Frank Lord | The Poet Warlord

Two poems contributed to Unusual Work No. 38
Published by Collective Effort Press, November, 2024, Melbourne, Australia, ISSN: 1832-5009

Another Day, Another Dollar
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SCHLOCK!!!
Published by No More Poetry, June, 2024, Melbourne, Australia, ISBN: 978-0-9756425-2-8

Poems about psychosis, Hollywood schmaltz and urban bohemia.

A word from the publisher:

“No More Poetry are excited to publish the third poetry collection from local writer and artist Frank Lord, a collection of writing birthed between the melting realities of urban detritus, art-making and psychosis. The work is appropriately frank (honest), rendering it deeply funny and generously precise. The poems have time. The free-verse and concrete poems meander a contemporary existentialism on the impoverished clock of government benefits and the artist’s search eternal.”

Available at: https://nomorepoetry.art/21

Two poems contributed to Unusual Work No. 37
Published by Collective Effort Press, June, 2024, Melbourne, Australia, ISSN: 1832-5009

Academics on the Run
Intergenerational Trauma

Four poems contributed to Unusual Work No. 36
Published by Collective Effort Press, November, 2023, Melbourne, Australia, ISSN: 1832-5009

Kill Me & Sell My Body Parts on the Black Market for Heroin & Coca-Cola
A Poem About a Junkie
The Housing Crisis
Down & Out in East Melbourne

Six poems contributed to Unusual Work No. 35
Published by Collective Effort Press, April, 2023, Melbourne, Australia, ISSN: 1832-5009

Monday Evening
A Poem for My Neighbour
Mt Alexander Road
The Cragieburn Line
The Supermarket
A Memory of Twenty-Four

Seven poems contributed to Unusual Work No. 34
Published by Collective Effort Press, November, 2022, Melbourne, Australia, ISSN: 1832-5009

One day I woke up hungover to a mysterious email from a poet called 𝝅O, a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene, the chronicler of Melbourne and its culture and migrations, a pioneer of performance poetry in Australia, and a highly disciplined anarchist.

In that email he claimed to have found my first book, Seventy-Seven Tales From Urban Psychosis, in an op shop in Preston, and he loved it so much he wanted to reached out to ask whether I had any other poems he could read. If I did, and if he liked them, he would publish them in his biannual magazine, Unusual Work, a magazine of experimental poetry, prose, pictures, paintings, photographs, sketches, sculpture, art, ideas, politics, and anything else starting with abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.

I had long since given up the act of writing due to a long long long string of failures. In fact, I hadn't written a poem in several years, but I had some old ones lying around on my hard drive so I said sure.

The poems published include:

The Break-Up
Groped on the Tram
Good Friday
The Morning Commute
Interplanetary Courtship
$$$
Confessions of a Train Wreck

This was the beginning of my friendship with 𝝅O, and I am forever grateful to him for lifting me up out of the gutter when no one else would.

A Day in the Life
Published by MoodWar, June, 2017, Melbourne, Australia, ISBN: 978-0-646-96903-9

MoodWar gave me a year to make another book. This was the product.

I was living with God at the time. And I had a girlfriend who I loved. I'm still in contact with God but not the girlfriend. I wish it were the other way around. God and I would spend our days smoking pot and playing Nintendo 64. Sometimes Mario Kart but mostly Super Smash Bros. Maybe that's why she left me.

When she eventually did leave me I thought fuck it and left the country. I went to Southeast Asia and stayed there for five months. I visited Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. I associated with well-known gang members and was paranoid the whole time. So so paranoid.

Seventy-Seven Tales From Urban Psychosis
Published by MoodWar, June, 2016, Melbourne, Australia, ISBN: 978-1-682-73487-2

I made this book when I was 25. I was so happy back then. At the beginning of everything. And the end.

I had never written a poem in my life but that summer for some reason I felt compelled to. It was an exceptionally hot summer. I had just returned from Europe and didn't have any air conditioning. I was living in North Melbourne in a slanted two-storey terrace that was slowly sinking into the ground. It sucked. There were six of us in that house, and none of us were on the lease. That became a major problem later on.

I didn't tell anyone I was writing this book. Out of fear maybe. I worked on it in private over the course of six months. Then I printed and bound it myself and started dumping it in places around the city: trams, park benches, toilets, the gutter. Soon MoodWar got in contact with me. They wanted to release it on their new imprint. We got a beer at a pub on a Wednesday night to talk about it. That's how we met, and I am forever grateful to them for believing in me and encouraging me to become an artist.