ESSAYS
The Immortal Malley and the End of Modernity
The Ern Malley hoax provoked a debate that was not by any means unique to Australia. Indeed, the Ern Malley affair is simply an antipodean manifestation of a long-standing discussion in Western culture about the best way for literature and art to respond to the impact of modernity on society.
Recasting the Mould: ‘Beyond is Anything’
Upon hearing of our Children of Malley II edition of Cordite, one of our readers sent us in an unexpected surprise. Lurking in the wings was a Malley encounter we never expected: we found that the hoax lives on.
Ern Malley and the Art of Life
During a panel at the 2010 Salt on the Tongue poetry festival in Goolwa, SA, one audience member slammed performance poetry as being ‘more about the poet than the poetry’.
Text and Paratext: Ern Malley and the Function of the Author
The immediate target of the Malley hoax was Max Harris and those associated with Angry Penguins, but McAuley and Stewart also had ‘bigger fish’, as it were, in mind. Herbert Read in particular, the English poet and critic—whose writings were a significant influence on Max Harris’ own poetry and aesthetics—was very much in the hoaxers’ sights.
Glen Phillips and John Kinsella: Mythology and Landscape
For both Kinsella and Phillips poetics is work: it is a continual and never-ending process, a symbiotic process from which a voice of activism may spring. It is the aim of this voice to put the land and its strength and survival at the heart of the contemporary landscape poetry.
An Introduction to the Work of Glen Phillips
I initially approached Glen Phillips in the hopes that he would contribute to Cordite Poetry Review’s Children of Malley II edition, whimsically playing off the Malley / Mallee imagery. As Glen’s poetry, criticism and almost entire oeuvre deals with the landscape of Western Australia I thought what better assonant reference could we have for this, our second Malley edition.
On Creative Commons II
The notion that poetry is primarily self-expression has often seemed to me a seductive (but conveniently commodifiable) mistake. We all like to think that we are makers of language, but anyone poking around in the engine of poetry uneasily realises that it is just as likely to be the other way around, that just as DNA shapes our morphology, language is the shaper of our consciousness.
On Creative Commons
Welcome to Creative Commons, the thirty-third issue of Cordite Poetry Review! With this issue we celebrate ten years online!
Jonathan Ball, Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jay Millar: Ex Machina and the Creative Commons
Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009) is a long poem written as a series of poetic and philosophical statements. Each page contains a titular number, and each line of the poem refers the reader to another page through a footnote. The book thus resembles the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books of yesteryear, only instead of developing a progressive narrative, the system recurs and loops endlessly. If one attempts to read the book as directed, not only will one never reach a terminal position, but certain pages that exist outside of the system will remain forever unread.
John Kinsella’s Poetics of Distraction
Like Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings, John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography has firstly had to address the question of its status with regard to “the allegorical requirement of a master text.”
The Call to the Creative Commoner: The Digital Humanities and Flexible Copyright
If you try and stand in the way of the open source movement, then you are a counter-revolutionary. You may find yourself blindfolded and up against a crumbling wall, waiting for the collective report that will remove you from the picture and allow the future utopia of free knowledge to inch that little bit closer to reality. Like the hard-liners of the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) movement[ii], the Digital Humanities army marches proudly forward waving its banners and imagining a bright, free future for the Humanities.
Creative Licences and CCMixter
Do you remember a time when you completed the written draft of a poem and signed it with the © symbol beside your name? By including the copyright symbol you probably thought you were asserting your ownership of the poem and establishing yourself as the creator, as well as protecting your exclusive right to publish, perform or otherwise deal with your creation. However, you do not need to include this symbol in order to be protected by copyright law; in Australia, this protection is automatic when an original work is written and you retain control of your work unless you sell or transfer the exclusive rights.
All Rights Relinquished: Permapoesis
While writing this work I have been eating wild foods, vegetables from my garden and a small amount of transported agricultural product. I am in transition, along with my family and some community friends, to relocalise food and energy resources and address the degree to which our participation in a hyper-mediated society degrades the ecologies that support us.
Zoe Rodriguez: The Danger of Copyleft
Where I work, at Copyright Agency Limited, which collects and distributes over $100 million a year for its 17,000 authors and publisher members, we sometimes say when it all gets too hard, ‘nobody ever died because of copyright’. So, it was chastening to see the agony Tolstoy endured late in his life over whether to offer his works to the commons or retain copyright acted out with such passion in The Last Station.
The Poetic Commons
Poetry is a kind of creative commons of the culture. These days we inhabit different microcultures and that complicates matters, but there remains a kind of substratum that most members of say, one country, understand.
Peter Larkin’s Knowledge of Place
There are many distractions surrounding the everyday, so many asides busy vying for our attention, alleviating us of our time. Objects are seen less for themselves and more often as materials which become products, products which remove the things themselves from an originated state. Landscapes are demarcated in terms of their service.
Introducing Peter Larkin
To my delight, and profound confusion, one morning there was a message in my inbox from Peter Larkin. Peter contacted me after reading my poem ‘a continuous plain’, which was published in Cordite’s Pastoral issue, edited by Stuart Cooke, and which quotes a line of his: ‘true scarcity of no trespass.’
Zombie Haikunaut Renga II
This is Part 2 of Cordite’s Zombie Haikunaut Renga project, continued from Zombie Haikunaut Renga I. Please read the instructions if in doubt about commenting on this post!
The Gendered Gothic: Dorothy Hewett’s Alice in Wormland
Dorothy Hewett and ‘zombies' are not generally found in the same sentence. However, Hewett liberally utilises Gothic tones and imagery in her poetry. These Gothic trappings do not serve only as motifs: they permeate the mood, conflicts and resolutions of Hewett's Alice in Wormland. This collection, published in 1987, combines pseudo-autobiographical elements with parody, mythology, and morbid images to ultimately reach a strangely optimistic resolution.
Zombie Haikunaut Renga I
This is Part 1 of Cordite's Zombie Haikunaut Renga project.
Please read the instructions before commenting on this post!
The Death of Poetry in Australian Classrooms
In 1982 Neil Postman first noted that the concept of childhood was disappearing in his book, The Disappearance of Childhood. It's highly unlikely that we'll be saying anything new if we claim that poetry is disappearing from the classroom. And though it is, and has been doing so for decades, poetry itself survives. It's just going to other places. To the small press, to cafes, to cyberspace, even to public transport. Perhaps, if we want poetry to be heard and read in other places too, our society needs to bring it back to schools.
Zombie 2.0
We know more about the undead species who have lived in our hearts and dined on our minds than ever before. We have probed into their weaknesses, evaded their tricks and know well of their canny (and uncanny) chicanery. We know these things … because they were once like us. Let us not rest on our laurels. Let us be vigilant and as ready as we can be for the uneasy future that is Zombie 2.0.
Post-Epic Editorial
We're thrilled and excited to say that we've now gone live with the second part of our Epic issue. Cordite 31.1: POST-EPIC aims, in the spirit of Ko Un's Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), to produce 1,000 lines of epic poetry. Towards this end, the poets featured in our Epic issue have each nominated a line from their work to be used as the title and starting point for a new Post-Epic poem.
Epic Editorial
When ‘Epic' was suggested as a theme for an issue of Cordite, I was expecting it to be either rejected outright or at least modified into something less archaic. When it was actually chosen as the theme for issue 31 with myself as the guest editor, I was faced with a more pressing concern: would we receive enough suitably epical submissions to justify our choice of this theme? Or would the dearth of appropriate contributions confirm that, as literary critic Tom Winnifrith has written, the epic is ‘as antique as a dinosaur', or, as Mikhail Bakhtin would have it, the epic poem is ‘an already completed genre … distanced, finished and closed'?
