FEATURES

Our features editor is Matthew Hall. This category includes articles, essays, reportage, rants and more. We usually publish a set of features in each issue of Cordite, plus some extras throughout the year. We also publish regular reviews and interviews. If you’d like to write a feature for Cordite, please visit our submissions page.




An interview with M. F. McAuliffe

M. F. McAuliffe was born and educated in Adelaide and Melbourne, and holds an Honours degree in English and some graduate stuff in photography and anthropology. She has taught technical writing, media analysis and basic TV production to engineering and …

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An interview with Brendan Ryan

Brendan Ryan grew up on a dairy farm at Panmure in Western Victoria. One of ten children, the themes of farming and family have influenced his poetry for over twenty years. His first chapbook, Mungo Poems was published by Soup …

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Work: A Cordite-Prairie Schooner Collaboration

Cordite is excited to announce a special collaboration with Nebraska-based literary journal, Prairie Schooner. The collaboration, entitled ‘Work’, is the first in what promises to be an exciting ‘Fusion’ series, wherein Prairie Schooner teams up with innovative journals from around …

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No! Theme! Editorial!

The young PhD was applying for a ‘Theory for Practising Writers’ teaching position in a Creative Writing degree. He had devised a three year course, the first year of readings, lectures, tutorials and essays which though extending as far back …

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Tiny Steps: the Electr(on)ification of Cordite

Cordite 36: Electronica has been a fascinating and challenging issue to put together. It contains forty new poems, fifteen spoken word tracks, a dozen features and, for the first time, a selection of multimedia or ‘e-lit’ works. Bringing together these disparate types of content raises an interesting question for Cordite as an online journal. Have we finally broken through that invisible barrier between ‘text-based journal’ and ‘online journal of electronic literature’?

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Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social

Twenty years ago, if you published a quarterly literary journal, you could be certain what that meant: four issues a year. When Anna Hedigan wrote her overview of journals and their web presence eight years ago not much had changed. The publishers’ attitude to the online space was that it was essentially a placeholder for the print journal.

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The Electronic Literature Collection V2

‘Electronic Literature’ could refer to quite different things: a novel written in the form of emails, a poem in Cordite (poetry is code!), a piece of musique concrète, an interactive installation in a gallery, a thread of You Tube comments, the Wikileaks cables . . . Understood broadly it would include any piece of literature that makes use of an electronic technology – e.g. Microsoft Word – somewhere along the line. ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ might be a more productive question to start with.

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An interview with Talan Memmott

Talan Memmott is Assistant Professor of digital media and culture in the Digital Culture and Communications program at Blekinge Institute of Technology and an internationally known practitioner of electronic literature and digital art with a practice ranging from experimental video to digital performance applications and literary hypermedia. In June 2011 I met with Talan to discuss the history of beehive Hypertext Hypermedia Literary Journal, which he founded and edited.

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An interview with Maria Engberg

Maria Engberg is a lecturer at Blekinge Tekniska Högskola in Karlskrona, Sweden, a researcher in digital media and literature and my colleague in the ELMCIP project. I caught up with her in August 2011 before she jetted off to Georgia …

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‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry

Mezangelle poetry is a form of electronic code poetry popularized by the avatarised avant-gardist, Australian multimedia artist Mez Breeze, a.k.a. Mez, a.k.a. Netwurker. The word mezangelle is adjective, noun and verb: mezangelle can refer to or describe the language in …

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An interview with Jason Nelson

It is overly simplistic to state digital poems come entirely from building/discovering interfaces. Any artist’s creative practice is a merging/melding mix of fluid events and inspirations. But within many digital poems there is one commonality, the emphasis on interface.

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Contextualists and Dissidents: Talking Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

The world of literary critical discourse is governed by one central imperative: to expound. Every point must be developed, every quote “parsed”, every nuance and inflection (whether of tone, dialect, or syntax) “unpacked” to find a maximum density of critical …

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Supra-text Sequences

Image: A series of frames require me to shade some of the evenly-distributed sets-of-3, black or blank. How I apply notions of form (actual space) and appearance (virtual space) to my experience in the world is very much like my …

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Electronica

This issue of Cordite makes a bow to music and the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound. When David suggested this editing gig to me, I thought how odd, and then, perhaps, …

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Cordite 35: Oz-Ko is now complete!

If you’d told me in April this year that we’d still be posting content from our Oz-Ko issue in November, I would have called you barking mad. But that’s exactly what’s happened: what started out in 2009 as an idea for a straightforward issue devoted to new poetry from Australia and the Republic of Korea has now spawned three separate issues including one hundred and fifteen poems (of which over ninety are translations), almost two dozen features (including essays, articles, interviews and photo galleries) and two separate tours, to Korea and Australia, by a total of eight poets from both countries.

Excuse me while I take a moment to reflect on that.

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