ESSAYS
Festivals
Welcome to the first Internet-only issue of Cordite. Issue #8 reflects a period of transition within Cordite. Migrating to the Web has been a difficult and confusing process, with which we have not yet fully come to grips. We now …
Chris Mansell: Poetry of the Northern Territory
Region is not acknowledged in contemporary Australian poetry – which is strange since the way we see our tradition is in terms of bush and country. It's also what most contemporary poets have rejected in fact (and, legitimately, act in …
Georg Trakl’s ‘Dreamland’
Sometimes I am brought to recall those quiet days which to me trace a wondrous, happy, wayward life, one which I can taste, unquestionably, like a gift granted by benign, anonymous hands. And the little town of Talesgrund is replaced …
Between Virtue and Innocence: In Defence of Prose Poetry
Each virtue responds to a specific form of innocence. Innocence is moral instinct. Virtue is prose, innocence is poetry. – Novalis Long before Romanticism, poetry was thought to whisper with a sound which was the sound of Nature purified; poetry …
Narrative and Poetry: What Happened Next?
In narratology, the narratee is the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a particular narrative. Narrative poetry belongs to the class of poems, including ballads, epics, and verse romances, that tell stories. (Dramatic and lyric …
Experience and Transcendence in the Poetry of Tomas Tranströmer
Someone says, “Poetry is about experience”. Then someone else says, “Poetry is about transcendence”. No sooner are these two statements allowed to engage each other than a vast, complicated world begins to form. Fierce conflicts arise between the advocates of experience and the defenders of transcendence. “Poetry holds a mirror to life”, we are told. “Poetry is no reflection”, we hear in reply, “it is a ‘furious ascension’”.
