ESSAYS
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?
Oz-Ko Envoy Editorial
When the call for submissions to Cordite’s thirty-fifth issue went out last November, it included the following ‘instructions’ for potential contributors: “For this issue, while the overarching aim is Australia-Korea relations, we instead seek works on any theme. Although works that take Korean themes as their inspiration will of course be considered, the focus is on attracting engaging, innovative, translatable and contemporary works, no matter their ostensible subject(s).”
‘You’re alive, and I’m alive’: Resistance and Remembering in Ko Ŭn’s Maninbo
Ko Ŭn is a literary giant who has gathered together a suite of folk stories, anecdotes, vignettes and asides in order to construct the monumental edifice of his Maninbo. The title translates literally as the ‘family records of ten thousand lives’, and the poet seems compelled to record the details of those who might otherwise be erased from history.
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.”
