ESSAYS
Phenomenological: Musings on Contemporary Filipino Poetry
On my frequent trips back to Manila, I often marvel at the range of books and literary material now occupying the shelves of bookstores. There’s the usual fare of fiction thrillers, children’s books, academic and scholarly reference books, and religion-based how-to guides. There’s also a flood of young adult and poetry books.
SUBURBIA Editorial
Suburbia is often perceived to be artistically peripheral and yet it is also entrenched as the focal point of Australian cultural hegemony. After all, Australia has been the most suburban nation on earth since the late nineteenth century.
Ghost Flowers in the Word Machine: Poetry, Pessimism and Translation in the Age of Technology
I once read that the word ikebana (生け花), denoting the Japanese art of flower arrangement, can be roughly translated into English as ‘living flower,’ or ‘bringing life to the flowers.’
‘a homemade world’: On the Dandenong Line
Sometime in 1953 my parents bought a house in Clayton (Victoria, Australia), then on the edge of south-east Melbourne. We moved there from a decidedly different environment: the guest house that my Grandmother owned. This was on Beaconsfield Parade in South Melbourne.
Ken Bolton’s Suburbia, an Introduction
This is going to be a rather disordered list of undeveloped and not closely connected thoughts about ‘the suburban’ and its binary partner ‘the urban’. Not my thoughts, for the most part, but my list of thoughts generally available.
Wright Vociferous – ‘Birds’ and ‘Skins’ – Physiognomy, Identity and the Wild Spoken Word
Our presentations organically generated overlays. Had I had more time, I would have brought in her first recognition of ‘I’ experienced at around three years of age.
No Safety, No Submission? A Survey of New Zealand Small Presses
There is a preconception that small presses, existing as they do outside the mainstream, publish poetry that is wilder, stranger, more political, and more ethnically diverse. Poetry that the university publishers have turned away, or whose genius such presses have failed to recognise.
But Why Am I Telling You this? You Are Not Even Here: Against Defining the Suburb
When I was 17 and finishing my high school exams the petrol station around the corner from our house exploded. I didn’t hear it but my twin brother did: he jingled the keys and we drove in his Subaru ute to check out the damage.
The 2018 Event Horizon of Micro Press Poetry Publishing in Australia
I begin with cosmic censorship conjecture, a formally observed tête-à-tête that coils between astrophysicists whenever they get worked up over space and matter. Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that matter can cataclysmically implode to a state where a given density and the space-time curvature split towards infinite values.
MATHEMATICS Editorial
I was already quite a few years into a creative writing PhD titled ‘Generic Engineering’ and flailing around quite spectacularly in a galaxy of words when an academic friend, perhaps hoping to spare me the indignity of a completed thesis and potential employment, flipped to the middle of the 526-page book he was reading and wordlessly pointed to a single sentence. ‘Due to a predilection whose origin I will leave it up to the reader to determine,’ he read, ‘I will choose the symbol ♀ for this inscription.’
Nighthawk, Part 1: Use of Additive Sequences for Generating a Cut-up Poem
In 1973, I was a post-graduate student at the University of California, San Diego, working on my Master’s degree in music composition. My principle teacher at the time was Kenneth Gaburo, well known for his work in compositional linguistics which crossed boundaries between music, language, writing, performance, and dance.
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.
