discussing the relative frequency
of her massages and orgasms,
and how protein shakes
are made from cattle hearts,
and how the sniffer dogs
might find the Valium in her handbag.
It’s an Indian Summer, and the fairylights
asphyxiate a tree, the bistro buzzers
skitter on the tabletops
and she leans in close,
and chews her plastic straw
and lets her eyes grow wide
on the nervous man beside her.
She tells him
about a recent wedding, where both parties
looked like they were eight months pregnant
and how she’s never understood
why lemons cost much less than limes
and that she’s still black and blue
from horse-riding
and this pub really changes of a Friday
and she never should have listened to her mother.
Three women haul their prams onto the balcony
and shake bottles of formula
and order bloody marys.
A girl in horn-rimmed glasses and coral nails
grabs the man beside her by his nervous hand
and leads him out into the street.
This poem appears in Fiona Wright’s collection, Knuckled, published by Giramondo Publishing.
(for the siblings) ~ Kevin Gillam
they are there on the cusp of a
little hill, in the trampled splendour
of a suburban yard. they are three,
elephantine trunks standing against a
background of untidy sky, their oily
confidences drab on Escher limbs,
and the still bricks and lost pickets
heighten the haecceity of these three.
I go and sit with them often. I sit
between them, face to a bleary just-risen
moon and while breathing deeper and deeper
I find a kind of un-stringed puppetness
owning me. everything around them is
not tinted, a landscape of slow bleeds
with aching grace: the cusp where they stand,
splashes of buffalo, pot-bellied air,
the impressionist light. some spire in a nearby
church tolls its god, and in the corduroy silence
that follows, this join-the-dots man of me
forgets numbers, this seep of leaving
rooted in turn in the clear outline of these three
draws me towards them. having no need for eyes
I follow the scent of sweet decay,
let my soles find exposed pasts, and since
no-one is around, I brush my cheek
across them, hold them, press my chest
against them, know their ribbed unknowns
This poem appears in Kevin Gillam’s collection, Permitted to Fall, published by Sunline Press.
Summer ~ Stephen Edgar
A spiritless, grey-lit interior,
Midafternoon, the nadir of the day
When visitors are scarce; as in a mime
Silence informs the empty corridor,
Making all sound extraneous, far away,
As though it were the memory of time:
A closing lift, a nurse’s wordless voice
Monologizing on the office phone
Offscreen, the metal rattle of a trolley
With all it offers those without a choice,
And somewhere hard to judge the sullen drone
Of a polisher spreading its melancholy.
Wards open to the left and right, from which
The stillness wells like stage mist. Ranged in beds
Lie figures from the London underground
By Henry Moore, while in a curtained niche
An intimate family group with half-bowed heads
Out of Renaissance art sits gathered round.
As in a nightmare loop the eye regards
The bowls of grapes, the bunches of bright flowers
(Watered by someone once who then ignored them),
The drinking vessels and the get-well cards
Again, again the faces drained of hours,
Emptied by their waiting even of boredom,
Subsisting in their realm of four o’clock.
Procedure rooms pass by, and linen stores,
And stores for dressings, cannulas, syringes,
And blank, shut rooms where no one comes to knock.
Glimpsed from a junction in the corridors
What seems a painting down the hall impinges
Into the atmosphere, although the glare
That pullulates across it from the lighting
Wipes out its subject from the dazed newcomer,
Till he approaches closer to that square
Of tell-tale glass, which stares clearly reciting
The myth of an outer world; its content: summer.
Who would have thought that blue could hurt so much?
This prospect also has forgotten time:
Along the shore the many-lacquered frieze
Of small waves lays a stationary touch;
The trees, as though self-mesmerized, all climb
Unmoved, you’d say, into a printed breeze
In which the yachts, remnants of an event,
Have long been left behind. Almost without
A cloud, the unimagined sky annuls
All qualms across the bay’s embellishment
Which it exults
above — except, far out,
A white dismay among the feeding gulls.
This poem appears in Stephen Edgar’s collection, Other Summers, published by Black Pepper Publishing.
sound (& silence) ~ Pooja Mittal
terrible silences speak to me—
terribly pale silences, soft as the faces of new pigeons.
under the arch of an upturned sky
the rain collecting (wet-feathered coin-glitter) in endless gutters.
slow aggregate of things
that shine, that refuse to shine.
breaths suspended, crossed arms of branches
suddenly deprived of clothing—
the nude earth
aching
like a young bride.
stripped & open, foot & soil
indistinguishable from mind—this downpour relentless
as the clatter of abandoned weapons. knife-quick,
bird-voices hide & reveal themselves.
sleight of hand, a shifting veil,
a stifled breath, a touch withdrawn.
terrible silences. across chasms of nearness,
between blades of grass, these silences
speak to me—agonizingly thin
as the voices of infants, all-encompassing as dusk,
merciless as dawn.
This poem appears in Pooja Mittal’s collection, Subliminal Dust, published by Odyssey Books.
Audiology ~ Geoff Page
The winter shrubs are
crisp with wrens.
Wire brushes on a snare
are suddenly a
well-heard whisper.
It’s not a miracle exactly
but something very close.
The world retrieves its
rustled paper,
the sibilance of
jingled keys
as now I start to hear my shoes
complaining on the gravel.
My typing turns as brittle as
an office full of clerks.
Max Roach playing cymbals
leaves his fretwork in the air.
The sound of Clifford Brown on trumpet
is sweet and clean as first I heard it
fifty years before.
The world seems more
transparent now,
thinner than a leaf.
This poem appears in Geoff Page’s collection, A Sudden Sentence in the Air, published by extempore.
House of Ash ~ Lyn Reeves
My house burnt down.
I couldn’t do a thing about it. I just sat there
looking out the window while it burned.
It started in the bedroom. The smell of smoke
had been around for months, years maybe,
but it didn’t set alarm bells ringing.
Smoke clung to the curtains. The smouldering
mattress scorched the sheets. A sooty film
grimed the windows and the walls.
My skin paled with the slow drift of ash.
It brittled my hair. The taste of cinders
parched my mouth. Words began to blaze.
They flared up wantonly, igniting spotfires.
As fast as I put one out,
sparks flickered in another room.
Perhaps it was a fault in the wiring, or
the too-bright light through a magnifying lens, or
the piles of crumpled poems on the floor — good kindling.
The sun was a crimson disc and the moon promised no rain.
Tears couldn’t stifle the flames.
They only drove them underground
where they devoured the foundations.
I kept looking out the window.
No firemen came with bright red engines and vanquishing hoses.
No water bombs dropped from above.
The house continues its long slow smoulder
until everything I touch crumbles
the heart hollowed right out of it.
Now I live in a house of ash
alert to the slightest wind.
This poem appears in Lyn Reeves’s collection, Seasoned with Honey, published by Walleah Press.
from Out of Bounds ~ Dominique Hecq
Incarnadine Sun
The skin of day bursts
A wild goat leaps off the page
Word parola Wort mot woord –
a dice throw cast in jest –
a tongue in free fall –
images adjust to words:
things said
things utterly written
Where do words come from?
From behind an eyelid
the world slows down
silence swaps
the living with the dead
the mother with the child
the dead for the living dead.
Is language the world?
Washed out Moon
Milk letters spilled
in mid air song
High up in the mountains she drops and falls in a mirror you call a lake.
Her eyes are split and so is her face. Her skin is inside out. Burning. Freezing.
She swims in air solid as glass, glimmering as silver.
She wheels herself back through a field of rocks to what you would call home.
She is all shivers and sweat. Her voice booms in her chest. Her head.
Husks. Her heartbeat is strong. Is weak. Is no more.
How long must i wait for this death to come, she asks – for this death to go?
In a foreign tongue she hears that she is not prepared.
This excerpt is the opening lines to Dominique Hecq’s collection, Out of Bounds, published by Re.Press.
01 December
Summer is. And so are these poems – here and now – for your reading pleasure. Part 1 of 4 to the SPUNC Summer Poetry Feature is below. If you missed them, be sure to have a read of our Winter and and Spring features as well.
Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow
Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq
Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland
Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson
Projections ~ Alex Skovron
WHAT IS IT about masks and capes, and midnight escapades, and the colour black? It’s 1958 in a Rose Bay gloom (the Wintergarden, say): Wagner’s overture engulfs the gritty screen, and the grim crusader, ensnared between those deathly spikes of steel, the walls still closing in from Saturday last, at last ingeniously escapes; ‘The Batman!’ screech the sprung crooks of 1943, the serial rolls. Shortly I’ll be crouching over a pad to sketch that wondrous pointy slit-eyed cowl. Or 1960 at the Metro, Bondi Junction (facing the Coronet), where I rustle my ninepenny Smith’s while my courage surges to Zorro’s amazing sword (‘the sign of justice done’); later I’ll practise slashing an imaginary Z, will render on bluelined airmail sheets the mystique of his ebony blindfold, that spirit-level hat, the cheeky pencil moustache. And in between there’s 1959, where Sleeping Beauty delivers a shriller charm: Maleficent is magnificent – for weeks I’ll struggle at my miniature desk to never quite accomplish her bristling lines, her tempestuous cloak, the terrible horn-topped angular grandeur of her scowl … These (and others too) the instructors of a particular art: they empotion me, inflict the all-embracing myth, during that innocent universe where white is black. By 1977 the triggers of memory twitch when I countenance Vader’s hollow metallic lament, his mantle all-enshrouding (night-mammal, blade-wizard, enchantress-witch), his helmet a master-stroke from the century’s blackest hole. Let him keep. In a decade or two, a dark new hero will defy the screens of our sleep.
This poem appears in Alex Skovron’s collection, Autographs, published by Hybrid Publishers.
Last Poem ~ Kate Middleton
for P.
I went to pick a rose for you
and found there were no roses—no symphony, no cherish.
The seasons are lost in a brushstroke now,
the blankness of my inattention. And I wanted to give you
those easily crushable petals (they are so easy
to grieve for) but the morning frosts
have seized us all. Instead I gave you the tissue
of my thin words, and said
I wish these were roses.
Brought like Josephine rushed roses through the blockades,
the giddiness of bringing those buds into a new country.
The gentle, pressable flesh of them
an explanation for my warring self. We sat together
in the cold house, the words between us withering,
having lost the libraries of eloquence
they used to hold, the pattern of sunshine dropping through
the red lace shawl hung suspended in the window.
This poem appears in Kate Middleton’s collection, Fire Season, published by Giramondo Publishing
Les Fantaisies Bisarres de la Goutte ~ Pete Spence
an anonymous mass
was something
Einstein was looking for
through all this plasma
and grit!
today i can’t even
throw a shadow
as i lazily air my feet
nor can i gather
enough energy
to have a tantrum
and i’d like to!
tantrum ego!
does a tantrum have mass?
the air leans
against a wall
taking a breather
in the specific
gravity of the moment!
the daze goes by
but don’t get
any more impressive
now that the ladies lounge
is full of pokies!
a new brand of air
is advertised
but clearly
it has evaporated
into the dun mass
seeking anonymity
This poem appears in Pete Spence’s collection, Perrier Fever, published by Grand Parade Poets.
Snapshot, Chequers, 1960 ~ Mark Mahemoff
Here they are, resplendent in black and white,
pictured at the start of a patchy career.
But what’s the occasion?
Who have they come to see?
Is it Billy Eckstein, Nat King Cole or Gene Krupa?
They wouldn’t remember and it doesn’t really matter.
No one could eclipse this young pair’s glamour.
All the elements are there, almost as if staged.
A packet of Rothman’s
on a starched white table cloth.
Their optimistic smiles posed for the camera.
He is twenty, she is twenty three.
They reek of sexuality yet to be unleashed.
She’s revealing a suntanned shoulder
wrapped, self-consciously,
in her mother’s black fur stole.
His right arm is almost touching her back,
close but not too close,
as dictated by protocol.
There is something both attractive
and unsafe about her beauty.
It’s as if there is a hook
concealed inside sweet bait.
Neither one knew the pain that lay in wait.
The high hopes to be bludgeoned by the hammer of reality.
But here they are pre-marriage,
drugged by romance:
these youngsters, my parents,
for better or for worse.
This poem appears in Mark Mahemoff’s collection, Traps and Sanctuaries, published by Puncher & Wattmann.
Hush ~ Cameron Lowe
In the blue light her skin is electric,
a neon field, one arm displaying
the tendered cloth,
the other raising sail in the drift of night—
and what might be at stake here,
sheets swimming
in this blue sea of reflections,
the play of a smile frozen in glass,
or the mind settling on the surface
of this rising tide.
In the sudden rush for resemblance
a splitting begins, this table,
that chair, hands shaping that which
is and isn’t there, until
all that remains is imitation,
and she breathes out, letting
blue light embrace and taste her,
the light spilling from splintered limbs.
This poem appears in Cameron Lowe’s collection, Porch Music, published by Whitmore Press.
Cold front ~ Pam Brown
this shivering caravan
reeks of rum,
shadows smear an atlas
on a pillowcase
idly silhouetting a rabbit
on the masonite wall,
iced-over scraps
on the laminex splashback
grey nomad buys clairol –
the future looks bright
o only a cold front
is oblivion dark ?
come here for a moment,
sit and regard,
gape at the landscape
we’ll never inhabit
en plein air
is so much a sinkhole,
nowhere so zen
as some other place
who changed ‘the proposal’
into ‘the dream’ ?
I never said
I’m living the plan’
I’ve already been sideswiped
and I was here last
my cup’s white interior
tarnished by tannin,
readers of teacups
expended by tea bags
such a dreamy hiatus
o only a cold front
copying a trance
is too difficult to do,
sun on shut eye –
deep eggy red orange
but pocket some wisdom
when winter arrives
the grey sheen of sleet
will cleanse us like windex
This poem appears in Pam Brown’s collection, Authentic Local, published by Papertiger Media / SOI 3 Books.
This Arm That Never (Quarantine Station) ~ Nathan Curnow
This arm was cast from a smallpox victim,
manufactured in bees wax and ink, painted
yellow representing a jaundiced appearance
in a sealed glass box on felt. Note the size of
the pimples that filled with pus and erupted
upon clothes and linen, in the mouth at first,
across the palms, down to the soles of the feet.
See the wedding ring they could not take off.
We are invited to interpret the story. This arm
is fragile but in good condition, priceless as
a research tool. Check the painstaking length
the artist went to for our medical education,
donated to us by Sydney University, the victim
buried in an unmarked grave. Imagine it as
a ravaged gift, think how it must have played
a part, displayed here in our movable collection,
gambled upon the voyage. This arm that never
stops retelling the story of its deadly cargo.
Reaching through time, swollen, resigned,
still untouchable.
This poem appears in Nathan Curnow’s collection, The Ghost Poetry Project, published by Puncher & Wattmann.
24 November
A month out from the launch of his first collection of short stories, The Rattler & other stories, author and St Kilda bookseller, Alec Patric, stood holding a freshly-minted copy. Co-worker and illustrator of the collection, Miles Allinson was there too. The stories were the result of years and years of inspiration and fine-tuning and the artwork had been created up against Miles’ PhD deadline. But here it was. The two stood, transfixed. The cover was a lush chocolate with burnt orange titles and felt like velvet. The interior leaves – high quality, crème. The font, curly and clear, Garamond. The pencil illustrations whispered of sketchbook. Spineless Wonders had come through.
But twenty-two pages in, the wonder turned sour. In one of the signature sentence-long paragraphs of ‘B O M B S’, there was a noun-verb disagreement. The hostess is contrasting the Hollywood movie portrayal of plane crashes of panicked passengers with the stillness that descends the cabin in those final moments. Alec’s choice of simile is perfect: the yellow masks bounces down from the overhead compartments to dangle like rubber chickens.
Alec picks up the phone and calls me. He is charming and buoyant as always. The cover, the paper, the illustrations. The font. And then he tells me about the mistake and in the silence that follows, I remember the dangling chickens sentence. It was one of the long list of errors found by the copyeditors and I was sure I’d corrected it. But clearly I hadn’t.
Alec’s silence told me the grammatical mistake was a blight on his story and on his book. There was only one thing to do. ‘I’ll fix it,’ I say. And unlike the passengers in the fated plane, Alec breathed again.
The single copy that was sent to Alec was a dummy run, in lieu of the traditional proof. Not only is this a faster and cheaper process than generating a proof, it also means that the actual book, bound and covered, can be checked before a print run. And correcting this ‘proof copy’ should not be a huge drama. All I had to do was re-open The Rattler’s InDesign file, delete the unnecessary ‘s’ and upload the revised file to Lightning Source. The revision would take forty-eight hours, the reprint four to five days. The books would be at the shop two and half weeks ahead of the launch. Not ideal, but do-able.
As it turned out, the revision was a huge drama. In my haste to correct the copy, I didn’t relink the illustrations with enough care and consequently the hundred copies which arrived at St Kilda’s Readings the following week had one illustration inadvertently repeated.
Another call from Alec. He didn’t have to ask. I fixed the problem, checked I hadn’t created any more problems, and submitted a second revised text file. Thanks to the lightning-fast print on demand, the books arrived in time to be processed by Readings St Kilda for the launch as well as sent to their other stores.
All of this left me with a good feeling about the quality standards of Spineless Wonders, a bill for one hundred misprinted books and two cartons of books not fit to sell at full price.
Light bulb moment. I purchased a labeller and stuck Sample Copy on the back cover of eighty misprinted copies, wrapped them in an order form and mailed them to bookshops. As I am the publicist and admin for Spineless Wonders, as well as editor and director, it took me about two weeks. By this time, The Rattler & other stories, had received great reviews in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age and Bookseller + Publisher ran both a review, and an interview with Alec.
On the strength of this publicity, I spent the best part of a week on the phone to bookshops. The results were fantastic. By Wednesday afternoon I had placed forty-five copies of The Rattler & other stories (as well as a handful of our first publication, Permission To Lie) in fourteen bookstores. The orders were for multiples of two, three, four or five copies and ranged from firm sale, sale or return and consignment.
Throughout the week I had many conversations with booksellers across the nation. I got knockbacks:
We can’t sell short stories, We’re too busy with our Christmas stock, This one is not for us …
At one well-known bookshop in Paddington, Sydney, the bookbuyer seems to always be out getting a coffee when I ring. Is it me or should I be worried about her caffeine addiction? A common refrain was: who is your distributor?
Andrew from Hill of Content, Melbourne said, ‘You’re really good at getting reviews. I’ll take five. Send me an invoice, you know the drill’. Michelle from Booktique in Merimbula was reading the sample copy, had seen the reviews and intended to call me. Matilda’s Books in Mount Waverley had an order from a U3A customer. I had terrific conversations and learnt lots about life from a booksellers’ point of view.
Misprinting one hundred books was an expensive mistake for me. Added to that was the cost of mailing the samples to eighty bookshops. But it did mean that the product got into the hands of booksellers. POD books have not had a good reputation (poorly proofed and self-published, printed on thick, whiter than white paper stock in miniscule print with narrow margins). When I began Spineless Wonders I set out to produce critically-acclaimed POD books, indistinguishable from those produced by larger publishers using offset printing. My printing error, and the experience of ‘hand-selling’ to bookshops, gave me a chance to assess if I had succeeded.
Bronwyn Mehan runs Spineless Wonders, a publishing company devoted to producing quality short Australian stories. Her print on demand publications are printed by Lightning Source Australia and it is hoped that its distribution channels, comprising some of Australia’s best known distributors, will be operating soon.
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