Splog - SPUNC: Small Press Underground Networking Community

Celebrating 35 Years of Fremantle Press by David S Hall

2012-05-21T18:52:18Z

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.

Does the world really need another book?

2012-05-03T14:26:06Z

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. *

The International New Publishing Network

2012-03-28T10:49:41Z

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

A John Kinsella Manifesto: What I Do and Don't Look for in a Poem when Selecting for a Literary Journal

2012-02-17T12:39:21Z

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.

Four Firsts: Twists in the Unsolicited Submissions Game by Kent MacCarter

2011-12-19T00:14:41Z

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.

Summer Poetry Feature, Part 4: Cronin, Hill, Sant, Shapcott, Collins, Gorton, Shepherdson

2011-12-01T10:15:47Z

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.

Summer Poetry Feature, Part 3: Lloyd, Clemens, Caddy, Ryan, Cooke, Rowland

2011-12-01T10:14:43Z

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.

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.

Summer Poetry Feature, Part 2: Wright, Gillam, Edgar, Mittal, Page, Reeves, Hecq

2011-12-01T10:13:37Z

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.

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.

Summer Poetry Feature, Part 1: Skovron, Middleton, Spence, Mahemoff, Lowe, Brown, Curnow

2011-12-01T10:04:02Z

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.

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.

Bronwyn Mehan Encounters an Upside and Downside to POD and its Hand-selling

2011-11-24T09:54:59Z

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.

Martin Shaw: Round Up of some Current Small Press Releases

2011-11-21T09:41:52Z

Any round-up of new releases from small to medium-sized Australian publishers in the latter part of 2011 inevitably leads one to a sense of awe at quite what this hardy band of passionate souls are achieving – year-in, year-out in this country – in the face of the numerous challenges the book trade faces these days. I hardly need to recount those challenges here.

Isn’t it about time though that these achievements by smaller publishers are better recognised? My colleagues on the board of industry body SPUNC: The Small Press Network certainly think so (and watch this space then for an update on the possible establishment of an awards night in 2012). But now to my by-no-means-comprehensive wrap of tasty morsels that no self-respecting Xmas hamper should overlook (if you will pardon my anthropomorphism). So why don’t we start with the letter A and that dynamic publisher Affirm Press? This year saw the publication of no less than six debut short-story collections at regular intervals, all of which were received to considerable critical acclaim. And if their hip credentials weren’t already secure, look out for their Christmas offering: Marc Andrews’ Pop Life: Inside Smash Hits Australia 1984-2007 .

Now the beauty of this sector is also that it constantly surprises, often by alerting you to aspects of culture or community that you might be only dimly aware of. Imagine my surprise when I sighted in my store the other day Sarah Miram’s Darebin Parklands: Escaping the Claws of the Machine from Melbourne Books, a wonderful account of the battle to save an unsightly municipal tip from commercial development and to create the bushland park we know and love today. For those who might have preferred the sticky carpet in those years, Melbourne Books also has Dolores San Miguel’s The Ballroom: The Melbourne Punk and Post-Punk Scene. Here’s a publisher who has got all bases covered.

In terms of fiction stocks, small presses are often considered ‘incubators’ that identify and nurture local talent before handing them over to “proper” publishers. Thankfully, the reality is rather different. Enduring relationships are often formed between authors and their chosen publishers, whose taste and attention got them noticed in the first place. So as well as Affirm Press’ Long Story Shorts series, we have debut collections from Giramondo in Jess Huon’s The Dark Wet and Spineless Wonders’ The Rattler & other stories by A S Patric.

Marvellous novels from the ever-astute Sleepers Publishing, Steven Amsterdam’s What the Family Needed and Miles Vertigan’s Life Kills have also just been released.

Tony Birch returns with his mightily impressive Blood from UQP.

Fremantle Press gives us Adam Morris’s My Dog Gave Me the Clap – which the author swears ISN’T a semi-autobiographical first novel.

There’s also a foray into the graphic novel genre from Black Pepper Publishing with Mirranda Burton’s Hidden. Dylan Horrocks, author of the acclaimed Hicksville, says “it is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read”!

And what about poetry or general non-fiction I hear you asking? These are all fields too rich to comprehensively survey!

So here’s a brief highlights package:

UQP have a finger on the political pulse with Andy Lamey’s Frontier Justice: The Global Refugee Crisis and What to Do About It, “compulsory reading for our politicians” according to Julian Burnside.

The first title in the Giramondo Shorts Series is Michael Wilding’s offbeat account of his publishing days, Wild & Woolley: A Memoir.

Puncher and Wattmann have Bruce Dawe’s Slo Mo Tsunami and Other Poems.

The irrepressible UQP also has a marvellous anthology, 30 Young Australian Poets, edited by Felicity Plunkett.

Giramondo have also started publishing a series of Selected Poems by distinguished Australian poets, with Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems being the first in the series.

In the visual arts, Australian Scholarly Press offers Simon Gregg’s The New Romantics: Darkness and Light in Australian Art.

Finally: journal culture. Sadly there was a demise this year with the treasure-chest that was Ivor Indyk’s Heat, and an almighty scare for Island who, thankfully, got a temporary reprieve. But there’s also good news to report as well. Kill Your Darlings has kept its early promise alive with a stimulating mix across the genres, and an excellent blog that takes a close temperature of cultural opinions and debates around the country.

Can we talk then about ‘rude health’ in Australian small press publishing? Well maybe not in their bank accounts (!), but richness is to be found at every turn here. I would urge all readers to not take for granted our cultural land of plenty – get thee to a bookshop and reciprocate these publishers’ sterling efforts.

Martin Shaw is Books Division Manager for Readings Books, Music & Film.

An Accidental Publisher: Alan Wearne on Grand Parade Poets and Christopher Bantick

2011-11-16T10:37:14Z

Yes, I am an accidental publisher, one who is only seeing now that my new vocation has quite a few raison d’être I was unaware of pulsing behind its existence. Money, of course, helped as did my desire to try and ease frustrations with certain (though not all) aspects of contemporary Australian poetry. Witty whingeing can only go so far. If I have a loud enough poetry mouth (and I’m sure there are still plenty of folk who’ll never forgive my hatchet job on the late Dorothy Porter’s What a Piece of Work) we all know that cliché re: money-and-mouth, don’t we?

If one of the aims of Grand Parade Poets is to promote people who are not part of (or have chosen not to be part of) the mainstream poetry scene, then the initial catalysts for its conception were both tragic and comic– an untimely death on the one hand and a deservedly enthusiastic use of emails on the other. And, having been part of the poetry world since the magical year of – you guessed it! –’68, I hope I can readily appreciate the difficulties facing young (and not so young) poets seeking audiences for their work.

It was the death of Benjamin Frater (1979‐2007), one of the most highly talented poets of his generation and an heir to Blake, Ginsberg, the Beats, the Symbolists, the Russian Futurists, Artaud and Sydney’s South West Suburbs that prompted the beginnings of this press. It was agreed by myself and a number of Ben’s closest associates that a volume of his work just had to be published, not merely in his honour but for the benefit of Australian literature.

Although there are other publishers in Australia that might have taken the risks of publishing this, everyone involved felt that it was important to keep the editing, production, etc. ‘in the family’ as it were. During this period an old friend of mine, the highly individual yet very accessible Pete Spence, was emailing me and, doubtless many of his other friends, a near continual production line of witty, idiosyncratic excerpts from his ongoing opus which has lasted over four decades.

It was at about this time I inherited some money. I thought that putting an amount of that legacy towards a poetry publishing enterprise would be worth the emotional risk, if not the financial gain. Once Pete was on board, I started casting around for more poets in a proposed initial series.

The poets I have in mind range in age from the mid 20s through to early 70s. Their geographical locations range from the northern rivers of NSW to the southern suburbs of Perth. They are diverse Australian voices which deserve to be read, and will make a real contribution to contemporary Australian poetry. We will be dealing with, as Laurie Duggan commented on the Frater and Spence, “… books by poets who ought to be better known.”

Almost four years to the day he died, Ben’s Selected Poems, 6am in the Universe, together with Pete’s Perrier Fever, was published. This dual project took over a year’s concentrated work, particularly from Rob Wilson (Ben’s editor), Tim Cahill (co-editor and writer of the afterword), Elle Dumuro (co-editor), Lisa Nicol (who is at work on a radio documentary on Ben), Anna Craney (who made the Ben DVD that goes with the book), Miriam Wells (Girl Friday), Chris Edwards (designer) and of course Pete Spence himself. In the last, say, three months, I wandered around, shrouded in my accidental vocation. I went to sleep with it, woke to it, talked constantly to folk about it. Whenever I was finished with them (or they with me), I started talking to myself. I might have read actual poetry, but I certainly never wrote any. I have never experienced anything quite like it.

III

If there is another attitude of mine which can partner with my hopefully enthusiastic support for the Bens and Petes of this world, it is an attitude brought out on occasions when certain quasi-literary opinion piece writers (more often than not in the Murdoch Daily Broadsheet) present themselves as some kind of Andrew Bolt and/or Janet Albrechtson of the craft – wheeling out all those buzz phrases only the truly ignorant could think they would get away. It is then that the combative side to my nature urges me to continue in the publishing game.

‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’ announced a headline around the time that I was deep at work preparing to launch the Ben and Pete double act. Whether journalist, teacher and author, Christopher Bantick, thought up this ridiculous phrase is debatable. Its cultural revolution ‘wall poster’ style seems to have a sub editor’s touch, but Bantick certainly supplied the data upon which this call to arms was based. Reading it, one has the fear that if the dice rolled an unfortunate way this critic might end up reviewing my books as a publisher. I don’t know if other countries have to suffer such reactionary diatribes in their mainstream literary media but, if Australia is the exception, then the editor in charge might have kept of this in mind to justify its publication:

‘Here’s something worth a good old Aussie stir, poetry. That weirdo corner of the arts. Now, what they require is yet another blood sport spat.’

I might have engineered a reply to Bantick and his backers but I was on auto-publisher at the time and could do nothing else.

If Bantick’s article requires, say, a Quarterly Essay style reply to fully bury the article, such as it is, well and good. I can only inform you how it affected your correspondent. Bantick’s initial target was a young Australian woman who had won some kind of International Poetry Slam event. He could not allow her any pleasurable five minutes of glory. Instead, he set up some sneering, huffing and puffing near-to-hate attack, doubtless thinking that, via attempted satire, he was on the side of ‘greatness’.

If the leading satiric poets of the language are Dryden, Pope and Byron, then their chief targets surely were not the slamsters of their time … slamsters who were probably down on the village green or in a nearby tavern regaling friends with witty enough doggerel on issues of the day. No, the targets were Shadwell, Cibber and Southey; writers with a decided ‘Only greatness, not popular appeal, can restore poetry as the nation’s memory’ mind set. That, plus poetasters who believed they were the men to do it. Meanwhile, down at the tavern, local bards were doubtlessly urging punters into some folk ballad sing-a-long, which one day might be taken up by dialect poets such as William Barnes … who in turn would lead to Thomas Hardy who would then lead onto W H Auden, etc. Although they have no pretentions to be Virgil or Dante (and isn’t that their charm?), poetry slams can be a pretty basic word sport. They’re an easy target if you’re after one.

Think of the little league at half time – mind you, when your team is down by ten goals at half time, wouldn’t you rather watch the little league? That one of their Aussie number won some International Prize is a pleasant enough novelty and that she would love poetry slams on Commercial Prime Time TV (an idea that Bantick abhorred), is an entertaining thought balloon.

But Bantick cannot allow this amusingly honest World Champion Poetry Slamster to bask in her few hours under the media sun. He compares this news-worthy (enough) item with the fact that Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s recent Order of Australia was never mentioned in the press! Now, I welcome this award given to Chris Wallace-Crabbe – his urbanity and wit being one of the resilient strengths of our verse and criticism for nearly sixty years (though I can think of other Order of Australia poets whom I believe did not deserve that gong!) But mention this in order to attack some successful poetry slamster? Why would one bother? Except, perhaps, that it just adds to the all-purpose huffing and puffing, demeaning for all concerned.

Mind you, one of the poems positively referenced by Bantick – in his all purposeful diatribe – was nothing like the work of Wallace-Crabbe or indeed of Wallace-Crabbe’s close colleague also mentioned in the article Peter Steele. This was Sylvia Plath’s incomparable ‘Daddy’.

‘Daddy’?

Surely if there was a 20th Century poem that might bedrock a young woman’s slamming career, it might well be that great hymn to patricide. You get the kind of confusion Bantick’s bile was giving forth?

When it comes to poetry, one of the great refuges of opinion piece writers surely must be a reference to ‘scansion’. When I see such a reference, alarm bells are surely ringing for I know that this writer has little else to say! Now, whether a poem that purports to be written in a regular metre can attend consistently to that metre (or if, in changing metre, it doesn’t look/sound clumsy) it is a bedrock of much great verse in our language. How pleased I was when I heard from Gerri Pleitez, a young poet I know with heaps of ‘attitude’and she had read Gray’s Elegy. And, yes, it somehow made sense (this kind of pleasure and attitude equalling that joy a few years ago when my former student, Alan Murphy, by then well into his 80s, wrote and recorded his first and probably only rap song). That is how it should be.

But ‘scanning’ has its limits. With those that harp on about it, or the lack thereof – remind me so much of those neo-conservatives who love to introduce the Magna Carta into their ravings. It even reminds me of those holocaust deniers who proclaim they aren’t anti-Semitic, they just want to establish … the truth (as if such referencing instantly grants them some kind of moral high ground)!

Bantick, in his column made reference to one poem that scans, My Country by Dorothea Mackellar – and boy does that scan – it does nothing else but scan itself to death. That this particular piece of clichéd-ridden, sub-Georgian doggerel can still be referred to in an article of comment about contemporary Australian Poetry must really show up a paucity of intellect and imagination. Do you think that were there to be an opinion piece in the New York Times on contemporary American poetry, that a mention of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Edgar Guest would even be countenanced? If you don’t know these two look them up and consider it.

Is it any wonder one would now feel it was a duty to publish Benjamin Frater, Pete Spence and hopefully those others to come? I can say My Country made me do it.

In the late 1990s, John Coventry, a businessman friend whom I have known since grade 2 (1955), gave me his card. On the back of that card was his company’s mission statement. Perhaps it was the poet in me who thought that this phrase I had never seen before was some kind of joke John had concocted, though one I didn’t quite get. I soon saw this term again and again, by now making me think that it was a businessman’s joke, one transcending any single CEO. Wrong again. I saw that mission statements were indeed universal, every direction I turned there they came hurtling towards me in all their corporate hyperactivity … whilst I wryly, sorely became aware that if there was a joke, it was on me: verse novelist, dramatic monologist, satirist, friend of John Forbes, Laurie Duggan, Gig Ryan, Pi O, Nigel Roberts, Rae Desmond Jones, poet sophisticates all.

Whose was the first mission statement? We’ll probably never know. Such is the way of the current world. I reckon we’ll soon be auditioning whose is to be the last. Until then, thirteen years after I received John’s card, I give you (ah such is the power of language) Grand Parade Poets Pty Ltd’s never to be repeated, don’t-tell-me-you’ve-guessed-it-already …

Mission Statement

Poetry for Grand Parade Poets is the imaginative use of language under pressure for the enjoyment of yourselves and others. We believe there are plenty of readers who don’t want Australian Literature, let alone its poetry, to be turned into a sideshow booth at some 365 days a year writer’s festival, or a dingy, cramped branch office of Cultural Studies. Poetry is too serious an occupation to be beholden to such ephemera, though with a wonderful perversity there is no section of the arts better suited to not taking itself seriously. Poetry must be elitist and democratic since it brings high-powered imaginative entertainment and intellectual pleasure to those willing enough to meet it at least part of the way. Grand Parade Poets wishes to publish poets of music, passion and intelligence. We trust you will enjoy the results.

Alan Wearne is publisher at Grand Parade Poets.

Things You Can Tell Just by Blogging by Laurie Steed

2011-10-24T10:28:54Z

This is the second instalment of a three-part series on blogging. We’d like to share the thoughts of three prolific bloggers and get their impressions on how the relatively free-form online space compliments and/or diverts from print publishing.

Part 1: Concrete & Chalk: Ruminations on blogging by A.S. Patric

Blogs used to be great. They were windows to troubled souls, a psychological choose your own adventure. You could read about people’s lives and comment if you felt so inclined. More importantly, blogs offered online interaction when interactivity was sorely lacking.

Today blogs feel tired, or at the very least in need of invigoration. These days, everything is interactive. We now Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, news sites and micro-blogs. Where does that leave traditional blogging? Well that depends. If you’re a blogger of expertise or a collaborative blogger, then you’re still in good shape. Take the literary sphere: I don’t surf for new blogs but I regularly check in with those blogs I know and trust. In my world, that’s SPLOG, LiteraryMinded, The Column, Verity La and Killings. What about writer’s personal blogs? I rarely read them. Why? Well, I’d rather read a writer’s selected thoughts than their everyday meanderings. I’d rather explore what they write, rather than what they choose to discuss.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run your own blog, but it does mean you’re indebted to make it interesting. Local lit is already showcased in Radio National’s The Book Show, RRR’s Aural Text, breakaway podcast The Rereaders and JOMAD and ABC’s First Tuesday Book Club. If you’re covering similar territory to any of these programs, your thoughts run the risk of being more echo than shout. Blogs are also competing with books, TV, and films, not to mention the rest of the Internet. Given a choice between watching a DVD and reading about the life of a writer, most will choose the former, if only because they’re tired, stressed, and have to work in the morning.

None of this stops me writing blog posts, nor should it stop you. Ultimately it comes down to why you’re blogging in the first place. Blogs works best when they’re about interaction rather than promotion; if you enjoy connecting with a small but loyal group of readers then by all means start a blog and enjoy the conversation. If you’re planning on being the next literary “it” boy or girl, then please, save the world from another self-indulgent blog and just hire a publicist.

In a digital market, much is free. Your time is not, and running a blog takes a lot of time, both to write original content and to make sure your blog is suitably tech-savvy, incorporating widgets, buttons and twitter streams. As a writer, do you have that time? More importantly, are you the type of writer who enjoys being permanently plugged in? If you’re Max Barry you lap it up and prosper, but for others it creates an existential nightmare.

Now is a uniquely beneficial time in blogging history. As a writer, you can take part in a quality collaborative blog without having to maintain your own. The blogs mentioned earlier have built loyal and dedicated fan-bases, and they all want quality content. What does this mean? It means if you can write well, you can choose where your work appears. Along the way, you’ll build a professional profile, creating win-win relationships with the best in the business. It’s not necessarily better, but is certainly easier than setting up your own blog and spending the majority of your time creating content, hoping someone, somewhere will recognise your genius.

Still worried you won’t get discovered without your own blog? To that I say Cate Kennedy, Peter Carey, Steven Amsterdam, Nam Le, Alex Miller, Karen Hitchcock, Kim Scott and Patrick Cullen. A couple of these authors have excellent websites (and I’d definitely recommend getting one of those) but none run their own blog. Or to put it another way, some writers write while others lead the discussion. A precious few do both. It’s impossible to be everything to everyone, and therefore begs the question: which type of writer are you?

Laurie Steed is a writer, editor and reviewer based in Perth, Western Australia. A recipient of Varuna and Rosebank fellowships in 2011, his work has featured in various publications including the Age, Meanjin, and Sleepers Almanac. He’s a PhD Student in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australian, fiction editor for various journals and an active member of the EWF Program Advisory Committee. When not working, he likes to hibernate like the bear, and to a lesser extent, the European Hedgehog.

Concrete & Chalk: Ruminations on blogging by A.S. Patric

2011-10-18T11:38:16Z

This is the first instalment of a three-part series on blogging. We’d like to share the thoughts of three prolific bloggers and get their impressions on how the relatively free-form online space compliments and/or diverts from print publishing.

Part 2: Things You Can Tell Just by Blogging by Laurie Steed

There’s a chalk outline on the concrete. We imagine a sprawled-out body with one hand raised as though waving. At some point early on, writers realise that the space within the chalk balloon belongs to them and soon begin returning to it with totems. An old typewriter. The nub of a pencil. Notebooks. Letters of acceptance or rejection in a bundle. Artefacts accumulate. Books and trophies bearing our names seem ideal for filling in the outline on the ground. We return to this retrospective view of our lives again and again but no writer ever comes back to it with a blog.

Perhaps it’s because the best we can achieve with a blog, (if we are not secretly hoping to have it promoted into book form as Krissy Kneen and a few other writers have done) is to garner a few comments from fellow writers. It doesn’t get much better than that. No Nobel awaits. The artefact melts away quickly. A post gets old after a few days and we begin thinking about what next to produce for a small coterie of literary comrades.

If a writer holds to this perspective their blog will fail within weeks or months, (the usual lifespan of the blog). Investing considered thought—focused narrative forms—into electronic veils does not give the same satisfaction as chiselling words into stone. There’s another way of approaching an online creative space and that’s to break with a Stone Age mind frame. To release the idea of permanence and readership and open up a new channel for emerging forms within our own process.

Writing is often a monumental act. A writer will summon up determination and courage and attempt a novel, moving with colossal intention from one phrase to the next. Writing can be a more intimate part of our daily lives, intended not only for transmission to spectral audiences far and wide, but also for ourselves. The literary qualities we have devoted ourselves to can be absorbed into the membrane of our daily lives, giving unique narrative to our private existence.

Most of us begin with paper. A notebook for a few thoughts, character details, ideas for stories… a private place to sigh and thrill—in words intended for our eyes alone. Some writers have scribbled out their entire creative DNA in these kinds of books. It is interesting to juxtapose Anais Nin, who produced her diaries for publication and found lasting recognition through them, and Henry James, who in the final days of his life, destroyed as many of his notebooks as he could: one suggesting the creation is all that is relevant, the other showing the creator in the midst of art. There is also a question here in whether our primary intention is to project ourselves into art or to channel art into ourselves.

If some writers scrap the paper and move directly to composition, producing nothing but extended prose, they give themselves no space to explore their creative possibility other than within the heavier, determined medium of the literary artefact itself. Within the blogging space the writer now has a place where a sketch can grow into a fully formed image, which might continue to expand into a large scale sequence, developing organically into a short story, novel, memoir, etc. The blog offers the writer a moving surface to range out these potentials, allowing a vital admixture of exposure and time into his or her process.

The medium is not just a frame. It affects every word that takes shape. Carving words into stone is so laborious we only ever get the essentials. Date of Birth. Death. Name. Beloved: Wife/Mother/Father/Husband/Son/Daughter. Biblical/Poetic Phrase. Paper maintains a similar expectation. It is a formal space. The words need to carry a higher value, invoking depth and density, even if the prose itself poses as casual, passing banter. The words need to be at least worth the cost of publication. A blogpost responds only to our creative desires and needs, and its production is free.

A blog can be a stage in the development of our work or personal evolution, yet the medium itself offers possibilities some writers will find liberating. So far, the most successful literary blogs have created a place for the bookish equivalent of a great phone conversation. Still to be seen is a new form; a unique blogging creation. Flash fiction has been growing to maturity, especially where prose is driven by concision and precision, delivered in the sudden space of a post. Blogs will continue to grow diurnally, offering an aesthetic of the in-transit—catching the attention of the distracted, overwhelmed, burnt-out reader with new forms of focus, rest and renewal.

The secret of art is that the sublime will always find ways to struggle through whatever comes to hand. Oil pigments on cheap canvas or applied directly to walls leads to the Renaissance. Printing presses produce novels. The excess of military brass instruments after the American Civil war provide Jazz the tools to develop. Images fixed into film-thin plastic frames and passed through a shaft of light usher in cinema. The blog uses a different kind of light through other frames, but we will watch only a little while longer before the sublime breaks through again.

Writers will continue to find the greatest satisfaction in artefacts like the book and trophy. We turn ourselves into words and having those words made into something solid again is part of the bargain. (It seems a paltry existence if that’s all we hope to leave as evidence of having lived). Perhaps we can’t help sketching out the body on the concrete in chalk, looking to fill the shape with a biography worthy of a life. There are ways we allow for the superfluous, overabundant, exuberant to emerge and fill out the picture of a person lying on the concrete, delighted by every passing thing, crossing the open sky above.

a.s.patric.Ink

A Week In Yale, All About Publishing ~ Anna Maguire

2011-09-29T13:50:28Z

In July this year I flew into New Haven Connecticut to attend the Yale University Publishing Course on Book Publishing and Digital: Leadership Strategies in a Time of Transition. I was excited about spending a week with people from all over the world who were equally passionate about publishing and just as inquisitive about how digital will impact their business and what they should focus on while the industry is in transition. After five days and thirty-one presentations from some of the leaders in the publishing industry I’ve certainly got a better understanding of some of the challenges small and large publishers are facing.

While at Yale I paid particular attention to information I felt was beneficial to Australian small and independent publishers, to assist them draw up their digital strategies. Sometimes the strategy may be more about preparation rather than implementation, but a strategy will help you focus on what steps you do need to take at this time. What came out very clearly in the Yale Publishing Course is there is still a huge amount of experimentation happening and no one has all the answers – yet! What IS clear is that technology is developing rapidly and coming down in price.

However, if despite all you have heard about the oncoming digital juggernaut you haven’t started clearing rights this needs to be a major priority, as this takes a lot of time. If you work in text-based content you should get out there and start converting. When you are producing this text-based content, have a think about links. Is there information on the web that is relevant to the product and where the book would benefit from links?

I also heard some specific information that may be useful to small publishers that I wanted to share.

• The ‘A-la-carte’ Approach We heard that many small publishers are now taking this approach. Perhaps another way we’re more used to thinking of this is hiring consultants to do what isn’t your core strength. Small publishers can choose from a smorgasbord of skills to help them navigate the digital highway. Don’t know where to start? Then find someone how can help you decide the first steps. (Ed: SPUNC’s the best place to start!)

• Taking on the Challenges The challenge for many publishers is the thought that digital sales may cannibalise their core business. We heard from many speakers who had decided that THEY are better to compete with their business than someone else competing with them. (Oh, and by the way, your business of publishing books, you know, those with paper, is now called a ‘Legacy Business’!)

Martin Levin, Counsel, Cown, Latman and Liebowitz P.C. gave a great talk at Yale called ‘My Biggest Mistakes in Publishing’. At ninety-two years young, Levin has had an amazing career in publishing and you can read about some of his expertise here. He shared some of the decisions he made along his career that in retrospect were bad mistakes. One of them was walking away from a product that competed with the core business of the company he was with. Shortly afterwards THAT product took off and his company went out of business! He told us yes – DO compete with yourself by launching digital alongside your print business.

Marketing and Metadata I couldn’t count the number of times at Yale I heard about how important marketing is for discoverability in the digital age. Every opportunity you have you should collect the email address of your customers. Traditionally booksellers WERE your customers but people are now searching online for their books so it’s imperative to understand who your end purchaser is and why they are buying your title. Consider giving some content away for free, but perhaps ask for an email address before they receive it. People are generally happy to provide information for something they really want.

But it’s not just having the direct communication; it’s having the correct information about your title that helps them find you. Metadata is absolutely crucial to ensure published works are found online so make sure the retailers have the same standards you do and work with them to make sure it’s right.

One other point about marketing – make sure your catalogue is online. These days there’s a number of very affordable ways to do this and it avoids the hefty print costs associated with what is almost instantly out-of-date material.

Small Illustrated Publishers I asked a number of speakers what they would do if they were a small illustrated publisher in Australia. The answers varied from ‘Watch and learn, but don’t jump in too soon’ through to ‘Do nothing yet’. (These answers ARE assuming you have or are clearing rights, I can’t emphasise how important this is.) The reason for waiting is because technology is changing SO fast, and coming down in price every year. Don’t spend huge amounts on development when in the next 1-2 years there will be toolkits to enable you to do the same things at a much lower cost. Of course, there are alternatives, and certainly finding a young developer keen to work with you purely to build their CV seems to be one option a few have explored.

There are some other things you can do to prepare for your digital future.

Work with your authors Help and support your authors starting the creative vision for digital products. Educate them, especially about digital marketing and where they can support the discoverability of their books. Some of the larger authors have put together ‘Social Media Marketing Instruction Packs’ for their authors to help and guide them. If you can’t do afford to do this on your own then it might be worth working with a few other small companies to create one that you can share.

Work with your designers Educate your designers to ‘future-proof’ the work you are creating. Lisa McCloy-Kelly, Vice President/Director of Digital Production Operations at Random House Inc had some great specific instructions about how to go about this. • If your designer is creating an image, make sure they deliver it in colour even if you plan to use it in black and white.

• Keep layered files to make image editing easier later on.

• If adding text over an image, make it heavier so that it will read on a device, and if working with grey scale make sure the contrast is dark enough to render well on a greyscale device.

• If you are designing a chart, design more than one at the same time.

• Make sure you keep any special fonts that you may need if you are considering doing fixed layout ebooks in the future.

Photography If you are doing any photography, consider if you can take extra shots that you might use on future digital projects.If possible, do some video at the same time as you do any photography. Sometimes you might not have a firm plan for current use but having access to this extra digital content could be useful in the future.

Other good ideas

• Start to work out if you have content that can be serialised. Although the subscription model hasn’t been entirely worked out yet, it will be in the not-too-distant future.

• If you are considering apps, McCloy-Kelley from Random House Inc suggested you don’t approach them as duplicate content for your books. Look at how to make the content interactive, to deliver material in a different way than your published content.

• Michael Cader from Publishers Lunch/Publishers Marketplace thinks that small publishers have the opportunity to rethink how the model works. His message is you don’t need to work on the current business terms. Be flexible and don’t approach digital the same way you approach your business models for your print business. He recommended we think about Pan Macmillan’s Compass imprint –the legacy out of print titles they have digitised are on a different contractual model.

There was a lot to take in over the week of the course, and I hope that some of this has been useful. This is an exciting but also challenging time in Australian publishing and sharing information is one way we can help move forward the Australian digital industry.

Anna Maguire runs Digital Consultancy Digireado and tweets at @digireado.

Doctoring the Imagined Arse: Penguin Plays Rough shouts out for fiction

2011-09-23T09:23:16Z

When I was five, I dictated a play to my Mum. She typed it up on a grey hulk of a computer which ran on .dos and came in a box so big I actually got lost in it long enough for Mum to file a missing person’s report with the police. The Celebration was a masterpiece before its time – a year one extravaganza that crashed through the living room of my parent’s house. The bullies were evil animals of the forest (bunyips, foxes, etc) and the then love of my life, Thomas Caley – who I had already devoted copious Valentine gifts to and named my dog after – played my long-lost lover returning after years spent fighting in a distant war.

It was War and Peace meets Old MacDonald Had a Farm, and burned through resources at parent-teeth-grinding pace: my best friend and I used the entire supply of acrylic paints at both our houses on our painted king sheet-come-cyclorama. We relieved Franklins of all its cardboard boxes for the construction of Thomas’ WWI-replica bomber jet.

Now, with a safe twenty-three years wedged between me and The Celebration, I can see that the whole endeavour was an elaborate way of re-designing the world they way I, as an idealistic five-year-old, thought it should be; a world where bullies were fated to live in caves wearing nothing but brown lycra jumpsuits and egg cartons on their noses; where I got to live day-in, day-out, in the flower girl dress I’d worn at my brother’s wedding aged three; where I could actually kiss Thomas Caley in front of my sister’s video camera; and all the good animals of the forest (rabbits, kangaroos, etc) could think of nothing better to do than dedicate their lives to seeing us happy, together, embracing.

I needed to re-imagine things because, in the real world, Thomas had to be forced by his Mum to reciprocate a Valentine’s gift. This turned out to be one of his sister’s old books caked in baby food with torn pages and Texta scrawled over the pictures.

What I had orated to my Mum as a five-year-old could very well be dismissed as escapist fantasy. Fiction is often dismissed as such – especially imaginative fiction not seen to be as “important” as hard-hitting journalism.

Take this Facebook cutaway from October of last year:

Take a look, also, at the moderate swathe of ‘true story’ nights that have popped up in Sydney’s indie event calendar over the last year or so.

There isn’t anything wrong with hard-hitting journalism, of course, or a moderate swathe of ‘true stories’ filling Sydney’s indie event calendar. But the tendency in a great many people to dismiss fiction as being light entertainment, a fun way to fill a few holiday hours, or something that isn’t as interesting or important to programme as a ‘true’ story, is something I’ve been smelling in the air over the past year or so. And it’s been hovering, underscoring conversations, like a damp mould rising from what was once a cheese sandwich left behind the couch.

A great deal of recent (and not so recent) commentary points out just how blurry the distinction between ‘true stories’ and ‘imaginative fiction’ truly is. In his 1977 lecture Poetry, Borges suggests that realist prose is not necessarily any closer to mapping ‘reality’ than any other form of writing:

It is said that prose is closer to reality than poetry. I think this is wrong. There is an idea that has been attributed to the short story writer Horacio Quiroga: if a cold wind blows from the bank of the river, one must write simply, “a cold wind blows from the bank of the river.” Quiroga – if it was he who said this – seems to have forgotten that that construction is as far from reality as it is from the cold wind that blows from the bank of the river. What is our perception of it? We feel the air move, we call it wind; we feel that that wind comes from a certain direction, from the bank of the river. And with this we form something as complex as a poem by Gongóra or a sentence by Joyce. Let us return to that phrase, “a cold wind blows from the bank of the river.” We create a subject, wind, a verb, blows, and a context, from the bank of the river. All of this is far from reality. Reality is something simpler. That apparently prosaic and ordinary line, deliberately chosen as such by Quiroga, is a complicated phrase; it is a structure.

More recently, David Shields’ Reality Hunger, a manifesto made of cobbled together anecdotes and quotes, points out that:

There’s a good case for arguing that any narrative account is a form of fiction. The moment you arrange the world into words, you alter its nature.

In The Next American Essay, John D’Agata tells us that from the same Latin root for fact we get the words artifice, counterfeit, deficient, façade, infect, misfeasance and superficial. Facts – or the building blocks of ‘true stories’ – are slippery things. Just ask your garden variety quantum physicist.

Sometimes we’re blind to certain facts because the way we perceive the world has no room for them. Often, one wakes in the morning to discover that what was a fact yesterday is now ridiculous. Like the solipsistic ‘universe revolving around the earth’ bonanza. Or the mysterious ‘aether’ that supposedly fills our air.

The distinctions between short-fiction, creative non-fiction, poetry and plays can be useful when you want to get down to the nitty-gritty of how to make a piece of writing work. But sometimes it’s useful to step back and see the whole world of words –hell, even the whole world of art – as one business. The business of imagining.

The favourite mantra of writing schools – ‘write from what you know’ – urges young writers to do the opposite. Hence the large proportion of ‘semi-autobiographical’ first novels that hit the shelves each year. Imagining is much harder than carefully notating how you live and shaping it into a story arc. It requires empathy. It involves writing about what you don’t know as if you do. It demands writers research, roam outside the verisimilitude of their own mirrors, their backyards, and maybe even their national borders for characters, places, ideas and themes.

I believe the most important job we have as story-tellers is to re-imagine the world – even in journalism – and make readers see it in vibrant new ways they hadn’t thought to see it in before. It is this imagining, this daydreaming and ‘invention’ of the world that often reveals parts that have always existed, but required a tighter, larger or more off-kilter framework in order to be seen.

Kekule, a German organic chemist, famously cracked the structure of the benzene ring after dreaming of a serpent eating his own tail. It is not solely the important affairs of science and the state that benefit from such imagining, but the equally important affairs of the heart, the spirit and social organisation also.

Don’t allow Descartes and his cronies con you into thinking that just because these things are invisible they aren’t real. Writers and artists can make tangible that which is invisible. And in so doing, they assure us that we’re not deluded when we fall in love or have our hearts broken.

I am not suggesting that we all retreat into a Dungeons and Dragons world, blissfully ignorant of what fills our newspapers. Neither am I suggesting that objectively observable facts do not exist. I am suggesting that we need to exercise our imaginations in order to understand how ‘facts’ – bubbling away in our science labs or filling the columns of our newspapers – matter.

We need to exercise our imaginations in order to write better newspapers; in order to write poetry, short fiction, novels and film scripts that aren’t afraid to steal details from all corners of the real world (not just from ourselves). We must be bold in our visions of how to re-arrange and interpret facts. Because it’s one thing to claim you are an acute observer of the ‘real world’ – whatever that is – but it’s another to make observations come alive and to create visions in which readers can see why they should even care about those observations at all.

So then? Why have I been noticing so much maligning of imaginative fiction?

My hunch is that the ‘well-made’ skeleton we’ve been using to hold the flesh and blood of our fictional stories together (particularly realist fiction) has become arthritic. It’s starting to smell, much like our hypothetical cheese sandwich behind the couch.

I am now going to arrogantly stroll out into the middle of the internet pond, wave my fists at the sky, and declare … All Good Art Needs to Feel True.

Art critics, shoot me down. Go on. I dare you.

For something to feel true, is quite a different task than taking an old story board and filling it with actual events that happened to me or someone else. There are things that can feel true that can’t be seen under any biologists’ microscopes, or any sharp observer’s eye … and these sensations have something to do with the choppiness of a conversation, the rhythm of a story, the amount of time your friends will let you ramble before cutting you off or getting distracted by a kitten on YouTube. These things warp disastrously when we try to shove them into Old World story shapes.

There is something about the ADD-esque flicking of focus and mad tangle of ephemera in Nick Sun’s ‘The End’ in The Penguin Plays Rough Book of Short Stories that feels very true. The prose may well be described as clunky. He lapses into cleverness for the sake of cleverness, or weirdness for the sake of weirdness, but Sun’s is a divergent imagination that sprawls over the page like a Wikipedia mind map. His story predicts Bieber as the second messiah; recounts the Fourth Horse-person of the Apocalypse’s gender issues in minute detail; and manages to squeeze Africa, a black hole and a slam poetry battle all into the space of a 3000 word story.

‘The End’ is by no means a foolproof practical guide to how to survive the Apocalypse. You would be hard-pressed to find anything overly useful in its surface mulch. Dig a little under the silliness and you’ll find an imaginative structure that boldly reflects the way many of our 2011 minds leap from topic to topic like hyperactive fleas.

Last year the Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University, Susan Greenfield, was interviewed on The 7.30 Report about new developments in neuroplasticity. She spoke about experiments which showed that when subjects imagined playing finger exercises on a piano, the same neural pathways were traced in the brain as when they actually fingered the piano.

When I heard Professor Greenfield say this, something clicked. I’m beginning to understand now why I do what I do. And why I don’t want to do anything else. Using your imagination, encouraging people to think up new ways of dreaming, is important. It does leave a trace. It shouldn’t matter that science has found tangible proof of it.

There is more to life than things that can be evidenced; such as buying incrementally more expensive Ikea lamps over the course of your twenties as proof that you’re really growing up. There is more in life than the stuff you can see.

Imaginative fiction, poetry and all the other forms of writing can help us see what’s real, but invisible, and humming between the objects of our world. They can help us doctor the crippled, imagined arse of all the ‘true’ stories that fill our newspapers. They encourage us to not just ‘write from what we know’ – but stretch ourselves out of ourselves, exercise our empathy muscles, and be braver in our recreations of what feels true and vital right now.

Pip Smith is director of Penguin Plays Rough

Paying the Rent: Publishers throwing in their lot with the retail sector

2011-09-22T12:34:30Z

I’ve been watching with interest recent debates about retail rents. Obviously, in Australia at the moment, and not only in Australia, the retail sector is (sing along) ‘doing it tough’.

In the Melbourne Age newspaper of 20 September 2011, Premier Investments CEO, Mark McInnes, was reported saying an increasingly ‘adversarial’ relationship had led to Premier attaining a 30 per cent rent reduction after threatening to close one of its Portmans stores. Premier Investments’ retail chains also include Peter Alexander, Just Jeans, Jay Jays and Smiggle. According to McInnes (or to the Age quoting McInnes), ‘Landlords have got a business model, they are protecting that business model, the [shopping] centres are underperforming, the retailers are underperforming and there are massive arguments going on between retailers and landlords about the types of rent they are trying to get.’ Business commentator Malcolm Maiden, in the same paper on the same day, referred to the ‘the battle with landlords that is developing as the retail recession intensifies’.

For publishers, or for Monash University Publishing, at any rate, an important question is:

How much of this downturn is cyclical … occasioned by the international recession … and how much is structural: arising from the expansion of internet traders unencumbered by retail rents and staff and a host of other overheads associated with doing business in the retail sector on the street?

E.P. Thompson, in The Making of the English Working Class (1963), noted that the first mass political activism in the wake of the industrial revolution was not about low wages but high prices. If we’re in the early stages of a digital revolution, a possible parallel can be seen.

It hardly seemed a coincidence that in the Age, again of 21 September, another article reported on Australia Post struggling to keep up with delivery demands arising primarily from increased online shopping.

Of course, these two phenomena are likely to be related: consumers can be expected to look extra hard for bargains and forego the ‘real’ shopping experience (assuming that is worth experiencing) when money is especially short and economic confidence low. One businessman I was talking to recently, however, voiced the opinion that, because of the internet, retail rents need to come down by half before ‘shopfront’ retailers can compete with their online competitors. His successful clothing brand was driven to the wall by rent costs, and he was now re-launching the brand as an online entity only.

‘It will take a long time for the rent chargers to accept this need for their costs to come down,’ he said.

Has there ever been a truer word spoken?, I wondered.

At Monash University Publishing we have thrown our lot in with the retail sector. You can buy our books in human bookstores – I’ve been unsatisfied with that ubiquitous ‘bricks-and-mortar’ adjective, for bookstores, for some time, and am going with ‘human’ as more suggestive of these stores’ distinctive property – in Australia and New Zealand, North America, Asia and, soon, the UK, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. But I’ve been surprised at the number of print books we sell from our own site even though, naturally, we don’t undercut the retail price (except with special offers for contributors etc.). Getting to bookstores is, I guess, not always easy. I still believe for a range of reasons – primarily to do with maximising a book’s impact – that distribution into the human retail trade is the best option for us, and that human bookstores offer or can offer a unique and valuable service.

But, not surprisingly, perhaps, I also like the idea of those retail-property rents coming down, and of the price-competitiveness of our products going up.

Thinking about it for a moment, a more or less inevitable effect of the web and its spread would seem to be to make the specific location of retail outlets less important.

One could have said the same thing about the spread of car ownership and the growth of suburban society, after the 1940s, except of course that the growth of suburban car society resulted not in increased freedom for the retailer and the consumer but in increased cost burdens being placed upon, and fewer choices being made available for, them, because of the simultaneous rise of massive shopping centres offering retailers a ‘captive’ market of consumers extracted from their own, ordinary communities, and charging high rents for this privilege. (Jason Epstein discusses this dynamic in his eminently readable Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (2001).)

There is some hope, I think, that falling profits in the human retail sector will bring rents and prices in this sector down as well and, over time, lead not only to this sector’s renewed competitiveness but also increase the capacity of retailers … and most importantly bookshops, with their seemingly inevitable low margins … to be more creative and experimental in what they stock, and so to provide a better service for producers and consumers, including readers and publishers. What results might actually be a more diversified and interesting social landscape.

Nathan Hollier is Manager, Monash University Publishing

Janet DeNeefe Weighs in on the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival

2011-09-15T07:38:55Z

Ubud is the ideal location for a literary gathering. It has the feel of a village in a community that is exceedingly friendly and charming. It is also considered the cultural capital of Bali with its intriguing history of holy sages and European artists spending time here. Beyond the main road grow majestic rice fields and bamboo groves. There’s even a monkey forest reserve. The venues we use are elegant and spectacular. The wow factor is ever-present and creates a memorable experience.

The Ubud Writers & Readers Festival is now eight years old. We’ve come a long way since our first chaotic year in 2003. I remember back then how the writers were confused about just what was going on, when and were often left waiting at the airport. Sessions clashed and emotions were frazzled, strained. But it was also exhilarating and somehow a great success.

The UWRF is not your average festival. It’s held in two languages – meaning we need translators on board for certain sessions and that the work of authors is not always available in English. Our festival team is primarily Indonesian, with just about half of them organising the Indonesian authors and program. It’s an immense challenge but immensely rewarding.

We love inviting established authors as well as emerging ones. Those lesser known writers published by small presses are often the most dynamic and surprising speakers. The presence of Indonesian publishers also offers great opportunities and networking for our visiting guests.

Funding is our constant dilemma. Relying on the support of corporate sponsors leaves us in such a fragile place. Each year we have to start afresh with sponsors; seeking new ones, re-approaching old ones, talking to everyone. We have to fly to Jakarta to get this done. It is eternally difficult to attract a three-year agreement – as hard as we try. Citibank is a prime example of this. Just when we thought we had a solid sponsorship deal in place, they pulled the plug. This, of course, meant we had to drop a few authors. Plan B was to cut yet more writers, the program and events. Luckily, ANZ bank came on board, saving the day in 2011. We all breathed a huge sigh of relief and kept working on the program as we originally planned. Not having access to government funding to help cover basic running costs also makes it difficult.

I would like the foundation that organises and runs the festival to be stronger. To do so, I would like to see the formation a board to oversee the festival’s management.

Indonesian publishers are certainly interested in the works of Australian authors and international authors in general. Our job is to connect them, to help them meet new authors and get the ball rolling. This year at the festival we are holding an informal ‘meet Indonesian publishers’ session for authors and publishers to network. It’s really exciting when we see positive alliances form out of these gatherings.

The programming committee is always interested in small press publications and any work of quality. We are not a commercial festival, as such, so we are not governed by the major publishers to showcase their latest work. We have a lovely freedom to feature whoever we so desire! It makes for a dynamic line-up of authors who are not the usual suspects that the bigger festivals tend to only feature.

Janet DeNeefe is director of the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival.

Spring 2011 Poetry Feature Part 4: Adamson, Farrell, Nunn, Hardacre, Kerdijk Nicholson, Beesley

2011-09-08T10:24:57Z

Welcome to SPUNC’s Spring 2011 poetry feature. Over the course of National Poetry Week, we’ll post parts 1,2, 3 and 4 … a bumper crop of great poetry from some of our member presses' books.

If one, two or many of the poems jump out at you and offer you a cuppa, then we strongly encourage you to pick up a copy.

We look forward to featuring great poetry put out by Sunline Press, Odyssey Books, Hybrid Publishers, Papertiger.Media / SOI3 and Illura Press this summer.

Part 1: Hart, Ryan, Wearne, Harrison
Part 2: Sharkey, Alizadeh, Sykes, Goodfellow, Charlton, Tredinnick
Part 3: Day, Sherborne, Ballou, Mateer, Holland-Batt, Liversidge
Part 4: Adamson, Farrell, Nunn, Hardacre, Kerdijk Nicholson, Beesley

Currently, it’s springtime. Now, Part 4.

The Kingfisher’s Soul ~ Robert Adamson

A wave hits the shoreline of broken boulders

Explodes, fans into fine spray, a fluid wing,

Then drops back onto the tide: A spume

Of arterial blood. Our eyes can be gulled by what

The brain takes in—our spirits take flight

Each time we catch sight out—feathers of smoke

Dissolve in air as we glide towards clarity.

In the old days I used to think art

That was purely imagined could fly higher

Than anything real. Now I feel a small fluttering

Bird in my own pulse, a connection to sky.

Back then a part of me was only half alive:

Your breath blew a thicket of smoke from my eyes

And brought that half to life. There’s no

Evidence, nothing tangible, and no philosopher

Of blood considering possibilities,

Weighing up feathers, or souls. One day

Some evidence could spring from shadows

As my body did in rejecting the delicious poisons,

The lure of dark song. You came with a wind

In your gaze, flinging away trouble’s screw,

Laughing at the King of Hell’s weird command;

You created birthdays and the cheekbones

Of family—I was up, gliding through life

And my fabrications, thought’s soft cradle.

I scoured memory’s tricks from my own memory,

Its shots and score cards, those ambiguous lyrics—

Clear bird song was not human-song, hearing became

Nets and shadowy vibrations, the purring

Air, full of whispers and lies. I felt blank pages,

Indentations created by images, getting by

With the shapes I made from crafted habits.

You taught me how to weigh the harvest of light.

There was bright innocence in your spelling,

I learned to read again through wounded eyes.

Wispy spiders of withdrawal sparked with static

Electricity across skin, tiny veins, a tracery of

Coppery wires, conducting pain to nerve

Patterns: All lightweights, to your blood’s iron.

You brought along new light to live in

As well as read with—before you came, whenever

I caught a glimpse of my own blood, it seemed

A waterfall of bright cells as it bled away.

The clouds of euphony, created by its loss, became

Holes in thinking, pretend escape hatches. You’re now

A rush, wings through channels of my coronary

Arteries. We slept together when you conjured

A bed in your Paddington tree-house: barb-less hours,

Peace appeared and said: Soon, the future awaits you.

I stepped into the day, by following your gaze.

This poem appears in Robert Adamson’s collection, The Golden Bird, published by Black Inc. His collection, Black Water, is available from Brandl & Schlesinger.

the orange household ~ Michael Farrell

poets like kids in flap

the old glue laundry &;

donkeys dead

a roarer

he propped up

the bars &;

he brayed like someone honoured so much

time we spend at our friends looking

for termites genital rosebuds

from our lips racism is too

into your own streets lined with palm

the orange father bethlehem

in his mind a state of collapse

bags sugar in homage to an ancestress things

never need change ground the same piece of covering

valid over & over wrapping as an object

in strips of words infinitely large orange children

mourn the donkey sit down as they pour its breakfast

This poem appears in Michael Farrell’s collection, a raiders guide, published by Giramondo Publishing.

Bali Sunrise ~ Graham Nunn

Sunlight falls in slivers through the thatched walls of my villa. I can hear the early morning procession of motorbikes, a rasping voice that is never lost. The hibiscus outside my window is a rush of wings. The tiny bodies of these nameless birds, wide awake and restless. I had planned to sleep late this morning, but I find it impossible. This land, so wild, that I am forced to admire its beauty.

pulling back blinds

sun has touched

the rice paddy

This morning I wake at 4am. The strangeness of the hotel room hits like a bad dream. I slap at the crazy sting the mosquitoes have left on ankles and neck. Watch the shadows move through the old blinds. Darkness slowly comes apart, lifts away at the horizon, which leads me to think of my grandmother and the constellation of stars she is guarding. I light a stick of incense and whisper a prayer.

alone

a gecko joins

the conversation

iii

Another humid morning and I am up with the roosters, shaving the bristles from my tired face. The animal I have only heard has eaten the banana from my fruit bowl and left its black skin for the ants. The sky is hazy, depthless. Standing before the mirror I muse on my time here. I am a solitary Adam, in a foreign paradise.

far from home

a stranger cries

in the stillness

In the village market, they are laying out offerings for the gods. The closeness here makes me agitated. The streets a turbulent mix of artists, shopkeepers, drivers and dogs. Everything here rests on the edge of the tourist dollar. The bargaining is fierce and musical. They offer morning price and still we want less. The daily game of financial cat and mouse unfolds, until a price is reached. The vitality, the spiritual strength of these people make me weep as they smile and wish us good luck. In so many ways I have never felt so hollow.

counting our money

wind carries

the sound of laughter

Today has been gathering momentum, all of my thoughts converging into one – the poems, the people, the uninhibited beauty. Last night at the farewell party, the sky kept its stars hidden and words failed me. I tried to tell them everything, to speak of real beauty, but when asked, the silence was inevitable.

This morning, I stare through the mosquito net and watch the sunrise over the village. Images and textures, the taste and scent of this land rush through me in waves. I breathe it in.

a rooster crows -

last morning in Bali

This poem appears in Graham Nunn’s collection, Measuring the Depth, published by Pardalote Press.

5:15 ~ Paul Hardacre

words his brutal formality as

basement poem or smoky affair &

it could've been any dance club or

side of the road taking a piss / roll

in five for hanam-cit dawn laneway

treatment / a measured line of cranes

or mountains / a ronaldo wash & dry

your pre-pubescent sons / their culture

i guess / sublime orange & seasoned.

cornered she flowers in red canvas

winter all marching legs & head down

marble in green / the rusted ascent she

views the LZ flared & nothing below

to walk the rimy stone / conspicuously

wealthy & marvelled / all worn in the

head or shelled / didn't read it that way.

morning as a nacelle in acrylic

says 'that's not me' against the table

with cold fingers / the dead bonsai of

love in her mind as we pass the stall it's

byron calling on horseback in skimpy

roman armour / the grand chuckled

apology in leather & bone / sunlit dye

or later wetland sharing gum at dusk

to run / to find her voice gram-positive

This poem appears in Paul Hardacre’s collection, Love in the place of rats, published by Transit Lounge.

They talk to you, they give you one or two keys, an empty map of another earth ~ Anna Kerdijk Nicholson

These nights are a world of sound, you wrap a blanket

round you and sit, and then there it goes again,

behind the clouds, a flicker, lightning, you’d be bound,

but others say no, it’s a precursor to the southern lights.

Your ink is used to survey and chart and yet you doubt it,

surmise your words will grow nasty mould. Judgment:

in import grimmer than azimuth, zenith, lunar longitude;

in its calculation and consequence further-reaching.

You take possession of islands every day: every

thing within range of your eye seems capable of

dissolution and reconstitution at the tip of your pen.

It is ‘all for the Glory of God and for your King’,

they say; but only sons of bitches could say that:

in this phosphorescent age, you are footprints on the moon.

This poem appears in Anna Kerdijk Nicholson’s collection, Posession, published by 5 Islands Press.

Temperature and Actresses ~ Luke Beesley

afterThe Vertical Ray of the Sun, a film by Tran Anh Hung

We emptied mosquito nets

of the morning air

or simply took them off her

How strange this scene would tell

if we took its colour in a picture

The white lie

of its colour and form

as the orange curtains just happened

to lift with the wind

between the conversation.

– We are simply human fires.

She talked of the face

the expressions, the taste especially

smoking cigarettes and the smouldering talk

of art and passions. The reaction

of warmth to rain.

- How to place

the constellation of our life?

She used the word prayer because it’s restful. Think –

the cool, damp architecture of religion

the beauty left

A soft word

in a sure sentence.

The sexuality of fainting.

This poem appears in Luke Beesley’s collection, Lemon Shark, published by SOI3.

Spring 2011 Poetry Feature Part 3: Day, Sherborne, Ballou, Mateer, Holland-Batt, Liversidge

2011-09-07T10:44:09Z

Welcome to SPUNC’s Spring 2011 poetry feature. Over the course of National Poetry Week, we’ll post parts 1,2, 3 and 4 … a bumper crop of great poetry from some of our member presses' books.

If one, two or many of the poems jump out at you and offer you a cuppa, then we strongly encourage you to pick up a copy.

We look forward to featuring great poetry put out by Sunline Press, Odyssey Books, Hybrid Publishers, Papertiger.Media / SOI3 and Illura Press this summer.

Currently, it’s springtime. Now, Part 3.

Theories of Probability ~ Sarah Day

I’m listening to the long range forecaster

examining the earth’s chronology;

it seems there’s no averting a disaster,

no desperate appeals to the Ringmaster,

no recourse to the drug of lethargy.

I’m listening to the long range forecaster,

the constancy with which we’re struck by aster-

oids precipitates an early elegy,

it seems there’s no averting a disaster;

We’re tenuous any way you look, past or

future say the annals of geology,

it seems there’s no averting a disaster:

and though this rudely spells potluck vaster

than our comprehension and technology

(I’m listening to the long range forecaster);

to stuff it up ourselves seems so lacklustre,

Blind Chance appeals to my psychology.

I’m listening to the long range forecaster,

it seems there’s no averting a disaster.

This poem appears in Sarah Day’s collection, Grass Notes, published by Brandl & Schlesinger.

Journo ~ Craig Sherborne

My desk’s across from Racing.

I’m Murders-Paedophiles-Falls from Grace

who bellow back through a fly-screen

while my pen wags across the page: I make

stick figures without limbs,

a foot with a snapped leg,

half an arm, three fingers

bent back, splayed.

I have no second language

unless you count these stumps

of words I use, scratches

and splinters on shorthand paper.

At first glance a sheet of music

but with all the notes broken.

My hand’s a plastic telephone.

I shoulder it kinked against my ear,

top lip kissing the speaker dots.

Grievers refuse to talk to me

but “I’m sorry for your loss” is enough

to finesse their heavy, thank-you breath—

the elocution of trust.

For comment, Professors of Everything begin

their quotes with the usual “Sad”.

I wait for the dead to happen.

“That’s why it’s called a deadline,”

I yawn to the new girl,

like showing off a callous, a scar.

She frowns admiringly.

She’s never seen a corpse but wants to.

This poem appears in Craig Sherborne’s collection, Necessary Evil, published by Black Inc.

On the Subject of Untimely Extinction ~ Emily Ballou

Though the Elephas maximus had made it, old shaggy Mastodon

suffered a fateful extinguishment, Captain Fitzroy enlightened,

due to the door of the ark being cut much

too small for its four sworded tusks.

Darwin could just see it

like a massive, ancient Highland cow

one brown eye peering the slit in its knotted fringe;

he could hear its bellowing deep mawww

as it watched from shore the flood waters rush in,

the boat float off without him.

This poem appears in Emily Ballou’s collection, The Darwin Poems, published by UWAP.

After Returning from A Voyage of Exploration ~ John Mateer

On the pillow John Mateer’s sleepy head

is a goldfish bowl aswirl with Venetian water,

and on that galleon, that luminous toy,

he is at the helm, telescope to his eye,

swearing he can’t see Australia.

And when his caravel glides into the Tejo,

as poised and cerebral as a black swan,

he calls for a glass of port and a pastel de nata,

then takes to his bed in a quiet hotel in Alfama,

and dreams the dream:

that one day there will be a poet

named John Mater, just as there was once,

off the edge of maps, a monster

called Australia.

This poem appears in John Mateer’s collection, Southern Barbarians, published by Giramondo Press. His collection, The West, is available from Fremantle Press.

The Art of Disappearing ~ Sarah Holland-Batt

The moon that broke on the fencepost will not hold.

Desire will not hold. Memory will not hold.

The house you grew up in; its eaves; its attic will not hold.

The still lives and the Botticellis will not hold.

The white peaches in the bowl will not hold.

Something is always about to happen.

You get married, you change your name,

and the sun you wore like a scarf on your wrist has vanished.

It is an art, this ever more escaping grasp of things;

imperatives will not still it – no stay or wait or keep

to seize the disappeared and hold it clear, like pain.

So tell the car idling in the street to go on;

tell the skirmish of chesspieces to go on;

tell the scraps of paper, the lines to go on.

It is winter: that means the blossoms are gone,

that means the days are getting shorter.

And the dark water flows endlessly on.

This poem appears in Sarah Holland-Batt’s collection, Aria, published by UQP.

The lawn ~ Ray Liversidge

Spring has returned. The earth is like a child that knows poems.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

He is mowing the lawn, again.

Again it is unnecessary.

Like pulling grey hairs from

A greying head.

On another warm November evening

I put down the newspaper with

The interminable stories on emissions trading,

The growing number of climate change sceptics,

To watch him do what he does

Every other Sunday:

Go at it like there’s no tomorrow.

I want him to stop

Mowing the parched lawn,

But his body moves with such speed and purpose

That I believe he is fearful

Of grass and its slow and mysterious growth.

I want him to take the lawn clippings collected,

Like analects, in the grass catcher,

And spread them at the foot of the tree

Leaning into the corner of his garden.

I want to shake him

Like the wind shakes his cottage garden

When it blows hot

And hard from the north.

I want him to enter his house

When he has finished using the edge trimmer

And look up the word concinnity.

I need him to listen to the earth,

Know poems.

This poem appears in Ray Liversidge’s chapbook included in Triptych Poets 1, published by Blemish Books.