I first met Alan Loney at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. I was studying there at the time and Alan had been invited as a guest of Robert Creeley at SUNY Buffalo. As part of his American tour Charles Bernstein hosted Alan at Penn, where he gave a reading at the Kelly Writers House and met with students of Charles’ experimental writing class entitled ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’. Continue reading
What’s immediately significant about Judith Crispin’s poems is how strange they are. They bring into focus a world which is vital, lit, emotionally open and compassionate, but one which is also other-worldly, subject to laws and visions and visitations which are not those of conventional dailiness. This world of The Myrrh Bearers is animistic, shadowy, elegiac, and is certainly not routine and logical. Despite many who believe otherwise, our world isn’t routine and logical either. If it were so, would we bother getting up in the morning?
Best Australian Poems 2015 edited by Geoff Page
Black Inc., 2015
Australian poetry, and indeed poetry in Australia, always seems to be undergoing something of a personality crisis. From the bush ballad to Angry Penguins and beyond, Australians have a knack for producing poetry, and a unique language from which to create it, but it’s a cottage industry. Even ‘industry’ seems too strong a term for what Australian poetry produces, though we have (and have had) no shortage of skilled writers working at various levels of poesy and doing remarkable things.
The Fox Petition by Jennifer Maiden
Giramondo, 2015
The Vanishing, by Stefanie Bennett
Walleah Press, 2015
We are already vanishing. Believe that! Believe with the same candour You show in believing me. (Bennett, ‘Believe That’, The Vanishing)
Stefanie Bennett woke up alongside Jennifer Maiden one morning, remarking, ‘An enemy is nothing to sneeze at: / Often his eau-de-Cologne’s / All embracing’ (‘Stratum’). This might be the too-cute, not-clever start to an amalgamating take on these two books from two poets with similar concerns and different styles. Continue reading
Image by Annette Willis
There is a photograph I have returned to several times. It was taken during the drive from Melbourne to Perth, at the petrol station which marks the town of Nullarbor, while Lucas was filling our tank. In it, a storm front is approaching, the sky a deep violet-blue which emphasises the red scrub of the plain and the bright yellow of a limestone road skirting round behind the buildings and out of sight, blocked by a makeshift white fence and hand-painted red ‘no entry’ sign.
It fascinates me, this image, in the same way the experience of the place did in the moment I took it. Continue reading
Poetry for Cordite 56.1: EKPHRASTIC is guest-edited by Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton.
NOTE: due to the nature of what we’re seeking, we’re going to be accepting submissions to this special issue for a considerable amount of time; submissions close 1 NOVEMBER 2016.
Ekphrastic poetry has a long and rich history. While the meaning of ekphrasis has changed over time, ekphrastic poetry – however it is defined – has played an important part in many poetic traditions. Ekphrasis now generally refers to poems that evoke and / or respond to a work of visual art. Indeed, John Hollander (echoing Simonides) has said that ‘Works of art are silent; poetry speaks its mind’ – and ekphrastic poetry speaks of works of visual art with new inflections and, often, unexpected emphases. There are myriad well-known examples of ekphrastic poetry, including Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, Anne Sexton’s ‘The Starry Night’, Marianne Moore’s ‘No Swan so Fine’, John Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ and W H Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts, re-imagined by William Carlos Williams as ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’.
Notional ekphrasis is a term that usually refers to poems that evoke a work, or works, of art imagined by the poet rather than referencing an actual artwork. Such poems are doubly creative. They imagine and ‘create’ in words, one or more works of visual art and also, and simultaneously, imagine and create a poem. Perhaps the most famous English-language examples of such poetic works are Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, and there are many others besides.
For this issue of we are looking for:
poems that are conventionally ekphrastic (such works should be identified on the manuscript as ‘an ekphrastic poem’ and we would like the work(s) of art referred to in the poem clearly identified – including title(s), artist(s), dimensions in centimetres and, where appropriate, the institution in which the work is held);
and
poems of a notional ekphrasis (such works should be identified on the manuscript as ‘a poem of notional ekphrasis’).
Artworks directly referenced in ekphrastic poems may include paintings, photographs, sculptures, multimedia works, etc. If contributors would like to suggest that specific works referenced by a poem are reproduced as illustrations for the issue, they may do so providing they include a digital copy of the relevant work(s) and written evidence that they have all relevant permissions to permit the reproduction of the work in Cordite Poetry Review. Cordite Publishing Inc. cannot accommodate reproduction fee of any artworks and the decision about whether to reproduce a work will be solely at the discretion of the editors. No poems should be submitted that depend for their success on the reproduction of the artwork(s) they refer to, instead ekphrastic strategies should be employed to explore this connection between art and poetry.
Please note that we are also interested in receiving prose poems. More generally, we are looking for poems that persuade us that we are ‘seeing’ an interesting work of art through the medium of language while also reading a lively and inventive work of literature (however, we don’t need to ‘see’ it all; please do not send purely descriptive poems).
Please submit only once, with a maximum of three (3) poems in one (1) document … but first, please read the submission guidelines.
Indigo Morning by Rachael Munro
Grand Parade Poets, 2014
Rachael Munro is a keen observer who writes in a language of nettles and nets, establishing a daily mood via the accumulation of certain details. This is a book of apricot tissue petals and fences-turned-crystal lattices; of the world in its weather and a poet caught in the tangle.
Missing up by Pam Brown
Vagabond Press, 2015
From the cover, let alone the first lines, the title appears apt: a sense of levitation, humming along wires, strands of illumination flickering through a work of direct and intimate voices, understated in its deftness and density, with light touches that lift the lexis, and air pockets in its seams of meaning. Spread out across the pages are samples of complete, if not absolute contemporaneity interspersed with work that decries the shortcomings of an age in which culture is so often presented as a commodity. Pam Brown’s latest collection showcases self-objects and articulates responses to salient concerns, providing masterful representations of the everyday and outré that take their time to settle into the spaces and absences within which they are framed.
Everyday Epic by Anna Kerdijk Nicholson
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015
In the untitled preface to Everyday Epic, Kerdijk Nicholson describes how ‘the poet grinds down / a sum of parts / to atoms’. The result is a world in which the most quotidian of instances and images are made ‘alchemically new’, an echo of Ezra Pound’s credo to repeat, but with difference. These lines also suggest that the process of grinding down is at once violent and erotic, displacing and magical, disturbing and strangely familiar. Continue reading
In the Museum of Creation by Frank Russo
Five Islands Press, 2015
‘…Poetry … puts the whole world out of whack’ according to MTC Cronin in her latest collection The Law of Poetry (2015) echoing the 1930s structuralist definition of poetry as ‘language made strange’.
I think the first poem in a first collection should carry some whack – should both seduce and disturb a reader. And so it is with ‘The Archivist’ at the beginning of In the Museum of Creativity: there are strange and confronting images and phrases which tease partly by problematising what and how we understand language and poetry. Continue reading
Not Fox Nor Axe by Chloe Wilson
Hunter Publishers, 2015
On a first reading, Not Fox Nor Axe is likely to leave you a little breathless, not only as a result of the brio of the poems – as there is plenty of that in them – but from their relentless variety. They start with the evil knitters at the foot of the guillotine in Revolutionary France, and go on to the contents of Tchaikovsky’s desk, a female Ukrainian sniper of the second World War, Lady Jane Grey, William Stark (an eighteenth century physician who, experimenting on himself, predictably died young), shipwrecks, Marie Curie and a host of others.
Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop by Tim Cumming
Pitt Street Poetry, 2015
The Offhand Angel, by Jan Owen
Eyewear Publishing, 2015
Every so often a reader will come across a book that seems custom-crafted for – or even, disconcertingly, out of – their own matter and marrow. For me Rebel Angels in the Mind Shop by Tim Cumming ticks boxes at a machine gun rate, even in its insouciantly avuncular foreword. There, Cumming gives an account of buying The Rebel Angels by William Robertson Davies (dense, curious, intricate), and then at Treadwells (a bookshop for occult fanciers) picks up a copy of Oral Folk Tales of Wessex, published in 1973 (‘a year I like – it’s got a nine, a seven, a three and a one in it, all powerful numbers’).
The word ‘psychosis’ is derived from Greek, and etymologically means ‘life of the spirit’, or ‘to give animation to soul and mind’. This sense of ‘life’ or ‘animation’ has manifested through literatures of madness in a plethora of movements and forms. We’ve had the comically deluded protagonist of Don Quixote; the lunatic fool on the Renaissance stage; the manic villain in the superhero film; and, in the contemporary Australian context, caricatures of madness in films such as Cosi and Mental. Continue reading
The Non-Sequitur of Snow by Shari Kocher
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015
Dr Shari Kocher’s The Non-Sequitur of Snow is her first full-length publication, following nearly two decades of feature poems in a range of Australian and international journals. There is an airy sense of activity throughout this volume. Kocher’s poetic settings range freely between the material and the imagined, forging connections across generations, yet coming through with surprising steel in some pieces. Structurally the collection is diverse, flowing, and occasionally more experimental.
Parang by Omar Musa
Penguin, 2015
Omar Musa is something of a phenomenon. I mean that both in the demotic and the philosophical senses. Self-publisher, author of the successful novel Here Come the Dogs (longlisted for the Miles Franklin), lyricist with international hip hop outfit MoneyKat, Wikipedia subject. As demonstrated by the author photo in this book Parang, autobiographical promotional videos (‘Live and Direct from Kingsley’s Chicken’), comparisons to Junot Diaz and his sartorial style, Musa has made a career from ‘the street’.
Fainting with Freedom by Ouyang Yu
Five Islands Press, 2015
Ouyang Yu is a prolific writer whose combination of occupations – poet, novelist, translator, academic – gives some context to this book’s obsessive engagement with word, language and meaning. His biographical note mentions that he came to Australia at the age of 35, and there’s a pervasive trope in Fainting with Freedom of a stranger-in-a-strange-land’s curiosity for the materiality of language and its malleability: something akin to what Kerouac once alluded to when he described his relationship to English – a language he didn’t learn until he was eight – as a tool he could very consciously manipulate as necessary for effect and meaning. Continue reading
The Myrhh-Bearers by Judith Crispin
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015
Babel Fish by Jillian Pattinson
Puncher & Wattmann, 2015
At a first, casual reading, it is easy to see why Jillian Pattinson’s Babel Fish won the 2010 Alec Bolton Prize. Here is a polished and elegant collection, addressing not only the expected emotional and personal depths of the lyric, but also casually marrying art and science with unashamed reference to untouchable greats of literature and, dare I say it, a carefully monitored spirituality.
What Are You Doing Here? Selected Poems by Dennis Haskell
University of the Philippines Press, 2015
Dennis Haskell’s new selected is part of an interesting trend. In the past few months three other Australian poets (Adrian Caesar, Jan Owen and Robyn Rowland) have also had books published overseas that, in more congenial times, might well have been published here. In each case there’s a plausible explanation but it’s an interesting phenomenon even so.
Rabbit: A journal for non-fiction poetry #15 and 16 (Winter 2015): ‘Biography’. Edited by Jessica L Wilkinson, AJ Carruthers and Sally Evans
School of Media & Communication, RMIT University
Verge 2015: ‘Errance’
Edited by Joan Fleming and Anna Jaquiery
Monash University Publishing, 2015
Cuttlefish, Edition 1
Edited by Susan Midalia, Angela Meyer and Roland Leach
Sunline Press, 2015
The Australian poetry scene, however you define it, is definitely thriving. So much so that it sometimes causes consternation. Perhaps you’ve been there at a poetry gathering or launch when someone wonders aloud whether, ‘thriving’ is one step removed from ‘overgrown’ – whether this healthy scene is actually in need of some ruthless pruning.
Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger by Fiona Wright
Giramondo Publishing, 2015
The essay collection is a form that writers are turning to more often and no wonder, when the form offers so much potential, a potential totally realised by Fiona Wright’s Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger. There are many things to admire in this collection, not least being the fact they defy categorisation.
Immune Systems by Andy Jackson
Transit Lounge, 2015
Andy Jackson’s viscerally potent anthology Immune Systems exposes the reader to the bloodline of medical India, where medical tourism leaves the general population battling fraught poverty and the medical afflictions which accompany it.
Poetry for Cordite 54: NO THEME V is guest-edited by Fiona Wright and Omar Sakr.
This issue will be a glorious miscellany – no theme, no rules, no agenda, (no pants?) – a beautiful ambiguity. We want all of the things that are in between and out-of-the-box, that are fantastic and startling and angry and thoughtful and sassy and wild. We’re looking for poems with flair and fire, substance and style. For poetry that isn’t afraid to speak to what’s happening today, that isn’t afraid to push the boundaries of form and propriety. And for poems that stay playful, poems that can make us laugh out loud or delight in the mad things that are our words. Send us your best, your brightest, your most bonkers, your funniest work – and if none of that sounds suitable, well, all the better. We want to be surprised – such is the joy of editing an issue with no theme.
Please submit only once, with a maximum of three (3) poems in one (1) document … but first, please read the submission guidelines.
Cordite Publishing Inc. Australia’s issue 54: NO THEME V of Cordite Poetry Review is supported by the City of Melbourne through their Arts Grants Program.
How do you write about a place that’s not known for much – or that is known for being ‘not much’? If the Romantics sought to imbibe the sublime through encounters with wild nature and the modernists hoped to record the shocking dissonance of urban life, it’s easy to forget that some poems reject the easy juxtaposition between such extreme environments and instead delve into the everyday details of smaller towns, or duller suburbs. Continue reading
pick up half under by Geraldine Burrowes
Rabbit Poets, 2015
Geraldine Burrowes has come to the practise of poetry via a long and varied career in the visual arts that concentrated in its later years on 3D forms. Pick up half under is her first full volume of poetry. It’s an interesting collection, imbued with the peculiarity of the late starter. There’s a sense of the techniques of poetry school being applied, but in the best poems the abstract play of images is framed by life experience to create poignant and original work.
