Sadly, I begin this post by announcing the departure of Emily Stewart from GUNCOTTON, and I’d like to thank her for the great posts during her time at Cordite. But the world of editing and publishing calls for Stewart with some exciting opportunities, and I applaud her success there.
Laird
So now, with pleasure, I welcome two additional people – a producer and editor – into the Cordite Poetry Review fold: Site Producer Benjamin Laird and Blog Editor Melinda Bufton.
As Site Producer, Benjamin Laird will add his considerable experience in helping to keep the current (and any future) Cordite site running smoothly, operating with a logical architecture and dynamic enough to engage with developing media. Laird is a web application developer at Loop11 and performs a range of technical site duties at Overland literary journal. He’s interested in digital poetry, metadata, the Semantic Web, Python, literature, publishing, ergodic literature and open source hardware.
Bufton
Melinda Bufton has enthusiastically embraced the role of Blog Editor, picking up where Stewart left off. She is a poet and reviewer, and currently completing Honours in creative writing at Deakin University. She has also worked for many years in education, and for a while ran a careers consultancy where she specialised in creative work and creative workers. Poetry is important to her brain, her heart and her social adventures. Contact Melinda Bufton.
Libby Hart, poetry guest-editor for Cordite 40: INTERLOCUTOR, has made her selections and I look forward to publishing the results. Artwork from James Bonicci, a member of the Dark Horse Experiment as fetaured on ABC’s Artscape: Subtopia and new work by 2011 Glover Prize finalist, Melanie Scaife, audio from Chris Mann, Annea Lockwood and more, essays from John Mateer, Juan Garrido-Salgado and Geoff Page, interviews of North American poets/editors from Oscar Schwartz and Graham Nunn, translations by Luke Fischer and, hopefully, our first piece for Cordite Scholarly.
Calliope
I will also be introducing Calliope, a human-computer interaction (HCI) avatar developed (currently in beta phase) by a team at Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg. Cordite has advised the team led by Diana Arellano on speech patterns, pace and elocution for poetry recital and its (her) anthropological / emotional facial response when engaging with a given poem. Responding to spoken word cues, Calliope banters and responds with an appropriately themed poem. Video clips of her recitation in action feature poems from Kate Lilley, Carol Jenkins, Jane Williams and Jo Langdon. UPDATE: this will now not appear online until January 2013.
Now, back to orchestrating all of this to go down/up/off on 1 November 2012 …
