ESSAYS
Keiji Minato: Notes on Modern Haiku (1)
Haiku is a literary form. It carries ideological elements from its history as other literary forms do. Some of these elements are deeply ingrained in the genre. For example, seasonal themes and objective descriptions are the two main principles many people in Japan and in other countries believe to be imperatives. While they surely have some relevance (as they help beginners find concrete images and avoid various pitfalls), they are not absolutely necessary conditions for haiku.
Welcome to Haikunaut
I came to the haiku world 26 years ago with just one desire: to translate the poetry of Issa – some 20,000 verses, only a tiny fraction of which had appeared in English at the time. I plunged into Japanese …
Dry Pastoral
Contemporary pastoral? Such a term seems oxymoronic when describing a genre at least as old as Theocritus’s Idylls from the third century BCE. The pastoral itself is inherently backwards-looking, literally evoking the greener pastures of a pre-industrialised past. Even the …
Hal Porter’s Pastoral Vision
Few landscape poets have drawn an Arcadia of the austral zones with as much consolidated detail and convincing substance as Hal Porter does in his garden vision The Hexagon (1956). In matters of green comfort he provides from memory's storehouse – the granite-bowled, lush South Gippsland of his youth – Botticelli weeds, flesh-deep mosses, Ruben's cornucopiae, soft privet, canna lilies, extensive pasture, wormwood, boxthorn and blackberry. His poems mount a botanical catalogue recalling equally Spencer's Faerie Queen and the excellent Bush Invaders of South-East Australia, a biological control handbook from the Department of Primary Industries.
Pastoral Editorial
When we began throwing around ideas for this issue, the notion of 'Pastoral' first came up as a joke. Because ever since god knows when, for reasons that always seem to depend on one's thoughts regarding the generation of '68, …
Mulloway (Envoi)
Welcome to the dreamy village of Mulloway, population 28.1, set in the backblocks of the Hawkesbury, somewhere in the vicinity of Sandy Bay, Peat Island and the Angler's Rest. The place is awash with ribbon-fish shaped streamers and the sound of a parade of Customlines passing down the main street toward the water, all to a sound track of late-period Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris …
Seven Secret Cities
A city had never the dimensions of a page; or, if it did, there was no need for the writing of it. Writing is a way in which a city of instances becomes an event. Instances disclose themselves patiently; the intention to account for these translates them into events. The inhabitant, who may or who may not be transitory, writes, and the page opens onto a secret space where instances arrange themselves into constellations: something here can at last and literally take place
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 …
