ESSAYS
To Anthologise 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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.
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.
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 …
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 …
Supra-text Sequences
Image: A series of frames require me to shade some of the evenly-distributed sets-of-3, black or blank. How I apply notions of form (actual space) and appearance (virtual space) to my experience in the world is very much like my …
ELECTRONICA Editorial
This issue of Cordite makes a bow to music and the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound. When David suggested this editing gig to me, I thought how odd, and then, perhaps, …
Cordite 35: Oz-Ko is now complete!
If you’d told me in April this year that we’d still be posting content from our Oz-Ko issue in November, I would have called you barking mad. But that’s exactly what’s happened: what started out in 2009 as an idea for a straightforward issue devoted to new poetry from Australia and the Republic of Korea has now spawned three separate issues including one hundred and fifteen poems (of which over ninety are translations), almost two dozen features (including essays, articles, interviews and photo galleries) and two separate tours, to Korea and Australia, by a total of eight poets from both countries.
Excuse me while I take a moment to reflect on that.
Ozko (Envoi)
This poem, featuring the titles of the forty poems published in Cordite 35.2: OzKo (Hanguk-Hoju), officially brings to a close Cordite’s monumental Oz-Ko issue.
Highlights from the Korean Poets’ Tour of Australia!
In August 2011, Korean poets Kim Ki Taek, Park Ra Youn, Hwang Tong-gyu and Park Hyung Jun landed in Australia for a ten day tour. They presented at the Melbourne Writers Festival and in Sydney at the Redroom Poetry Company. The tour was a reciprocal visit following the Cordite/Asialink tour of Korea in May.
Balloon and Hyung-seok and Bo Yeon and Seoul city rolling
Balloon’s earned his name. He’s a six-foot-two barrel of a man with a voice that booms. He’s a giant among Koreans. A gentle giant with a wide, open face. The day is hot. His brow drips when he gets excited. Bo Yeon brings him a tissue. Bo Yeon brings water and coffee. She brings a bandaid. She watches everything with a hopeful half-smile on her full moon-face. Hyung Seok sits between them. He has a long expressive face landscaped by a strata of old scars. His hands are delicate and when he talks his fingers make tiny sculptures in the air.
In the Republic of Words: Ethics of Translation and the Politics of Contemporary Korean Poetry
In a book I recently read with my students in an undergraduate translation class, the writer sets forth twenty provocative theses on translation in this era of globalisation for a new comparative literature, ranging from ‘Nothing is translatable’ to ‘Everything …
A Report From the Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium
Trades Hall, Melbourne 7 – 9 July 2011 l-r: Ann Vickery, Martin Harrison, Tom Lee, and Tim Wright. How to sum up the Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium held at Melbourne’s Trades Hall under the auspices of Deakin University – …
A Fortnight of Poetry in Seoul
(or, Someone’s Always Falling in Love with Korea and Doesn’t Want to Leave) I am at the boarding gate of Incheon Airport, waiting for my flight to be called and for my return journey to begin. I am wearing large …
Dialogue between Australian and Korean Poets in Seoul
Australian poets Ivy Alvarez, Barry Hill and Terry Jaensch, accompanied by Asialink Literature Programme Officer Nicolas Low and Cordite’s Managing Editor David Prater, met with five Korean poets on 18 May 2011 in Seoul. Read a summary of the event, including excerpts from the Koreans’ poems.
Oz-Ko (Hoju-Hanguk) is now online!
The task of bringing these poems to you has been nothing short of monumental. Starting with the combined efforts of twenty poets whose work was selected for this stage of the issue, followed by the Cordite editorial team’s struggles with the challenges of bi-lingual layout and formatting, and finally of course the crucial role played by our two Korean translators – 김재현 (Kim Gaihyun) and 김성현 (Kim Sunghyun) – it’s been a labour of love, and we hope you enjoy the results.
Kim Young-Moo and Perth
As somebody who was born elsewhere, I can identify with Kim Young-Moo’s Perth poetry. His awe for the Swan River corresponds with an awe that has bloomed through my own poetic tropes. It’s an awe I have seen flourish in the poetry of other West Australian poets, those who I admire or aspire toward. Perhaps it’s the innate love of rivers, a shared ancestral respect for these points where we build our cities.
What the Job Is: Notes on Racism and the Cultural Divide
My plan to start teaching phonetics in my Korean English class actually germinated in Nepal. I began to notice signs similar to ones I had seen in Korea, toting the English language as a kind of educational panacea. I found myself wondering if the modern world was engaged in a cultural war, an effort to arm itself with my mother tongue. A policy of Mutually Assured Comprehension.
The Bastards Learned How to Swim
My drinking has always had a very narrow purpose, one that I’ve repeatedly given up without issue or pain; it is a bonus to rather than a facet of my days. But when I moved to Seoul I was confronted with a type of drinking attitude that insisted my commitment to alcohol be put to the test. For the first time I was taking part in a night life that had no half measures, no flip side to the coin: it’s go for a drink or go to bed. And if you choose bed, you better take a drink along.
Jeju-do with Family: A Korean Photo Essay
“It was before the Christmas of 2008 when my brother and his girlfriend came to visit my dad and I in Seoul. That’s over two years ago now and I didn’t keep a diary at the time. I have some memories, and I have some photos, and I have some memories from some photos. And I have some emails.”
Impressions of Modern Korean Poetry in Translation
Compared with Korean poetry, there is an avalanche of translations available of the Chinese and Japanese poets, and most poetry-readers would have some familiarity with Li Po, Tu Fu, Wang Wei, Basho and others. But how many have heard of Hwang Jin Yi, Han Yong Un, Pak Mogwol, Ko Un, Kim Chiha?
