- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
CONTRIBUTORS
Ali Alizadeh
The Fall of the West
Despite cutbacks, delays, interruptions the poison in my stomach didn’t succeed. Had to walk from the station of course, no more buses after 11pm. Feet sincerely sore, the night suitably spooky, at least rain didn’t add to my despair. Public …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
The Non-Vegetarian
(after Han Kang) It makes perfect sense, really to make the most of this body before the rot sets in. Maybe a premature sky burial, and who better than the ghost in this deadbeat machine to preside as chef de …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
The 3rd Poem
(for Sin Yong-Mok) Cross-cultural implies there are cultures to cross. There are bodies and languages sure, but cultures? What is so innately different between kimchi and vegemite these things one eats, then one forgets about as they’re transformed into a …
Posted in INVISIBLE WALLS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
‘Beware! This is not a real biography!’: Ali Alizadeh Interviews Jessica L Wilkinson
To many, biographies are a generic section in a bookshop which showcase – as this interview will discuss – a supposed element of ‘truth’. Suggestions of worthiness through platitudes such as ‘based on a true story’ or a ‘definitive biography …
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, George Balanchine, Jessica L. Wilkinson, Marion Davies, Percy Grainger, Rae Armantrout
Plato, Badiou and I: an Experiment in Writerly Happiness
I have many irresolvable arguments with a close and particularly argumentative friend of mine. We regularly disagree, in a civilised, congenial way, on specific topics to do with politics, love, the weather, Asian food and ethics.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alain Badiou, Ali Alizadeh, Michel Foucault, Plato
Off Kilter
This be the fulcrum, order’s pivot. Powers oscillate my words the rivet, evil, chthonic, to show you malfeasance, the urgency to recompense, the levers wholly off kilter: 1) The tigerfish is the carnivore of the Congo. Obtruding fangs eyes tenebrous …
Posted in 77: EXPLODE
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Chris Andrews
In a recent article published in Sydney Review of Books, Emmett Stinson argues that Australian reviewers’ and readers’ responses to Australian short story collections are regulated by the receptions of these authors in the US. And so, according to Stinson, the so-called cultural cringe lives on. But is this really the case? And should we really be suspicious of internationally recognised Australian writers such as Chris Andrews whose second collection of poems has been published by Baltimore’s Waywiser Press, the publishers of such giants of US poetry as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Chris Andrews, Emmett Stinson
Ali Alizadeh Interviews Paul Kane
Paul Kane is the Professor of English and Co-Associate Chair of English at Vassar College in the Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City. In addition to being a prolific poet and scholar of American literature, he is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Australian poetry.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Australian poetry, Paul Kane
Ali Alizadeh Reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2012’
Whatever one may expect from an anthology of contemporary poetry released by a mainstream commercial publisher – an accessible selection of diverse voices and styles, one for both the non-specialist, general reader as well as the (less snobbish) connoisseur, a selection featuring promising emerging writers as well as more prominent authors, and so on – Black Inc. Publishing’s annual Best Australian Poems Series has been meeting these expectations, more or less consistently, for close to a decade. And despite the series’ many specific strengths and few weaknesses, the latest addition to the series follows the same general tradition successfully.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Felicity Plunkett, Jessica L. Wilkinson, john tranter
THE REALPOETIK MANIFESTO
FOR TOO LONG has poetry been disregarded as a valid vehicle for the exploration of real world experience. Too often has poetry been filed in the ‘too hard’ basket and deemed ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inaccessible.’
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Jessica L. Wilkinson
Act #12
Vintage in verisimilitude. Private Sale – Vacant Position – Business 1 Zone. Scent of sandalwood, inconsequential bells, organic food and runes. Fortitude begs futurism. Health store – Home ware – Souvenirs. Unrequited regret: fetish value fades from my wallet, untold …
Posted in 49: SYDNEY
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews David Brooks
‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, the central event in the history of modern Australian poetry. Brooks’s account is an engrossing, at times exhilarating journey through the landscape of early-mid twentieth century Modernist poetry, but it also leaves the question of the need for yet another volume about the infamous hoax more or less unanswered.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, David Brooks, ern malley
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter
In his 2007 essay ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, David McCooey identified the prevailing mode of poetry in contemporary Australia as a negotiation between experimentalism (the new) and traditional composition (lyricism). This view is apposite in describing the work of many important poets of the last couple of decades; but a number of newer Australian poets have gone beyond and broken with this conciliation.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Claire Potter, Maria Takolander
Aa-zaa-dee (아-자-디)
How can I define this Real of language in words? Signs betray its unsayable being like a hoax. Has no authenticity cheated by fakeness; condemns all things to fantasy. How can I praise this enemy of appreciation? When it’s around …
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Kim Sunghyun
Grey (회색빛)
for Felicity Plunkett i In this World – which is not a world – black and white withhold truths. In a world we’d have multiplicities, the purity of unqualified impurities. In ours we possess , are possessed by, the comprehension …
Posted in 44: OZ-KO (HOJU-HANGUK)
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Kim Sunghyun
Ali Alizadeh Reviews John Mateer
Since the publication of his startling first collection Burning Swans in 1989, John Mateer has established himself as one of the key Australian poets who, for the absence of a better term, can be broadly labelled post-Generation of ’68. What my clumsy terminology seeks to indicate is that Mateer (alongside other younger poets such as those appearing in the seminal 2000 anthology Calyx) follows in the general direction of earlier innovators while making crucial, although not necessarily generational, departures.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, John Mateer
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Tatjana Lukic
With the success of novels and short story collections such as The Slap and The Boat, it seems multicultural writing is enjoying something of a revival in Australia. Yet poetry written by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians does not usually garner much recognition. It is the prose narratives of dislocation and cultural transition, and not poetry dealing with these themes, which are de rigueur.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Tatjana Lukic
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Jen Hadfield
Jen Hadfield's winning the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize for this collection seems truly sensational. Since the UK's most prestigious poetry prize is usually given to older male poets, the 30 year-old woman poet's success could be seen as a radical event. Furthermore, the ecologically conscious discourse of Nigh-No-Place can also be seen as a new, exciting development in the context of mainstream English poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Jen Hadfield
Epic Editorial
When ‘Epic' was suggested as a theme for an issue of Cordite, I was expecting it to be either rejected outright or at least modified into something less archaic. When it was actually chosen as the theme for issue 31 with myself as the guest editor, I was faced with a more pressing concern: would we receive enough suitably epical submissions to justify our choice of this theme? Or would the dearth of appropriate contributions confirm that, as literary critic Tom Winnifrith has written, the epic is ‘as antique as a dinosaur', or, as Mikhail Bakhtin would have it, the epic poem is ‘an already completed genre … distanced, finished and closed'?
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, epic
Ali Alizadeh Interviews John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s most recent book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is an incredibly ambitious and meticulous rewriting of that great epic poem of the Middle Ages, Dante's The Divine Comedy. Our guest poetry editor for Epic, Ali Alizadeh, interviewed Kinsella recently, via email. Their discussion ranged from traditional notions of the epic form, and Kinsella's relationship with it, to ecological manifestoes and collaborative projects, and the concept of 'pushing against form'.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, John Kinsella
Joan of Arc
She and the fire fight adjectives. Their concreteness deflects reification by language. She simply is a pronoun. It may signify say, my wife (coming from me 'she' often does) or, yes a medieval French woman, her being so roughly abridged …
Posted in 35: CUSTOM
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart
One of the most prominent features of these two recent titles – by two of Australia's most successful poets, published by one of the country's most exciting literary publishers – is their emphasis on the erotic. By engaging with unambiguously sexual themes and imagery, Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart have produced texts that beguile and entertain their reader through the evocation of, or a yearning for, romance and sensuality, whilst also running the risk of reducing allusion and openness in meaning by describing a definite, rather familiar, concept.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Bronwyn Lea, Kevin Hart
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Philip Mead
Once every decade, it seems, a scholar succeeds in writing an all-encompassing account of the practice and development of poetry in modern Australia. The 1980s saw Andrew Taylor's Reading Australian Poetry; and in the 1990s we had Paul Kane's Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Now, Philip Mead, senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania's School of English, Journalism and European Languages, has provided what is perhaps the most ambitious and provocative overview of the agonistic and at times conflicting discourses of Australian poetry in the 20th century.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Australian poetry, Philip Mead
