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.




To Anthologize the Now Perpetually: The Literary Situation of the Small Press and the Archive

“The little magazine is not difficult to define,” write David Miller and Richard Price: it is an anthology of work by strangers; an anthology of work by friends; an exhibition catalogue without the existence of the exhibition; a series of …

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Resident Strides: Small Press Poetry in the United Kingdom

The small-press scene is vast and multifarious. So, I’d rather discuss an exciting sub-scene with great authority, than the entire thing ignorantly. In recent years several unfunded, but economically viable, publishers have emerged, and they are more interested in promoting …

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An interview with Kent MacCarter

Kent MacCarter is Cordite’s new Managing Editor. In the Hungry Middle of Here, his first collection of poetry, published by Transit Lounge Press, was reviewed in Cordite in 2009. In 2012, another poetry collection, Ribosome Spreadsheet, will be released as …

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So long – and thanks for all the poetry!

This issue of Cordite Poetry Review is my last as Managing Editor. After eleven years I feel that the time has come for renewal and fresh energy. Therefore I’m also very pleased to announce, after a lengthy selection process, that …

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Liner Notes: Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album was released thirty years ago, in 1982. Twenty-four years after that iconic moment in the history of urban American folk, Liner Notes debuted at the 2006 Melbourne Fringe Festival with a spoken word tribute to David …

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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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