Poetry for Cordite 57: CONFESSION is guest-edited by Keri Glastonbury.

I must confess I’ve made a mess of what should be a small success
                                                     Courtney Barnett, ‘Pedestrian at Best’

Whether you’re more influenced by Delmore Schwartz’s ‘The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me’ or Courtney Barnett’s ‘Nobody Really Cares if You Go to the Party’ I want to know your feels.

Is there a ‘new sincerity’ in contemporary Australian poetry? As Oscar Schwartz notes in ‘can I have your attention please? poetry in the age of social media’, literary critic A D Jameson refers to ‘a resurgence of interest in preciousness, sentiment and twee’ that we might now associate with post-internet poetics. And as critic Charles Whalley writes, ‘The central drama of post-internet poetry is that of disclosure, confession and self-creation’.

What of the traditional idea of confession – unburdening your sins to a priest – in the era of The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse and the Catholic church … particularly relevant to me in The Hunter? What of sharing in the era of Facebook? Any ‘emo’ poets out there reading Sylvia Plath’s Ariel or Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back?

While the late twentieth century saw a reaction to the perceived solipsistic tendencies of the American confessional poets of the 1950s and 60s, the legacy of neither the New Formalists nor the Language poets has exempted the psyche or the self from poetry in the early twenty-first century.

Confession – it’s just another C-word.

Submit poems (visual and concrete welcome) or works of microfiction (500 words maximum). Read more about submitting to Cordite Poetry Review. Please note:

1. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.

2. Cordite maintains a hybrid submissions policy. This means that the guest editor may invite five (5) Australian and five (5) overseas authors directly to submit to the issue. In addition, the guest-editor will anonymously select an additional 30-35 works from Australian authors and use their discretion to select further overseas works. For each issue, the guest editor does not know the identities of the online contributors (via Submittable) until after the final selections have been made.

3. Simultaneous submissions or previously published material will not be considered. This includes works published in print and web journals but does not apply to material first published on personal blogs.

4. Please place up to three (3) poems in one (1) Word, RTF or PDF document (unless specifically noted otherwise for special issues), with no identifying details in the document itself.

5. We are not able to offer feedback on individual poems.

6. Submissions will only be accepted via Submittable …