ESSAYS



NO THEME VIII Editorial

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Claire Gaskin

Nothing makes me feel my fallibility more than editing a literary journal, marking papers or judging a literary competition. I can be wrong. I can be unclear. I can miss things.

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Shipwrecks in Modern European Painting and Poetry: Radical Mobilisation of the Motif as Political Protest

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Marion May Campbell

Shipwreck is also the synecdoche of all that shadows imperial expansion – navigational misadventure, piracy, cyclonic assault – tracking like sharks on the blood trail imperialism’s would-be glamorous advance.

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Residence: Dwelling with The Shards (an essay)

Posted on August 16, 2019 by Kate Middleton

When S. and I started to talk, the directions were endless, and sympathetic. What passed between us, over coffee and chai, in emails, in text messages, were the names of authors, books, artists.

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Introduction to Cordite 91: MONSTER

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Nathan Curnow

MONSTERI’m writing this after news that W S Merwin has died. His Selected Poems still sits on my bedside table, never far away in case of a spare moment.

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Poetry, Whatsoever: Blake, Blau DuPlessis, and an Expansive Definition of the Poem

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Ali Jane Smith

William Blake pinches himself. Yes! He is alive, not in heaven or hell for all eternity, but on earth, for just as long as I need him for the purposes of this essay. In the almost two hundred years since William Blake died many things have changed.

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On Being Sanguine: Two Years of Panic and a Response to Terror in Christchurch

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Charles Olsen

One Sunday, when I was an art student in London, I got on my bicycle and left my parents’ vicarage in Surrey for my room in Murray Mews, going along the River Thames and through London’s parks: Bushy Park, Richmond Park, Hyde Park and Regents Park. I was stung by a bee or wasp somewhere around Shepperton which got my blood up and I raced towards the city, perhaps a little too fast for my own good; a reaction to adversity.

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A Deaf Rough Trade: Defending Poetry to ‘regular people’

Posted on May 1, 2019 by Alice Allan

The poem is from page 37 of Michael Farrell’s latest collection, I Love Poetry. The poem on page 37 has no title, so I will refer to it from here on out as ‘37’. Not only is 37 untitled, but it is also without words.

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Editorial to AFRO AUSTRALIAN

Posted on April 1, 2019 by Saaro Umar

I can’t think I am living large if the home we live in is a mess while my own room is spotless. I want a beautiful mansion for all of us. Yes, I realise this is not a seamless nor an especially artful allegory.

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To Outlive a Home: Poetics of a Crumbling Domestic 

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Evelyn Araluen

While these pre-federation tropes of settler colonial Australia’s multifaceted and at times contradictory pastoral modes seem to recognise something of their incompatibility with Aboriginal land, they seek their resolution from burial, rather than reciprocal encounter with Aboriginal presence.

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Introduction to Cordite 89: DOMESTIC

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Natalie Harkin

I invited you to lean into this DOMESTIC sphere in all its homely undoing; to rupture the masquerading shape of cosy bliss; to plant seeds and haunt with your words; to unsettle and shape what survival looks and feels like – and you did.

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Kathy Acker and The Viewing Room

Posted on February 1, 2019 by McKenzie Wark

The last time I saw Kathy Acker was in London, in July 1997. I wasn’t sure how she felt about me at that point. I had failed to drop everything to be with her in San Francisco the year before, and I had failed to make a job materialise that would have brought her to Sydney, as she wanted.

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To Live There: on ‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’

Posted on February 1, 2019 by Eloise Grills

‘Dispatch from the Future Fish’ is a visual poem that is deliberately referential, opening up conversations and foregrounding the notion of writing into certain traditions: those that are given to us and those that we choose. The first lines, I …

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