ESSAYS
Ghost Writing: Translation, Death and Renewal
On 22 June, 2022, I lost my poet. He wasn’t really mine, and I didn’t really lose him, but we belonged to one other in that particular way that translators and poets do, and his death extinguished a partnership between us that had once fizzed with possibility.
Degrees of Freedom in Live-space: Desire Paths and Open World Games
This interactive essay is best experienced on a desktop device. Click the image below to open the essay.
Home Is Where the Heart Is: on Gomeroi Country
When I was a child, I grew up around my grandmother’s dinner table. We would watch her cooking as she explained to us what ingredients were needed, when to put them in, and how she could bring together food and family on the very same plate.
Upon Losing One’s Map: Displaced Affects in Fatima Lim-Wilson’s Poetry
The promise of a good life moves people in sure yet complicated ways. Among the people caught in this flow are transnational migrants who navigate the nexus of economic, political, and cultural realities of living elsewhere, where the durability of possibility is tested. But what happens when the certainty of a promise wears away?
REMEMBER Editorial
Remembering requires an intermediary to obtain a form and a content. It might be a family or here a poet, it is unceasing as a task and not an artefact.
Finding Home: On the Poetry of Place of Luisa A Igloria, Marjorie Evasco and Merlie M Alunan
For decades, Filipinos were taught that the country was ‘discovered’ by Ferdinand Magellan. The Portuguese explorer led the 1519-1522 Spanish expedition to the East Indies, credited as the first circumnavigation of Earth. Antonio Pigafetta’s chronicle of Magellan’s voyage became one of the earliest documents recording the culture of 16th-century Philippines.
SPACE Editorial
We often think of outer space as being vast, daunting and mostly empty, but it is abundant with fields we just can’t see. There are different kinds of fields, some are classical or quantum – all with values assigned to them. Coordinates.
Stretches of Time: Boring Poetry Between Jackson Mac Low and Kenneth Goldsmith
‘I am the most boring writer that has ever lived’. This the opening to the short essay, ‘Being Boring’, by the conceptual writer Kenneth Goldsmith.
ᜉᜄᜐ (PA GA SA)
Part 1: Lola ᜎᜓᜎ I remember my palms, you reading. Remember the oceans of thought through your breathing, you speaking, you teaching me everything you were taught to forget. I remember your knowledge through dark wrinkles on even darker skin. …
The Ugly Poem: Ouyang Yu’s Terminally Poetic and the Counter-Aesthetics of the Multilingual
Beauty has a quality about it that pretends to neutrality and universality, despite being steeped in asymmetrical constructions of aesthetic judgement. Of course, this is no surprise in a hierarchical world; ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’
NO THEME 13 Editorial by Joel Toledo
It is, by itself, a privilege both for myself and Chris to be given a chance to co-edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review. And, as I’ve been told by publisher Kent MacCarter, this is the first time Cordite has entertained and invited two non-Australian poets to select entries for the literary journal.
Recovering A Long Drive: Archaeology of a Literary Bot
Read “Recovering A Long Drive: Archaeology of a Literary Bot” in full screen.
Collecting and Curating an Antipodean Anthology: The Poesy of Louisa Anne Meredith
The long-winded title page of Louisa Anne Meredith’s last volume, Bush Friends in Tasmania (1891), attests to her eclectic experience as a prose-writer, poet, botanist and illustrator.
DIY Dick: The Infinite Invention of the Transmasculine Dick
I do not long for a dick. This comes easily to me, I don’t say it defensively. I am lucky to not long for a dick because I was assigned male at birth. As the story goes, when the doctor spilled my freshly birthed body into my mother’s arms, she held me and looked up, dopy, exhausted, into my father’s eyes and said ‘Robbie, what’s wrong with his penis?’ He replied ‘Kim, it’s a girl.’
Beyond The Warp: Occult Poetics in H D and Robert Duncan
Modernist poetry has a fascination with occult knowledge. It is prevalent in American poet Robert Duncan’s unclassifiable book on Hilda Doolittle, the poet known as H.D. (1886-1961).
NO THEME 13 Editorial by Chris Tse
Editing this issue of Cordite Poetry Review with Joel has felt a bit like a global cultural exchange, one that has expanded and enriched our respective literary worlds in unexpected and enriching ways. I’ve relished the opportunity to read and think deeply about the poems submitted for consideration, and to get a glimpse of what is occupying the hearts and minds of poets in Australia and beyond.
TREAT Editorial
Why the theme TREAT? Because, as I said in the call-out for submissions, ‘Who couldn’t use a treat in these difficult times?’ Though the word ‘treat’ also has other meanings, which I encouraged poets to explore.
26 Years of Accumulated Rage: A (non-exhaustive) List
All the teachers in primary school, who commented that ‘Of course you came second in cross country, Aboriginal people are really good at running fast!’.
Hoax Poetry from Plato to Antipodes: Reflecting on the Ern Malley Trial 80 Years Later Caitlyn Lesiuk
At 3:30 in the afternoon on Tuesday, 1 August 1944, Police Constable C Cameron Smith visits Max Harris, one of the editors of the literary magazine Angry Penguins, at his office in Grenfell Street, Adelaide.
Narrative consequence in Baldur’s Gate 2: A game to play on repeat for 24 years
When I talk to people who love computer games, I feel much like I imagine Gandalf must have felt when hanging out in Hobbiton – amused by the hustle and bustle of their little lives, but at the same time feeling ancient and tired in comparison, reminded of my great and terrible task that separates me from them.
Two Postscripts to Barron Field in New South Wales: The Resurrection and the Great Seal
We won’t rehearse the argument of the book at any greater length here. Instead, we want to append two postscripts that would need to be incorporated into any second edition, if such an unlikely publication were ever to transpire.
The Possibility of the New: ‘Nasa sa Isip’ in Oliver Ortega’s Nasa
It must be said that Oliver Ortega’s book, Nasa (Desire), is not finished yet. The book has two parts – a diptych. The first part, ‘Nasa sa Isip (In the Mind),’ already completed, is an appropriation via translation and selection of parts containing the word moment from the books Das Kapital and Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie by the German philosopher Karl Marx.
Speak, Joy: Say the Words
I am a working poet. I spend my days in search and celebration of words, a series of sounds I can weld, if I’m lucky, into insights about being human, and I confess it has never been harder to do so.
