ESSAYS
NO THEME 14 Editorial
The poetry in this issue is damn juicy. As a writer, there’s perhaps an added degree of exposure or vulnerability in submitting a random suite of your poems, unmoored by theme. Showing your backlog = showing your poetic bussy.
I’m sorry for what I said when I used ChatGPT
I’ve been scratching the back of my head lately, and maybe it’s a new condition I’ve yet to ask a doctor about or maybe it’s old allergies coming back, or maybe it’s because I can’t recall the title of this piece I read, the one that says our bodies are mostly microbial, and I can’t remember what meaning I tried to get out of it, can’t even remember if it was an essay or a medical report, or if it even matters, so maybe it’s not that; maybe it’s because I’ve been worrying about the mistakes I need to make up for while wrestling with the possibility that I may have to move to another country while struggling with the fact that one day I would lose my cat to time.
Rumpelstiltskin and the Girlie Werewolf: the Journey from Linocuts and Artist Books to Lagerphones
I am the Queen of Reduction Linocuts. At least, that’s how I am introduced to art students or fellow printmakers. I suspect one or two others, including former students, may now share that title, if not claim the crown outright.
Breaking up with Big Tech and Moving on with Life
Growing up in the 90s, we didn’t have internet, emails or smart phones, let alone tech apps or social media. We played out on the streets, read books, went to the cinemas, queued for concert tickets to see bands we heard on the radio, visited places we discovered through word of mouth and sent handwritten letters to each other. Meeting face to face was a big deal and without a mobile phone to bail out at the last minute, we all learned the art of waiting, noticing, and showing up. Analogue days were slow.
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.’
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.
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).
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.
