CORDITE POETRY REVIEW
ISSUE 45.0: SILENCE
Released: 1 February 2014

ESSAYS

Jan Owen
SILENCE Editorial

Saturday, February 1st, 2014

Silence seems a paradoxical and perhaps daunting theme for writers, yet it strikes me as tantalizingly hospitable too. It was pleasing that 494 writers took up the challenge, submitting some 1100 poems; my warm thanks to you all. This high volume meant that a number of fine poems had to be regretfully declined. A common element in those I finally selected was assurance and presence, the sense of a person thinking through the poem – and of the poem thinking through the person. Precision, energy, surprise and an unlikely angle were other touchstones. Feeling, too, of course; silence, actual or metaphoric, can certainly be neutral, but more often it affects us either negatively or positively: as nothingness, dread, loss, denial and oppression, or else as affirmation, safety, intuitive understanding, intimacy, transcendence, and so on. For me, as for many of those submitting, the theme summons up death – the lost voices – but also a sense of mysterious imminence and immanence.

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REVIEWS

Libby Hart Reviews Kate Middleton

Wednesday, March 5th, 2014

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INTERVIEWS

Klick: Im Gespräch mit Ann Cotten

Sunday, September 1st, 2013

Also gut, nun dies: Vor einigen Jahren war ein Teil meines Hirns voll mit kargem, sprunghaftem MAX/MSP, dronenartigem Zeug. Es ist immer noch so. Auf der ständigen Suche (immerfort mehr! Alles, immer!) nach AGF-Kompositionen (ein Pseudonym der Künstlerin Antje-Greie Fuchs … Recherche lohnt sich). Ich fand live Sets, die sie online gestellt hatte. In einer davon kam eine deutsche Dichterin vor, die auf der Bühne ihre Stimme über den AGFs Malstrom aus Mikro Klicks, Brüchen und Rauschen hinweg lesend, rezitierend, beschwörend live klingen ließ.

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SCHOLARLY

Selina Tusitala Marsh
Black Stone Poetry: Vanuatu’s Grace Mera Molisa

Saturday, February 1st, 2014

Black stone is both a figurative and literal reference to the (vanua) of Vanuatu, specifically, its black solidified lava base. Like many Pacific Islands, Vanuatu is founded on dormant and live volcanoes that impact upon the daily reality of its inhabitants. This essay examines the poetry of Grace Mera Molisa and how black stone is deployed as a key metaphor in her work as both poet and politician. Like black stone, Molisa has been a foundational creative and critical force in the formation of Vanuatu as a postcolonial nation, one based on an indelible Ni-Vanuatu spirit.

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GUNCOTTON BLOG

Helen Lambert and Louis Armand
Submission to Cordite 47: COLLABORATION Open!

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014

Poetry for Cordite 47: COLLABORATION is guest-edited by Helen Lambert (Moscow) and Louis Armand (Prague). What kind of poems are we looking for?: Two (or more) people working together to create a poetic work (written, visual, audio, video, etc). This …

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