Very Like A Whale

Australian poet Sam Byfield answers the ten questions this week. He just got back to Australia from a lengthy spell in China and his publication trajectory is inspirationally international. Many thanks for participating, Sam.

1. Describe your publishing trajectory. Where did it start? Where is it now? How long have you been at it?

I still remember my first publication very fondly, in 2005 in the recently defunct Lily Lit Review. In 2005 and 2006 I continued submitting to the better online literary journals and published in most of the places I wanted to. By mid 2006 I had the confidence to submit more to print journals. From then until recently I’ve been living in China, and so my submissions were limited to who would accept online submissions. Meridian was my first print acceptance and, as with Lily a year earlier, I was grateful that they were prepared to publish someone without much of a track record. In the past 12 months I’ve published in about a dozen print journals, including National Poetry Review, Diner and Cream City Review (US), Heat and LiNQ (Australia), Nimesis (UK) and The Asian Literary Review (Hong Kong) and am forthcoming in two anthologies, Outside Voices and Poetry Without Borders. I’ve become more selective with my online publications, focusing on better known zines, preferably that pay and publish the sorts of poets I find in print zines- Cordite and Mascara are two recent Australian examples.

In 2007 I published my first chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, with Pudding House Press, a little collection written during my first year in China. Publishing my first chapbook was a great experience- it gave me something tangible that I could show to the world. And it gave me the confidence to tell people I was a ‘writer’- without a book, it can be difficult to tell people who aren’t writers what you do, what the hundreds of hours you spend on the craft amount to. At the start of 2008 I launched it at Beijing literary venue The Bookworm, doing some readings from it and later work. I will be reading at the launch of the Poetry Without Borders anthology at the Sydney Writers Festival on May 22, alongside some pretty impressive poets, something I’m really excited about.

At the moment I’m finishing off my first full length collection, which I’m hoping to publish in Australia sometime this year. It’s shaping up as a two section book, the first based in China and Asia generally, the second focused on Australia. It may well evolve in a different direction though. Over the past six months my poetry has taken some interesting twists. I’ve been writing some ekphrastic poems and some historical poems, based in China and Australia. My first degree was in Australian history, and I’m finding the early history of Australian settlers to be a particularly rich poetic seam.

2. What would you do differently if you had to start all over again?

I’m a comparatively new writer, and I’m pretty happy with the trajectory I’ve taken so far. There are a few online journals I wouldn’t publish in if I had my time again, because of inattentive editors or generally bad poetry that I would have noticed if I’d paid more attention to previous issue, but these things are often only obvious in hindsight.

When I first started publishing I had an extremely unpleasant encounter with an ezine (whose name I won’t mention- suffice to say I’ve never published there, and won’t!). I submitted a few poems and a few weeks later received an email basically saying ‘yes, we thought your poems were great- but no, we won’t be publishing them because you plagiarized them. We searched them and found one of them had already been workshopped on bla bla bla online workshop. Not only will we not publish it but we’ll send an email to every editor we know telling them you’re a filthy plagiarist.’ My version is probably more polite than the actual email. You can understand my shock at not being asked to explain the situation and at the editors not even Googling me to work out if I’d published elsewhere or was workshopping online. Of course, what had happened was that someone had read a poem of mine that I’d workshopped at an open online community and has decided to steal it and workshop it elsewhere as their own. I sent off an email explaining the situation, showing them where I’d workshopped it previously, with references from the admin staff at this other community verifying what I’d said and showing them the thread, date-stamped, where I’d workshopped it. I received a reply email from the editor of the ezine saying that, yes, I was correct, but that I should understand the pressures editors are under and that hers had been the right course of action. All in all it was the most unprofessional display I could imagine.

3. Why did you start seeking publication? Why do you continue?

As with Kristy Bowen’s answer previously, it’s partly about having a readership. I get a real buzz knowing that not only a whole bunch of people are reading my work online, but that people on at least four different continents are reading print journals with my work in them. A positive form of globalisation, you might call it. I like to think it enhances cultural understanding- certainly, when I read poetry coming out of places I haven’t been, I get a better understanding of those places and people.

Also, of course, ambition is involved. Publishing is a yardstick for how my poetry is progressing. When I get an acceptance from a big name journal it pushes me to write more, to trust my own voice, to push myself to be the best poet I can be. In addition, I get a buzz out of seeing my work alongside that of poets I really respect.

One thing I really strive towards is to be genuinely international, and have both a strong print and online presence. In an Australian context, there aren’t many poets publishing beyond Australia, which I think is a shame. There’s a certain insularity that comes with that (or causes it), and a defensiveness I’ve found in one or two Aussie writers. I tend to think the quality of poetry being published in US print journals is on the whole more diverse, more interesting, and generally stronger than that being published in Australia.

4. Does your relationship with your work change after it is published and if so, how? How does the concept of publication affect your writing in general?

I revise very little after something’s been published. Occasionally I’ll change a few words or lines, but usually when I send something off it’s because I’m happy with the product, and I figure it’s best for my sanity if I let go of them at some point. If it’s in a magazine I feel like it’s found a home, though I always keep an eye out for anthologies and journals that accept previously published stuff, nothing wrong with having two homes.

I don’t write for any particular audience, except in the sense that I want the poem to be good so that people enjoy it. One thing I aim for in my poetry is a sort of universality, an emotional core, an accessibility. As with all writers, my work comes from a unique set of life experiences and personality factors, but I want a range of people to be able to get something from it, to be able to enjoy it on some level, to be able to connect with an image or an emotion or a place, or some shared experience.

5. Talk about putting a chapbook together. How have you done it in the past, how would you do it differently now? Why are chapbooks a good thing or not a good thing?

I’ve done it once and enjoyed the process. It was a chapbook of writing from my first year in China, and return to Australia, so there was definitely a sense of narrative development. Anyone who was critiquing and reading my poems during that time would know that place played a huge part in the writing of the poems, and man-woman stuff.

More recently, I’ve been working on a few different series. I’m still writing personal poetry, but in a lot of cases I’m exploring different narrators and voices, different physical and emotional landscapes. There’s still a piece of me in each poem, an emotional core or a familiar place or experience, but I like to think I’m getting more expansive. These might evolve into specific chapbooks, though there’s a way to go yet.

Chapbooks are great. I see them as little milestones for a poet, a way of getting a certain frame of work into a book, of it being accessible. Ten bucks for a chapbook is really just three coffees. I try to buy chapbooks when I’ve got the money and really enjoy having the work of people I admire sitting in my bookcase, especially if I’m friends with the authors.
In my own case, even if one doesn’t like my poetry, the paper is high quality and is good for building fires on cold nights.

6. What’s your advice to someone putting together a full-length poetry manuscript for the first time? Share your thoughts on the importance (or not) of narrative arc in poetry manuscripts.

Not having released a full length book yet I’m probably not well placed to answer this. I’ve enjoyed books that have a strong sense of narrative arc, and books that don’t. I tend to think the connections between poems, the consistencies and evolutions of tone and theme and emotional core, are important- certain poems work best when placed before or after certain other poems. One good example is Steve Mueske’s collection A Mnemonic for Desire (Ghost Road Press), which I recently purchased. The book consists of 5 sections, and there are distinct patterns that emerge in each section, which give the individual sections and collection as a whole a cohesive, balanced feel. There are themes and voices and images that reappear several times in the book, and the beginnings and ends of sections drive the overall narrative in a very strong way.

7. Do you personally market your publications? If so, why and how, and do you enjoy it? If not, why not?

Having spent much of the past few years in China, my capacity for marketing has been limited. That said, I’m an active member of several online communities (The Gazebo, and the private workshop Lily’s Forum), and marketed and sold my chapbook to members there. While I was back in Australia for a few weeks last year I gave copies of the chapbook to friends of mine, who I tasked with pestering their friends to buy copies, and before leaving China in early March I made all my friends there buy a copy (though I sold them at half price and spent the money on beer so my business skills could be questioned).

The Australian publishing scene, especially poets under the age of 40, isn’t big, and I’m hoping to offload some copies of From the Middle Kingdom to bookstores when I return.

8. Complete the following sentences: Big-name poetry publishers look good on your poetry CV, and have a capacity to help with marketing and readings that smaller publishers might not.

9. Small- and micro-presses can take risks larger publishers can’t.

10. Describe the ideal relationship with a publisher and the relationship with a publisher from hell.

I’ve had no problems with Pudding House Press. I think, especially for publishing a first book, they are a great place to do it- fast, easy and the quality of the chapbooks is first class. And I was able to use my own cover art, draw especially for the book by my sister Erin, which was a really nice bonus.

That said, next time I publish I’d like to do it with someone bigger, in a position to help facilitate some publicity and readings. There are a few publishers in Australia who I’m looking at, though at this preliminary stage I’m getting the impression that publishing a first full length collection is probably easier in the US than at home.

I can’t really think of what would constitute a hellish relationship with a publisher. I’ve had one or two hellish relationships, but that’s another matter entirely.

<><><>

Sam Byfield is the author of From the Middle Kingdom (Pudding House Press). He has been published in North America, Australia, the UK and Hong Kong, and widely online, and is forthcoming in the Poetry Without Borders (Picaro) and Outside Voices anthologies. He has just returned to Australia after living in China, and can be contacted at sambyfield@gmail.com.

<><><>

Previously on Ten Questions:

1. Kristy Bowen
2. Reginald Shepherd
3. Carolyn Guinzio
4. Nate Pritts

Coming up:

6. Neil Aitken, March 13
7. Edward Byrne, March 27
8. Rachel Bunting, April 3
9. Brent Fisk, April 10
10. Ivy Alvarez, April 17
11. Michaela Gabriel, April 24
12. Ron Silliman, May 8

Standing Page