ESSAYS
Hidden Signs of a City
How does one read a city? More specifically, how does a poet decode, and in turn re/present, the language of a man-made space? In Australia (and other 'New World' constructs) much poetry has been devoted to the natural world; but …
Constant Haze (Notes From Chengdu)
Five weeks and I have still not visited Mao's statue, which stands at the heart of Chengdu's First Ring Road. On the map in one of the city's English language magazines his presence has been reduced to a vector-based outline, …
Experience
Okay this was how I was going to start this editorial: As themes go, this issue's is, if nothing else, topical. Hillary Clinton's whole campaign in the run up to the presidential nomination will live or die on the basis …
White Homes Editorial
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Issue 26.1 of Cordite Poetry Review, the all prose poetry edition. When I started thinking about which writers to include in this issue of Cordite, I wanted to show the range of styles and approaches within the prose poetry genre.
Margie Cronin: Innocence
INNOCENCE: Blamelessness. INNOCENT: Not hurtful. One free from fault. Approaching the world with an attitude unwounded and harmless. Having a vigorous and unprejudiced perception that does not expect what it will find. Being prepared not only to understand but to reunderstand.
Michael Dransfield’s Innocent Eyes
When you think of ways to interrogate innocence, you will sooner or later come to a moral dichotomy. It can be unpackaged as either good or bad. It can oppose guilt, and by implication your innocence allows that you have …
Genevieve Tucker: Online? Present & Accounted For
In 2003 Cordite commissioned Anna Hedigan to review the websites of Australia's established literary journals. Now, four years later, we ask: what's changed? Genevieve Tucker's update looks at the online presences of some of Australia's litjournals in the context of …
David Prater: Hits & Online Readership
Frank Moorhouse's article in The Sunday Age (full text here) discusses the ongoing Meanjin 'controversy' in a much-needed context: that of the troubles currently facing print magazines, as well as some of the problems facing online magazines in Australia.
Trains (an Essay)
A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. Aldous Huxley, Along the Road: Notes and Essays of a Tourist The world is medium-sized. Michel Houellebecq, Lanzarote Romania (Part 1) We've …
Generation of Zeroes
Cordite 25 – Generation of Zeroes is now online, featuring new works by a whole bunch of digitally cool poets including Carol Jenkins, Derek Motion, Elena Knox, Jill Jones, Joel Deane, Klare Lanson and more! Our special guest poetry editor …
Candylands
In February 2004 I went on a one-month meet-as-many-poets-as-possible trip to the U.S. A mobile phone would have made everything so much easier. I call my friend S from a public phone at LAX, eventually getting through. I dump my bags at his shared one bedroom flat and we go to a nearby market, where I buy some dice, candles, and the best cookie I've eaten in my life.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Abstract Morality In Post-Avant Poetry
“Post-avant” poetry is widely considered to be an important branch of the post-modern tree. Yet, a distinction exists between post-avant & “po-mo” in other genres & art-forms.
Greetings to the New Malleys
Ern Malley, the original dromedary of Australian poetry has been anthologised, criticised and mythologised beyond belief. It's perhaps sobering to reflect that while Ern Malley's creators, his twin Gepettos James Macauley and Harold Stewart along with his original sponsor Max Harris have passed from this world, Ern's legend lives on. What is it about Ern Malley that refuses to die?
Wandering in Wuhan
I am astounded to find that ancient and medieval poetry occupies a uniquely central presence in Wuhan's contemporary identity; that, in spite of ideological and legal issues and restrictions, new cutting-edge poetry grows across China's cyberspace; and that all of this is happening in spite of a rapid, and some might say rabid, modernisation and commercialisation.
Destination Kurdistan
The Kurdish Center of International PEN, the worldwide association of writers, invited me, as an International Vice-president of PEN, to travel with a group of Kurdish writers on a one-week bus trip through Kurdistan in March, 2005. Nestled in the …
Robert Kennedy: The Journey (Death) of a Library
So what of the journey of Harold Stewart's library, where is it likely to end? Who will have access to all that he read? What will be left of it for us to discover, of his influences and a personality that created many great poems and Australia's most famous literary event and character, Ern Malley?
Michael Brennan: A Short History of Vagabond Press and Poetry International Australia
Chance and community might best describe how I edit and publish poetry. Chance in the unlikely alignment of latching onto good poems available for publication and that suit the nature of whatever I'm editing at the time. Community in the …
Editorial Intervention
Usually I despise the practice whereby editors place their own work in an issue of the publication they're editing. Apart from denying a place to someone whose work is probably better, such actions often signal a kind of desperation, a …
Domesticated Enemies
Our 21st issue, Domestic Enemy, sees Cordite finally obtain its majority! From our humble beginnings in 1997, it's been a long and dusty road, filled with many pit-stops, refuels, vehicle and driver changes, roadblocks, fake abductions, detours and [insert your …
Submerged Is the Best Place to Be
Submerged is the best place to be on a hot summer's day: somewhere in the shady corner of the pool, cross-legged on the bottom, blowing bubbles until you run out of air. Submerged is where Tony Soprano's psychiatrist tells him …
Judith Wright in Jammu
Being from a country that cannot seem to stop boasting about its ancient legacies and from a family whose own history goes back seventy-five generations, I find it incomprehensible how any self-respecting nation could spend over a century looking outside of itself for a ‘heritage’.
Richard Frankland’s Charcoal Club
Part of my homework for singing class was to go to a live gig. I didn't know much about Frankland, I hadn't known he was standing for the Senate until I went to vote. He has a powerful voice and his band of six (including a drummer who doubled as a eucalyptus branch shaker) played songs that veered from country to funky, interspersed with Frankland's state-of-things discourse.
Billy Bragg and the Fight for a New Australia
Thatcherism was the name given to the tide of economic rationalism that swept through Britain in the 1980's. It was a series of, often forceful, policy reforms and social upheavals that transformed the nation economically, politically, socially and philosophically. Musically, the nation was mute. The original f&^k you of punk's first wave, which was quite often only ever protest for protests sake, had all but died. In its place the superficiality of New Wave and the introspection of Goth reigned supreme.
Syd Barrett’s Threnodic Devotion
When something is 'of the stars' (de sidera) we desire it (desideratus); when there are no stars, we have no desires; when we have no desires we are ready to die, or be silent.
