CONTRIBUTORS

Corey Wakeling

Corey Wakeling is a writer and critic living in Tokyo. He is the author of collections Gargantuan Terrier, Buggy or Dinghy (Vagabond Press 2012), Goad Omen (Giramondo 2013), and The Alarming Conservatory (Giramondo 2018), and a monograph on Samuel Beckett's dramaturgy entitled Beckett's Laboratory: Experiments in the Theatre Enclosure (Methuen Bloomsbury 2021). Corey holds a PhD in English and Theatre Studies from the University of Melbourne. His next collection is entitled Debts of the Robots.

Translation and Experiment and Translation: Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu (and Friends)

This review concerns poet Nakayasu’s most recent major collection (as of March 2022), the self-translated hallucination that is Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (2020). Some Girls is one of the most advanced realizations of an experimental writing practice informed by modernist approaches to literature explicitly between languages, sensitive to a multilingual compass.

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Corey Wakeling Reviews Stuart Cooke’s Lyre

Stuart Cooke’s Lyre is the most ambitious work of ecopoetry in recent years. Few other writers could be employed to embark on this kind of project either, I think, considering Cooke’s long engagement with the central questions of ecocriticism not only by way of extensive reading and writing in this field, but also with immersed fieldwork in diverse ecologies found outside Australian metropolitan and suburban zones: notably, the Philippines, Chile, and the West Kimberley.

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durée

Eviction of the spy agency; what a bond of trust! The kids are fighting over cheese. When the golden fog appears, influenza. The last dregs of lager on a humid day. They say they adore how predictable I’ve become since …

Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS | Tagged

Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?

Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.

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A Genetic History of Uncommons

They take some responsibility for your precipices, as much as following ought to raze the civic. Largely, however, obligation, smirking, abides. * Wanneroo drive-thru of the talking cars. It makes the terminations of diversity seem ternary, that is, complexly coded, …

Posted in 77: EXPLODE | Tagged

Élan vital

It’s hard to gauge the health of this interaction because I’m grateful, because the iron fist is long gone, gabled in the California bungalow of dementia breached, lead gone, gold siphoned. I have you crystalline like childhood’s glass statuary, perfect …

Posted in 75: FUTURE MACHINES | Tagged

John Forbes’s ‘Miraculous Fluidity’

In a book on comedy, philosopher Alenka Zupančič has inadvertently discovered the key to the correlation of late twentieth century Australian poet John Forbes’s mastery of cultural imitation and his deconstruction of the mechanics of national identity so often queried in his work.

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Lingo Surprise

Lingo as a last keen sanctuary for the purpose come to the circle who saw philosophy and then turned back. The coral and the woods, and the ankle blisters from biting, were better, so we went. Then of course you …

Posted in 68: NO THEME IV | Tagged

CONSTRAINT editorial

It appears that when given the license to constrain the otherwise presumably instinctual, inadvertent, unconscious, innate, putatively authentic centres of creative practice, poets still appear to liken constraint to permission to release responsibility from the personal and expediting the imaginary to the machines of the sonnet, the page, the code, the number, the constellation, the collage, the palindrome, and the aphorism. Is this a sign of a persistent binary at the heart of creative practice, or of a persistent desire to debunk the binary?

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Corey Wakeling Interviews Javant Biarujia

Javant Biarujia is an iconoclastic Australian poet, at once an unparalleled linguistic confabulator and an exponent of Melbourne avant-garde poetics since the 1970s.

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Submission to Cordite 48: CONSTRAINT Open!

Poetry for Cordite 48: CONSTRAINT is guest-edited by Corey Wakeling. Submission is now closed for this issue, but open for Tracy Ryan’s Cordite 49: OBSOLETE. That poetry be raised to a pulpit of freedom and then celebrated as a picaresque …

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Charlatan

You say you want to end the charlatan, yet yours the standstill cruciform bleak daylight saved evening, starkly scapegoated. See, you say, sign of the bold made prone. Glad there the vanity at the Dandenong soak, your tight grip, it …

Posted in 57: MASQUE | Tagged

Shooting “Correspondence” Gallery

for Toby Fitch Scrape hard for the ruins, duke, I am at Heide thinking of birth and you, you are at the NSW thinking of Bacon and me. Think hamburgers of slag metal and contortion scrapped. Agreed, cloister as bedroom, …

Posted in 56: NO THEME II | Tagged

Prize Maggot for Meat Hunk to Knock Twice on Wood

Wormwood hotspot, but narrow berth aping El Paso heat on the Great Northern Highway between civic duties. Diffident arsehole bristles in the glade but for convent up the way quakes, nun patience chides the rough diamantine of the standard liquored …

Posted in 55: RATBAGGERY | Tagged

Depot of Pain

first The sloth to my having being sandwich hand steep, so may we marquee sloth to not stoop Rolls Royce, don’t move, around them moves derby droves, strewn wishes of rebarbative stone fishes. NN. Struth ventriloquy. Through city I speaks …

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The Reprisals after the Great Earthquake of Tokyo

The reprisals come as intent to smother the volunteer communitarians and orators in the interim, when all smoulders and aches and begins to regenerate. Effigies of dogs around necks, unsigned summons sported at the hip a heraldry of pamphlets. In …

Posted in 54: TRANSPACIFIC | Tagged

Pam Brown’s Sydney Poetry in the 70s: In Conversation with Corey Wakeling

Pam Brown is not only one of Australia’s most prolific and important poets writing today, but also one of our richest archives on the history of late twentieth century Australian poetry. Since this is Cordite’s Sydney issue, I thought an interview with her might evince a valuably multifarious image of, perhaps, Australia’s most speedily shifting poetic landscape.”

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Sweet Meats

The waiter’s resurfacing inflames love like a cotton field in cyclone’s eye. How near we feel the coast, the coast being a hoax of a military force, but the pitter-patter could hardly disturb this, our wading through day. A face …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Albert Tucker’s Fitzroy

To sit on a milker’s stool in the entry to your cottage, with the fallen carnations and Fitzroy’s bitumen smell rising up like a cordon between your disposal and your neighbours. Here we are in fame state. You turn the …

Posted in 47: NO THEME! | Tagged

Corey Wakeling Reviews joanne burns

joanne burns has been publishing experimental poetry in Australia for over four decades, and amphora is her thirteenth collection. At 135 pages, it is substantial and generous, of a breadth that allows for the prose poems burns is best known for along with a number of spectacular short poems and some longer series.

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A Report From the Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium

Trades Hall, Melbourne 7 – 9 July 2011 l-r: Ann Vickery, Martin Harrison, Tom Lee, and Tim Wright. How to sum up the Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium held at Melbourne’s Trades Hall under the auspices of Deakin University – …

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View from the Yarra Bend with two men (두 남자와 야라 벤드*에서 내려다 본 풍경)

An ugly gentleman, six-and-a-half feet tall, combs his black hair across one ear, and then another. Mallee gums eavesdrop the space where the magpies dig for paddle pops and ants, and he sees himself face down beneath the bench and …

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View from the memory in which we try to kiss each other (우리가 서로에게 입맞추려 했던 기억으로부터의 모습)

Firstly, I would like to say that I am sorry. Right now I’m kissing you on the shore of a lake so broad it is pulling all of the vistas of the earth in toward it. The plug island at …

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Corey Wakeling Reviews John Tranter

John Tranter has been publishing poetry for forty years, and his latest book is published in tandem with a critical companion to his oeuvre, The Salt Companion to John Tranter. As Rod Mengham writes in the companion’s preface, Tranter is “widely regarded by critics as the most important member of the so-called ‘generation of ‘68’”. This generation of poets was in fact named as such by Tranter himself.

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