ESSAYS
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.”
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.’
