ESSAYS

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.

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Shastra Deo and Liam Ferney want to have your babies.

BABY editorial

We released the call-out for BABY on 30 May 2023. We were thinking of baby projects, the spark of something new, thinking of the person who we call ‘baby’, thinking of Liam Ferney, bard of the bubs, who writes the best baby poems this side of town.

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The Linguistic Playground of Poetics: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry and Systemic Functional Linguistics

I wasn’t entirely prepared for the Canberran rain and cold. Late November, ostensibly summer, and my last trip to the capital at the same time of year almost a decade earlier had shocked me with a week of perfect blue-skied thirty-degree days.

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Gender and Abject Horror: The Poetic Self

I recently woke to clothes and sheets drenched in blood. The sun, squeamish, kept its distance as I stripped off and showered. Outside, a glutinous rain fell disinfecting the streets; the bins begged and pleaded; have mercy on us. My periods have been heavy all my life though, until then, I hadn’t bled so profusely in years.

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A Lonely Girl Phenomenology

I am following a lineage of sad and lonely girls, women who diarised or even fictionalised their sadness, knowing that their words would be scorned by the men they loved, men whose so-called serious efforts were lauded and canonised, while their own projects were dismissed as personal, histrionic.

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Leaving Traces of Us: Queer Coming-of-age in Anne Carsons’s Autobiography of Red

Anne Carson’s debut novel Autobiography of Red a coming-of-age narrative rendered in verse, tracing the life of a red winged boy named Geryon.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Can Poetry Be Happy?

My uncle named his retro-fitted army van after Field Marshal Erick Von … someone. I’m hesitant to Google.

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Cordite Poetry Review

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 …

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Cordite Poetry Review

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.

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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’.

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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.

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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 …

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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’.

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Cordite Poetry Review

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?

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Cordite Poetry Review

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.

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