About Simon Patton: Dotting a Few I’s
I was born in suburban Melbourne, Australia in 1961, left-handed and an introvert.
I got interested in poetry at around the same time I started listening to the radio. My first effort, scribbled at the age of fourteen, was a song called “At the Beach Party” . . .
I went to uni in 1980 to study poetry. I switched to Chinese instead in my second year.
In 1997, I received a fax (remember them?) inviting me to Hong Kong to work as an editorial assistant at Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine. I did three separate stints in 1998, 1999 and 2000. It was fabulous, and sparked my interest in King Hong Kong — an interest that has “snowballed” ever since.
I co-edited the China domain of Poetry International Web with the Chinese poet Yu Jian from 2002 to 2008. I took on more poets than I could handle, but we made a few more Chinese voices audible.
I escaped the city in 2011 and have remained escaped to this day.
I currently live with my partner, cat, chickens, goldfish and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria.
Recent work includes:
- A poetry review of up though branches by Kit Kelen in Plumwood Mountain journal (August 2018);
- twelve poems by Hu Xian translated in Chinese Arts and Letters, Vol. 5, No. 1 (June 2018);
- a poetry review of Homing by Shevaun Cooley, in Plumwood Mountain journal (February 2018);
- three poems published in Cha’s special Hong Kong issue (December 2017);
- twelve poems Yang Ke translated in Two Halves of the World Apple published by University of Oklahoma Press (October 2017);
- a poem, “Sulphur-crested Cockatoos”, in Plumwood Mountain journal (August 2017);
- a poetry review of Fragments by Antigone Kefala, in the Sydney Review of Books (July 2017);
- a poem, “Thirteen Swifties”, in Cordite (May 2017);
- and a journal article co-written with Omid Azadibougar entitled “Manuchehri Damghani and Basil Bunting’s ‘Overdrafts’” in Translation and Literature, Vol. 25, Part 3: 339-362 (2016).
