ESSAYS
FOB: Fresh Off the Books
‘Only idiots and government leeches live in Western Sydney,’ Zekay said to me as he tied up his oily brown hair into a topknot. He was standing in the middle of the grass at Central Park Mall, his hairy arms spread out like he was Jesus on the cross.
The Ocean’s Tide: Parentheses in Kamau Brathwaite’s and Nathaniel Mackey’s Decolonial Poetics
Rather than rehash reasons why mathematics and poetry are closely linked fields of intellectual practice, this essay assumes their relationship is the case and focuses on one of mathematics’s and grammar’s many functional figures, the parenthesis.
A Poetics of a Politics
When delivering a thesis presentation based on rethinking the methodologies for reading Aboriginal Australian poetics, a fellow postgraduate student asked me, ‘Do you consider your thesis political?’
LAND Editorial
When we chose to edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review around the theme of ‘Land’, it was with an interest in the inherent openness of the word.
The Land as Breath: Can Poetic Forms Be Metaphors for Landscapes?
We are standing in the midst of a football field doubled in size and then doubled again; a great, flat oval of water covered by streaks of green sedge that strike up from the surface like spindly grass.
Concrete: A Shikoku Pilgrimage
A long day of road walking out of Tokushima. Twenty-five, twenty-six kilometres including five hundred metres of gravel before and after Temple 18. Rosie and I left the hotel at about 7:15am and walked along one of the main arterial roads.
World of Feelings: Ghassan Hage, Bruce O’Neill, Magic Steven and the Affective Dimensions of Globalisation
Drive anywhere in Australia for long enough and you’ll pass a Bunnings Warehouse. Bunnings, a titanic home improvement merchant whose buying power enables the offering of low prices on products relating to the building and maintenance of the home, was around when I grew up in Australia, but I think my family went to a different, no-name hardware store.
Un(dis)closed: Reading the Poetry of Emma Lew
As with contemporaries like Claire Gaskin (Paperweight) and Kate Lilley (Versary, particularly ‘Mint in Box: A Pantoum Set’), Emma Lew has turned to fixed poetic forms like the pantoum and the villanelle. Constraint is both formally enacted and thematically explored.
Architecture, Poetry and Impressions of a Bendigo Chinese Doctor, James Lamsey
What have architecture and poetry got to do with property? This is a core question in the poetry collection ‘signs of impression’, which explores the operation of possession in a settler colonial context.
Possession, Landscape, the Unheimlich and Lionel Fogarty’s ‘Weather Comes’
A great many Australian poets are in an interesting and ironic state of dispossession, although perhaps only a small proportion of them actually feels that way – that proportion, let’s say, whose subjects and predispositions draw them towards the landscape, its flora and fauna, and their human experience thereof and thereupon.
Placeways in the Anthropocene: Phyllis Webb’s Canadian West Coast
Change is the true nature of every place we inhabit, everything we are. I live on what was an island that became, in time, a peninsula only to – one day in the not too distant future, with the changing climate and rising seas – most likely become an island again. Indigenous peoples travelled down this coast – when it had a different coastline, a different sea level yet again – thousands of years ago.
‘a serpentine | Gesture’: The Synthetic Reconstruction of Ashbery’s Poetic Voice
In 1966 John Ashbery published Rivers and Mountains. The departure from the fractures of The Tennis Court Oath (1962) are immediately apparent: it is a return to a language still distinctly marked by Ashbery’s usual probing and misdirection, but without the direct dislocations committed to denotative meaning, form and syntax in the earlier book.
Vorticist Portraiture in Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose
Mina Loy’s book-length poem Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-25) essentially presents an alternative, revised understanding of the modernist figure of the artist through a ‘polyglot’ language and avant-garde form (Perloff, English as a Second Language, online.). I argue in this essay that each of the characters within the poem is constructed through a Vorticist model, which also encompasses elements of Futurist and Cubist theory, as well as structurally incorporating Steinian poetics.
NEW CARIBBEAN Editorial
The thing for me is, firstly, while I recognise the usefulness of full publication as a rubicon for determining real writers from aspiring ones, I do think there are many things that we can miss. For instance, over the last few years, some local anthologies have been published, representing the poetic output at national levels – Jubilation which celebrated 50 years of Jamaican independence.
Deconstructing Decolonisation: Victor Questel’s Collected Poems
For those unfamiliar with the Caribbean context, a pan man is a pan (‘steel drum’) player, and a mas’ man’ is a participant in the masquerade. They are key figures in the annual Trinidad Carnival: a festival which creolised the quasi-pagan, pre-Lenten festivities of the white plantation class in the slave era and Canboulay (French Trinidadian Creole for ‘cannes brulées’, or burnt cane), a celebration at least as old as emancipation (1834), in which those who had been enslaved re-enacted the rounding up of slaves that occurred when sugar cane illicitly had been burnt.
She’ll Chew You Up: Notes on Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal and Tiphanie Yanique’s Wife
Writing about the novel form in her 1971 essay, ‘Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,’ Jamaican novelist and theorist Sylvia Wynter said that ‘the novel form is in essence a question mark.’ It narrates, but also prods.
NO THEME VI Editorial
It was a great privilege, if a little overwhelming (I had about 1,800 poems to read), to edit this edition of Cordite Poetry Review and, as it is not themed, I had the luxury of choosing poems on various subjects. I have tried to make the issue varied but also unified by my aesthetic principles.
Dissecting the Apocalypse: Jorie Graham’s Sea Change
I will first attempt to develop one possible reading of ‘On the Concept of History’, taking for granted that any such reading exists alongside – and may even contradict – other more familiar interpretations. The second part of the article will follow this line of thinking in approaching Jorie Graham’s Sea Change, a collection of poetry that explores the catastrophic possibilities of global warming.
Words and Spills: Disability, Sexuality and Cripping Your Poetry
Writing while crip is complicated.
Private David Jones’s In Parenthesis and The Anathemata
Shortly after midnight on 11 July, 1916, Private David Jones of the London-Welsh battalion of the Royal-Welsh Fusiliers was shot in the calf at the end of an operation attempting to drive the Germans out of Mametz Wood as part of the Battle of the Somme.
Thirty-Six Views of the Parallax: Mark Young’s the eclectic world, Bandicoot habitat and lithic typology
The first thing to note is that the body of a typical Mark Young poem often bears no relationship to the title. Do not be alarmed: this is a postmodernist conceit, and Young is thoroughly postmodernist, although he would eschew such a label.
Mansplaining Abortion in Alexis Late’s ‘Procedure’
In stanzas 1 to 3 the speaker begins in conversations experienced as attack, with a metaphor of a hunter trapping an insect, and the speaker expressing herself as insect under threat of being devoured.
EKPHRASTIC Editorial: Poetry that Sees
In ancient Greece ekphrasis was understood more broadly than in the contemporary world, indicating a complex genealogy for this term that encompasses so much fine poetry as well as many other forms of writing.
J S Harry’s ‘tunnel vision’, Vicious Sydney and The Car Story
As I began this essay on J S Harry’s poem ‘Tunnel Vision’ several years ago (2006) the radio drive shows in Sydney were full of opinions, mainly angry, concerning a report that a male teacher, in an English class, encouraging students to find as many words in ‘Australia’ as they could, had led the way by showing them how it contains the word ‘slut’, and then, when asked what that meant – it must have been a young primary-school class – had told them that it was a word used to describe women.
