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 and chanteuse extraordinaire alicia sometimes has done a terrific job balancing the ones and the zeroes, with the result that what you get for your eyeballs is an excellent assortment of long, short and plain kooky poems. And it's all free!
This issue also marks ten years for Cordite as a magazine, and boy does it seem like a long road since Cordite #1 was launched back in 1997. It would be tempting to paste notices to this effect all over the site but in truth, what would be the point? Since moving online in 2000 we've chosen to quietly go about our business, selecting and presenting good quality poetry and trying to retain some shred or integrity (a hard act, in a medium instantly dismissed as irrelevant by a significant number of book-mavens).
In this we've been supported magnificently by the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, who have bravely funded us basically since our inception and have been extremely positive and understanding throughout our migration to the web. we hope that this first ten years of operation can act as a solid base from which to extend the life of the magazine.
In truth it's often tepting to believe that no one reads online poetry magazines, apart from the people who are contributing to them, or failed contributors wanting to find out who got in ahead of them. At various times swince becoming editor of Cordite I've thought about closing it down or moving on to other projects. However, these gloomy thoughts have always been tempered by the fact that it's not my magazine to shut down at will; that it actually represents ten years of original work by a stack of great poets, some of whom were well known before Cordite started and others who have risen to prominence over the last ten years.
The sneaky part of me also likes to remind myself that a poetry magazine that can survive for ten years under a conservative government can survive anything.
All of which is to say that Cordite ain't going anywhere. We'll be making some special announcements in the new year about future themes, personnel changes and site revamps. Until then, check out the poetry and remember – words are bullets.
