FEATURES

Our features editor is Matthew Hall. This category includes articles, essays, reportage, rants and more. We usually publish a set of features in each issue of Cordite, plus some extras throughout the year. We also publish regular reviews and interviews. If you’d like to write a feature for Cordite, please visit our submissions page.




Work: A Cordite-Prairie Schooner Collaboration

Cordite is excited to announce a special collaboration with Nebraska-based literary journal, Prairie Schooner. The collaboration, entitled ‘Work’, is the first in what promises to be an exciting ‘Fusion’ series, wherein Prairie Schooner teams up with innovative journals from around …

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No! Theme! Editorial!

The young PhD was applying for a ‘Theory for Practising Writers’ teaching position in a Creative Writing degree. He had devised a three year course, the first year of readings, lectures, tutorials and essays which though extending as far back …

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Tiny Steps: the Electr(on)ification of Cordite

Cordite 36: Electronica has been a fascinating and challenging issue to put together. It contains forty new poems, fifteen spoken word tracks, a dozen features and, for the first time, a selection of multimedia or ‘e-lit’ works. Bringing together these disparate types of content raises an interesting question for Cordite as an online journal. Have we finally broken through that invisible barrier between ‘text-based journal’ and ‘online journal of electronic literature’?

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Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social

Twenty years ago, if you published a quarterly literary journal, you could be certain what that meant: four issues a year. When Anna Hedigan wrote her overview of journals and their web presence eight years ago not much had changed. The publishers’ attitude to the online space was that it was essentially a placeholder for the print journal.

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The Electronic Literature Collection V2

‘Electronic Literature’ could refer to quite different things: a novel written in the form of emails, a poem in Cordite (poetry is code!), a piece of musique concrète, an interactive installation in a gallery, a thread of You Tube comments, the Wikileaks cables . . . Understood broadly it would include any piece of literature that makes use of an electronic technology – e.g. Microsoft Word – somewhere along the line. ‘What literature today isn’t electronic?’ might be a more productive question to start with.

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‘The Anti-Logos Weapon’: Excesses of Meaning and Subjectivity in Mezangelle Poetry

Mezangelle poetry is a form of electronic code poetry popularized by the avatarised avant-gardist, Australian multimedia artist Mez Breeze, a.k.a. Mez, a.k.a. Netwurker. The word mezangelle is adjective, noun and verb: mezangelle can refer to or describe the language in …

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Contextualists and Dissidents: Talking Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons

The world of literary critical discourse is governed by one central imperative: to expound. Every point must be developed, every quote “parsed”, every nuance and inflection (whether of tone, dialect, or syntax) “unpacked” to find a maximum density of critical …

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Supra-text Sequences

Image: A series of frames require me to shade some of the evenly-distributed sets-of-3, black or blank. How I apply notions of form (actual space) and appearance (virtual space) to my experience in the world is very much like my …

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Electronica

This issue of Cordite makes a bow to music and the ways musicians in various modes and guises have used electric technologies to generate sound. When David suggested this editing gig to me, I thought how odd, and then, perhaps, …

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Cordite 35: Oz-Ko is now complete!

If you’d told me in April this year that we’d still be posting content from our Oz-Ko issue in November, I would have called you barking mad. But that’s exactly what’s happened: what started out in 2009 as an idea for a straightforward issue devoted to new poetry from Australia and the Republic of Korea has now spawned three separate issues including one hundred and fifteen poems (of which over ninety are translations), almost two dozen features (including essays, articles, interviews and photo galleries) and two separate tours, to Korea and Australia, by a total of eight poets from both countries.

Excuse me while I take a moment to reflect on that.

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Ozko (Envoi)

This poem, featuring the titles of the forty poems published in Cordite 35.2: OzKo (Hanguk-Hoju), officially brings to a close Cordite’s monumental Oz-Ko issue.

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Highlights from the Korean poets’ tour of Australia!

This gallery contains 12 photos.

In August 2011, Korean poets Kim Ki Taek, Park Ra Youn, Hwang Tong-gyu and Park Hyung Jun landed in Australia for a ten day tour. They presented at the Melbourne Writers Festival and in Sydney at the Redroom Poetry Company. The tour was a reciprocal visit following the Cordite/Asialink tour of Korea in May.

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Balloon and Hyung-seok and Bo Yeon and Seoul city rolling

Balloon’s earned his name. He’s a six-foot-two barrel of a man with a voice that booms. He’s a giant among Koreans. A gentle giant with a wide, open face. The day is hot. His brow drips when he gets excited. Bo Yeon brings him a tissue. Bo Yeon brings water and coffee. She brings a bandaid. She watches everything with a hopeful half-smile on her full moon-face. Hyung Seok sits between them. He has a long expressive face landscaped by a strata of old scars. His hands are delicate and when he talks his fingers make tiny sculptures in the air.

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In the Republic of Words: Ethics of Translation & the Politics of Contemporary Korean Poetry

In a book I recently read with my students in an undergraduate translation class, the writer sets forth twenty provocative theses on translation in this era of globalization for a new comparative literature, ranging from ‘Nothing is translatable’ to ‘Everything …

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A Report From the Poetry & the Contemporary Symposium

Trades Hall, Melbourne 7 – 9 July 2011 l-r: Ann Vickery, Martin Harrison, Tom Lee, and Tim Wright. How to sum up the Poetry and the Contemporary Symposium held at Melbourne’s Trades Hall under the auspices of Deakin University – …

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