Friday 19 January 2024

New site for poetry

'Anti Pode' is the dark cousin of HA, anti-pode.blogspot.com the yang to HA's yin, the bread to the cheese, the cream to HA's strawberries. I never thought of usig this URL back in 2006 when I reserved it. Well think about THAT,  it's been 18 years since I made the decision - not having been able to reserve antipodean.blogspot.com - to get this one. I wonder how this project is going to go. 

I've done so much with HA it's almost reached the end of its working life, but I hate letting go. I have this irrational need to conserve, as I have outlined in 'Leontography' (see link in sidebar) and so ditching HA just because I've got all these shiny new toys (shiny new URLs) goes against my nature. I'm the guy spending thousands of dollars to preserve flags, pieces of embroidery, old etchings. Give me a lost cause and I'll champion it.

I'll stuff my life with these old ghosts.

My plan with 'Anti Pode' is to post poems that have already been published elsewhere. There's an obvious selfish reason for this policy, in that many literary magazines and website require that material submitted be new and unseen. Fair enough. I did send some poems to a journal recently that had asked SPECIFICALLY for already-published material, but this is very much the exception.

I have hundreds of poems and a number of major projects, what I call collections or sequences, I sort of use the  terms interchangeably, I'm not a pedant. The 'Anti Pode' blog allows me to feature these sequences because I can make a 'Page' for the ones from which poems published on the blog have been taken. I took the images for the new site from my own records. One is from a road trip in December 2008 and the other is a shot taken out of my window in Pyrmont in about 2017. There's a tagline on the blog as well to localise it for international visitors. Many people won't get the "antipodean" reference because, to be honest, it's not a common word. So I upped the ante with a little bit of text designed to make the cartographically-challenged feel comfortable.

Go and see.

If you like anything on 'Anti Pode' please leave a comment. I have this instruction on the 'Legacy stuff' page on HA - frequent visitors might notice that HA has had a major redesign today - but it's worthwhile repeating it. Bloggers mostly work in silence and any acknowledgement of their efforts is devoured voraciously by a receptive psyche.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing. I look forward to being in touch with your work.

Matthew da Silva said...

Y're welcome!