ESSAYS
Notes on Five Canadian Small (micro) Publishers
Canada has had a wide array of small literary publishers over the past few decades. Most notably, the small press explosion in the 1960s created small presses such as Coach House Books, blewointment, Talonbooks and Oberon Press.
Islanding the Antipodes? Notes on Archipelagic Poetics
The result of this alternative view of Australian poetry, argues Minter, is a ‘more ethical set of metaphors’ to describe the intentions and movements of Australian poets and the affects of their work. Such metaphor would include, for example: distance; poetry as diplomacy; and poetry as survival, among others.
Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems
Gig Ryan asserts that, ‘Poetry is our response to the world, but it’s also the thing we poets find the most taxing, the best of engaging our brains. Ideally – like all good art – it should make us think.’ Yet, as she also acknowledges, meaning is often secondary when reading poetry. That is, it is intensified and made more complex by the poem’s sensual materiality and the affect it may evoke.
SYDNEY Editorial
This time last year, I returned to Sydney after almost two years away. For those years, Sydney had existed for me as a terrible video screen, an occasional and discomfiting image through choppy internet connections; or else, as a perfect …
Ross Gibson’s Blustertown
The town’s biggest fools are those who come from elsewhere and fall in love with it when they’re young. As a rule, these fools fall hard, beyond reason and recovery. I know because I fell that way. As you do when you’re twenty.
‘Xerographesis’: On Poetic Art and the Object in Amanda Stewart and Anne Tardos
Realism seems very S and M in its desires – Amanda Stewart, ‘Poetry Ideas’ What I write, as I have said before, could only be called poetry because there is no other category in which to put it. – Marianne …
These Living Walls of Jet: Visiting the Open Houses of Poetry
The purpose of poetry is to remind us how difficult it is to remain just one person, for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors, and invisible guests come in and out at will. from Czeslaw …
The Quickening Art of Jazz Poetry
‘if you’re in this higher condition and you’re performing, something transcends the music and reaches inside of someone else… someone gets it, they leave and do their thing. Then something comes out of their mouth they didn’t intend to say, …
Little Magazines Exemplars: A Companion Piece to ‘To Anthologise the Now Perpetually’
There simply is no easily had “brief record” of modern and contemporary little magazines held by the University at Buffalo’s Poetry Collection; even if we were to divide by era, geography, or special interest—there are, after all, over 9,000 such …
‘Hunger repletion musick fire’: Dransfield, Post-punk and the Countrylink Express
Many of you will be clued-in on the recent commentary re. Gray and Lehmann’s Australian Poetry Since 1788 anthology, published toward the end of last year. One of the criticisms of the book has been the choice of poets included, …
Australian Print Poetry and the Small Press: Who’s Doing the Books?
One of many pressing concerns for small publishers in Australia is simply this: are there enough buyers to consume their print runs? The question begets three subsequent concerns. Firstly, are Creative Writing programs creating a glut of writers and, in …
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.
