ESSAYS
Fuck Lectures About Sonnets: On Noor Hindi
In December 2020, Noor Hindi posted a photo of her poem, ‘Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying‘ on Twitter, announcing its publication in a forthcoming Poetry.
How to Be a Digital Artist in a Time of Climate Change
John Berger’s famous 1972 television series Ways of Seeing opens with an argument that visual technologies like photography, and the mechanical reproduction and distribution they enable, free pictures from the confines of their singular location.
Ambot sa Essay Kwoah: From Swardspeak to Hiligaynon, What Queering Language and Forms Means to Me
I went to this year’s Pride March with the goal of just taking pictures for this essay and going home immediately. The event was only a couple of minutes away from my apartment.
Notes on Bad Poetry
Maybe we’ll always disagree about poetry – about how it works, and what it’s for; about its modalities and affordances; about what makes a good poem; about why you might want to write or read one.
POP! Editorial
Welcome to the POP! edition of Cordite Poetry Review, in which Gatsby’s green light hovers over this text to tell you we are °º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø σηℓιηє °º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø, baybee.
Can Poetry Be Happy?
My uncle named his retro-fitted army van after Field Marshal Erick Von … someone. I’m hesitant to Google.
Tīfaifai and Translation: Piecing ‘Nadia’ from Chantal Spitz’s Cartes postales
In her 2006 collection of essays and poetry Pensées insolentes et inutiles, the pillar of francophone Oceanian literature that is Tahitian author Chantal T Spitz ruminates on the purpose of her writing: ‘This isn’t an autobiography but it now seems …
Opinion Fatigue: Monochromatic Voids and Typographic Symbols by Sebastian Moody
For Opinion Fatigue, Sebastian Moody has produced a series of monochromatic voids punctuated by sparse bouquets of typographic symbols. Very occasionally, a lone word appears.
NO THEME 12 Editorial
We have had the honour of editing this issue as two poets with collections published and forthcoming with Fremantle Press, and invited by Kent in the spirit of ‘shining a light’ on the thriving and amorphous field and bush that might be called ‘Western Australian poetry’.
Syntax Error: Troubleshooting Failures in Coding and Language
The kind of learning I’ve been engaging in has left me not knowing the names of things, or forgetting them unless I am using them at that moment.
Why = f(x): A Retired Tumblr Girl’s Inquiry into Suffering, Stardom and Female Labor
Suffering as a Function of Stardom In Patrick Flores’s The Star Also Suffers: Screening Nora Aunor (2001), he describes confessional performance as being a simultaneous unburdening of the self and burdening of others with one’s pain, a transaction wherein ‘pain …
DEDICATION Editorial
We came about this issue’s theme by dumping loved words into a shared document: nouns, verbs, phrases and onomatopoeia that stirred a shared love of intimacy with language, of play and tricksterism.
Writing Sound: Phonautography, Phonography and Marianne Moore’s Syllabics
9 April 1860, a room in Paris. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville is singing ‘Au clair de la lune’ into his astonishing invention. For twenty seconds he sings, slowly.
Holy Water / Heart Vapours
It is tears, often, that prove a mystic to be a saint. It is tears, too, that prove a girl a heretic, too Catholic, too Pagan, simultaneously overwhelming and refusing her audience.
What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry
Poetry is booming in Aotearoa, and nobody can quite say why. What’s stirring our blood in the plague years / this sixth mass extinction / our deteriorating climate of political and literal atmospheres?
Essential Gossip: Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan and U.S.-Australian Poetics
In 1985, when the bulky anthology Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries from Africa, America, Asia, Europe and Oceania (first published in 1968) was printed in a new edition, it was advertised with the curious dust jacket recommendation: ‘hailed by the Los Angeles Times Book Review as one of the hundred most recommended American books of the last thirty-five years’.
The Email May Contain Information: Eda Gunaydin on Toby Fitch
What might it mean to acknowledge that this is the substance of the labour performed by many of us, those of us who aspire to do anything but?
Peripheral Peripheries: Robert Wood on Alvin Pang
Here there are plastic chairs, plastic tables, phone screens, tv soaps, chicken rice, and the poem’s final word, which tells us what we have always known.
Open Relations: Angela Biscotti on Lucy Van
Perhaps the moment-to-moment labour of crafting verse is not wildly dissimilar to the invisible quotidian acts of looking after those we love.
Notes on the Archive: Chi Tran after Timmah Ball
The archive is a site of both order and trouble. It could be said that the archive is where history goes to sleep.
Bad Naturalisations
So why bring Veronica Forrest-Thomson into a discussion of Asian Australian poetry? There are a couple of circumstantial coincidences: she was born in British Malaya (her father was a rubber planter) and found an able and sympathetic expositor in the Australian poet Martin Harrison, who gave a 1979 ABC Radio talk on Poetic Artifice.
Writing Threat and Trauma: Poetic Witnessing to Social Injustice and Crisis
This article explores creative responses to crises that are written and technologically mediated in a liminal zone between threat and trauma.
Paper-feel and Digital Play: Note-taking and Videogames
After months (years?) of stagnation in lockdown, I handle a pen with an uncertain grip. I feel a tremor as I write, now, and my script varies wildly as I adjust and readjust.
Everything I Don’t Know How to Say / sve što ne znam kako da kažem
When I left Bosnia in 2018, my cousin gave me a book of poetry, Bosansko-Hercegovačka Poezija. It’s a slim volume, bright purple with a pale lilac square on its cover.
