Of Freedom

Posted on February 15, 2023 by April-Rose Geers

I wake alone and dream
of freedom when the uncertain curtain
fails to block out the morning light
I ask myself do I know freedom

when the early tui calls dimly and
the crickets hum beneath my window
I swirl the leaves in my tea and see
the poet waver what of freedom

the cat yawns his collar glints
he does not remember his time
on the streets linen sheets
the cat is indifferent to freedom

those who march find their place
in the swell and the howl and the
blood and the belly breaking
banded fight for freedom

while in a prison ward cucumbers
are chopped and one green leaf
stark against the cell door
offers freedom to the openhearted

still the pen embarrassed
turns away not at the lack
of words but the flow of them
what right have I to know freedom

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

O! Angaanga

Posted on February 15, 2023 by essa may ranapiri

for Shell

the moana washes up
what she doesn’t take
her detritus crackling gifts
glimmering on the shore
the sea in its own set of armour
the sea that puddles around on sand
like open mouths gargling
some kind of thought
that slowly assembles in the depths
and there it lives a very gay life
until the beach calls
and it knows that ia will come

O! Angaanga

O! Angaanga

the beach calls
or
is it some dumb gay poet
calling their friend on the phone?

O! Angaanga

rising from the waves
covered in molluscs
with a cap made of coral
you wear backwards
serving some ancestral fuckboi realness
covered in kelp that falls
like a kaakahu from your shoulders
spiders crawl from the places
that you hid them
to travel safe
under the moana

we watch as their legs skitter
with the glisten of the sand in the sun

O! Angaanga

those red streaked babes
find their homes
finally
in the driftwood
where they multiply
go look at my house
they say to each other
doesn’t it just
make you hot
to think about
such security?

sitting in a bath with
two locked doors
between you and the world

O! Angaanga

the seagulls
play a tune
that goes a little bit like
‘Mama’
and a little bit like
‘But It’s Better If You Do’
cracking creatures
against whatever hardness they can find here
whatever certainty

we dance there
arms waving at the sun
bodies reaching for something
close to stability
as the gulls continue
to feed

O! Angaanga

the sea is still draining from your ears
I go to say the way the water falls from
your open mouth reminds me
of that one Doctor Who special
where David Tennant plays up the worst
of his version of the Time Lord
which is umm saving people’s lives
when he’s not meant to
but I don’t actually say that

the episode ends with Captain Adelaide Brooke
killing herself to teach him a lesson
about fixed points in
time
is there anything in your past you wouldn’t change?

while the water flows you cannot speak
so you use your hands instead
and I try my best to understand
try my best to pretend

O! Angaanga

you’re on a towel now
dripping in the passenger’s seat
the sea creatures once alive
now folding off you in clumps
their reliable transportation
turned into a death trap

we’re stuck in South Auckland traffic
the car idles its fumes upwards

O! Angaanga

where do we go now?

in this imaginary scenario
do you still live where you did
in Takaanini
would we sit in your lounge
with kuumara creeping over the carpet
struggling harakeke into different
shapes
passing lines back and forth
about dear dear
Whiro
you would pull out an obsidian blade
and scrape along the leaf
till the muka
becomes something worth weaving
while I make increasingly deranged putiputi
I would leave on the table as a gift
when it’s time for me to go

O! Angaanga

when I write
I never cut
away from the heart

O! Angaanga

you’re unsure if you belong on land
after so long under the ocean
teaching schools of fish
what the hook means

this land is yours through whakapapa
any amount of time away
cannot be held against that connection;
a dull knife that makes the cord
sing rather than cutting
through

O! Angaanga

we follow the waters south
to Ootaakaro
tuna hugging the river floor while rakiraki
bob their bodies up and down
bills placed to snap
whatever moving thing would fit

when we get out
looking for the hotel I’m staying in
we only notice we’re going the wrong way
some five minutes’ walk past
what is the biggest building
in Christchurch

and a black statue of Victoria

she was never here but
she’s never left

O! Angaanga

I feel sick every time
the Tainui rules around
poowhiri are listed
a dress shirt and pants for taane
a dress with a respectable length for waahine
taane sit up front
waahine in the back
all black
thank God
for colonisation
thank God for the sorrow of Queen Vic
and young Albert getting typhoid

amene

O! Angaanga

God gave Noah salvation
in Uenuku’s peacocking
spectrum
said all the flooding is over
for now
except not really

the rainbow in the oil spill
the rainbow in the gay flag
the rainbow in the spinning crystal in the window
the rainbow in the Pink Floyd T-Shirt design
the rainbow in the paaua

O! Angaanga

you’ve grown obsessed
with dried seaweed
going through a packet a day
always offering me some
with a gritty grin
before popping the next sheet in

I always decline
too salty I say
knowing full well it’s not the salt
that gets me but the texture

you joke that it’s better than
filling your lungs with smoke
a prior addiction
that steadied you through
turbulent currents
in the homes of our kauheke
all those taonga paaua become ashtrays
the eyes of the stars
smothered with cigarette butts

O! Angaanga

there were twins racing toy boats
on the Kaiapoi river
when you told me you wanted kids
but didn’t want to carry them
like the arachnids formerly
hugged under your skin
which were all like real small
compared to a human baby

I think it was here where
I let go of a future I had held
so foolishly
and left it for all the trout
in the tributary

O! Angaanga

grey clouds hang at the Denny’s car park
like solemn watchers
we’re back in South Auckland now
never did figure out if the Ootautahi Denny’s was real

in this shitty weather we’re slow to move
giving questions to the dashboard
asking whether or not
suicide is a completely
appropriate response
to invasion

maybe the medication will stop me feeling
how I should
maybe the medication
is just muffling our ancestors?

O! Angaanga

I spent our separation inside of
a hollow heart (mine)
trying to beat it back
to shape
taking a mallet to its clay walls
my head ringing with
the question
can I fold the world into something
I want to live in?

I missed you
I guess is
what I mean.

O! Angaanga

I swam for the first time in the Waikato
the other day
stripped to just my underwear
in the warm awa
Tamanuiteraa turned into
an orange smear on the clouds

what part of me is clean here
while the rest rots?

O! Angaanga

Mary Anning allegedly
the woman who sold
seashells on the seashore
took the oldest and deadest
things and pulled them from the cliffs of
Dorset to tell a whole new story
about the earth’s ancient past
so not shells exactly (poetry always takes
some liberties)
but
fossils
and skulls

in the final shot of Ammonite
a film that is loosely (loosely) based
on her life
she stands on one side
of her discovery
while her gay lover
stands on the other

offering her a life that some thought impossible

O! Angaanga

I ask you about Hinemoana
and what it was like to live in her sea
and you just smile slightly
something moving at the edge
of your vision
that I can’t see
and sign something like
well, there is a reason
I’m not there anymore

O! Angaanga

I think I’m getting sick from
my own river
which would make sense
cos the council overseas a sewage system
that has the habit of overflowing
how much human shit into this river in
the last ten years?
let alone all the runoff that comes
from farms exploited by Fonterra

or is it claiming an awa
my ancestor already turned their back on?
I can’t imagine
doing that
but maybe I do that all the time
look at a mountain and say
I don’t even know you
anymore
without even knowing what I’ve done

but when I swim in the Waikato
my body becomes
something I can love
dissolving into
the paru water

O! Angaanga

how long can you hold your breath?

according to Facebook
I came out as trans 7 years ago
I sometimes wake up and remember
the boy I was still curled up
inside my stomach
like some dead meat I just can’t digest
that fluttering fear leaving
my house in a dress
my lungs shrivelled to the size of
what-ifs in my mind
but still they knew what to do
when I took my first breath in 23 years

O! Angaanga

I watch as one particularly clingy katipoo
makes its way out from behind your ear
and crawls over your still face
to rest in the centre of your forehead
like it’s finding warmth in some third eye
you have hidden their under the skin
it didn’t want the driftwood beach
the spider had grown attached
so it begins to weave you a veil

whether or not you should
you trust it not to bite
as it turns its energy into something
that catches the light

O! Angaanga

I remember in the early months
you bringing up binders
you would wear as a teen
and the others thinking you
were straight
I didn’t even think
you were cis
at the time

in your tino jacket
scuffed to fuck jeans
making some joke about LAND BACK

I thought then
that I would hope
to get to know you more
than just that taniwha who added me
on Facebook

O! Angaanga

I’m thinking about the bubbles flattening
to the surface of the tube
and our meme of Papa and Rangi
standing underneath a storm
of inside jokes and the knowledge that
if I did myself in
right here
and right now
you would just travel back in time
to make sure I had something else
to hold onto
with an arm outstretched
you would climb into Rarohenga and one-outs
everyone who would try and stop you pulling me back to life
or we could just stay in there together
and grow savage and old
collaged from a million different sources

oh to age as a waa is luxury
as a source of power
lets us grow fucking monstrous
fill the world with a kind of darkness
that chews the heads off men
or rewind to live
inside a single frame:

O! Angaanga

the pohutukawa blows up red
like it’s embarrassed
by all of the sentiment
our waka landed near one
bent into its own weight

we really go back
way back
to the Sunshine takeaways
me on the Friday
and you on the Saturday

I remember having a phase
where I would strip the batter
from the fish and eat both
separately

O! Angaanga

instead of different days
what if we went on the same one
and from then on
were never separated
even when things got real hard or real bad
you staring into the wall
and me bringing you back to the present
with a hey or a coffee
or a little meme I found
about being bisexual and depressed
oh aren’t we all
or like way too many poems
I read you down the line

O! Angaanga

imagine a world that wasn’t defined by capital
built on invasion and exploitation
I don’t know if I’m even capable of it
but I know
it’s not because of worker alienation that
I like shiny things

when I was a toddler my nan would get me to help
make mobiles to hang out on the porch
just driftwood with shiny Cats Eyes
(they were always my favourite)
watching from irregular stations on
glossy nylon

the plink they would make
a familiar rattle
like some other neighbourhood kid
was playing with toys
out there in the wind
lip to bottle hoping to get a song out of it

where by the right angle
capitalism could
just be blown away

O! Angaanga

how dramatic is this shit?!
if I was Byron or Shelley or Hopkins
committing my love to chains
in words
to clothing with many ruffles
saying your name over
and over again
until the calcium crumbles
or the moana passes her horizon
over our brows

O! Angaanga

you grow weary of the land and its politics
and instead of waiting the twenty or so years it will take
you have decided to give Hinemoana
another visit

we make angels in the sea lettuce
letting the tide move us gently in the foam
the impressions of our arms swinging
ephemeral at each wave
I make a joke about being wed to the ocean

you say in a voice like skipping stones
it was the beaches you always liked the most

cos on the taatahi there is always the option to run away
there is always a choice and if you change your mind
it just doesn’t mind all that much
the beach is used to things coming and going

O! Angaanga

no matter how much
I think I should be used to this
I’m not

over the course of the day
I shuffle back up the beach
while you remain below
as the sun dips
you begin to float
the great big sea pulling you back to her

I don’t remember what the last things I say to you are
probably something like
I’m getting cold
my stomach is sore
I don’t know if that means
I’m hungry or full

you just nod and smile
and sign: same
e rua e rua
seaweed still stuck between your teeth
you turn your eyes to the horizon
and slowly but surely
the sea
she takes you back

O! Angaanga
Auee!

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

Cottonmouth

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Jam Pascual

I call your name and the century turns.
In non-Euclidean geometry, parallel lines
intersect at both positive and negative
infinity. When I saw you last, you were
aglow with the halo of new priorities.
Fear not: the rudiment of therefore,
the agony of meanwhile. We bought joy
from the black market of drunk dusks.
We channeled Galileo with our backs
pinned to astroturf. Lately I’ve been
poaching the green tigers in my memory
palace just to hang their heads on the walls
like it’s good feng-shui, but that’s just a side
racket. The truth is, I’m a stenographer
in the courtroom of loss. Good on you
for getting out of that gig, but I’m not
ready to hand in my resignation letter.
I need to get the whole crime down.
I’m putting bull clips on my intentions
and childproof locks on my promises.
My appeals are nailed to sundials so
they mean nothing in the night time.
My mouth is an almanac of auguries.
My heart, however, is a glass knife—
I don’t care how good you are with it,
you can’t take it to war.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

To The Governor Part II

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Blain Locke Jr

Imposing my will
But like a bird I am free
This is my chance
I up and I flee
The grass is real green
But I knew it would be
Through fire and brimstone
A new day called peace
I take with me traits
Once I seen to be stripes
I guess all that changed
When men take a life
So thanks for the lessons
And I’m on to the next
And yes it costs pride
And or more just with acts
My actions are mine
I’m not coming back

This poem is a conclusion of the ‘To The Governor‘ piece. Judgement Day comes – you come out of jail. The traits that you learn in jail / the stripes, aren’t going to work. The codes that you learn in jail don’t fit outside. It’s a reminder of what you do outside. It costs a lot of pride. My father taught me great ethics. That’s a great Blackfella thing in me.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

huntsman

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Ren Jiang

Listen—
i am a sorry son weaving upward or
the spark in every raindrop shaken off somebody else’s web i—
want to sprawl across the stretching lifeline on your palm, plucking
at your favourite song.
Listen, i—
am often moved
by the temple bell rope coiling thick
around itself. i like to caress the fraying threads
and imagine it’s the pale fuzz on the back of a lover’s neck. Pull hard
and ring three times to call me home, the hushed buzzing an afterthought
to a long night.

I point my face towards the dripping ceiling,
observe that each nail rusts differently to the last,
which is to say that time gnaws at me and imprints
a different stain on each eye with each tear. My skin growing

cratered, i moult and hope to leave an intact shell with each season.
I am jealous

of that temple rope, entangled and disparate, whole in its swinging.

Listen—
there will always be leaving. Mind your step when you pass through, there are too many
splinters under this roof. There will always be crumbling i— think i lost my legs
somewhere i—
can’t see the trail behind me. Am i—
crawling backwards?

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

An Anatomy of Romance

Posted on February 15, 2023 by Julia Rose Bąk

Tomorrow I will learn that my body is romantic.
Romantic as in rounded, buxom; romantic as in
assumed to billow. Like Rose, lounging gingerly
in her stateroom, tousled curls lolling on open
shoulders. Like Rose, holding her lover’s gaze
much like a young girl holds a nectarine newly
ripened: tenderly; a question of hunger.

Tomorrow, when I carry my romantic body
to the water — which is to say, when I draw
her a bath — I will rub peppermint oil into her
aching wrists, at which she will sigh the slowing
pulse of a sigh, this sliver of breath an invitation
to press harder: a call to tenderise. Now stop.
Gentler.

Tomorrow, I will romance my body. But today,
under the three p.m. sun, I let her blister.
I click her dimpled knees as I lower us down
to lounge. When somebody asks how she is,
I will tell them she is doing well, as she quietly
unties her muscles’ mess of knots. In the evening,
with thumbs tucked underneath spaghetti straps
I will spell words out on the small of her back,
secrets kept by the curve of her spine.

Tomorrow, as she blinks her eyes into the black
of the bathroom, a single candle tacked to the
sink, the shadows lapping at the plaster will look
like a dozen running horses, and in the shadow of
a stallion, she will spill her own secrets, folding them
into the bathroom walls, and watching
as they’re taken away.

Posted in 108: DEDICATION | Tagged

Toby Fitch Reviews Running time by Emily Stewart

Posted on February 10, 2023 by Toby Fitch

Running time by Emily Stewart
Vagabond Press, 2022


Emily Stewart is the author of numerous chapbooks, including Like and The Internet Blue. Her debut poetry collection Knocks (Vagabond Press 2016) won the inaugural Noel Rowe Poetry Award and reflected an assuredly varied approach as it experimented with multiple voices (not just in monologues but polyphonic within poems), erasure as a feminist poetics (with homage-like condensations of Lydia Davis, Helen Garner, Susan Sontag, Clarice Lispector and more), post-digital affect (extracting poetic value from online idioms in particular, though sometimes overwhelming the poetic value), all while interleaving themes of climate change, the cost of living, and more in an exploration of what it means and feels like to live in so-called Australia in the Anthropocene.

Stewart’s latest book Running time (which won the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award for a manuscript by an Australian woman poet) offers a shorter, more localised, more focused, though no less polyphonic, series of poems about her recent time (since the pandemic) living around Ashfield in Sydney’s inner west on unceded Wangal land. And while the poems aren’t about the pandemic, they were generated in the compressed time of 2021’s lockdown. Stewart wrote a piece every day over a couple of months, which gives the book its shape and iterative style.

Each page of the book contains an untitled poem (or fragment), from as little as three lines and up to nineteen lines, the majority falling somewhere in between, like purposefully incomplete or sketched, half sonnets. These fragments are grouped into four sections across the book, titled: ‘So contemporary and so likeable’; ‘Loafing’; ‘Facing the wall’; and ‘Silence is okay’; all of which are quotes from within the poems.

Running time’s syntax refuses conventional poetic devices (like musty metaphor, misty description, high diction, traditional stanzas, heartfelt elegy, starry-eyed ode, precious personification), basic devices that, let’s be honest, are having their heyday again, and that usually perform a guaranteed intensity, the way any genre trope (yes, poetry uses genre tropes too) sets you up to feel things you know you’re going to feel. Stewart makes fun of how plain ‘balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa / balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa balsa wood’ can be because her poetry is developing its own idiosyncratic tropes while taking a stand against the staid, the emotionally manipulative, and the plain boring. And because poems are interstitial – they’re made everywhere, or anywhere, in between everything else (and whenever) – and should be inherently surprising, which Stewart’s invariably are at every turn. The syntax creates the illusion that Stewart is walking or running alongside herself, gathering and noting ‘signs’ as she goes along and then drops them into poems. The poems seem to know just when to drop a subject too; or rather they move swiftly between thoughts, ideas; or perhaps they are the movement of thought. In any event (and there are plenty hinted at, though the focus is more on how feeling and thought can conjure or be conjured by/into language), the poems move languidly from one piece to another, and are sometimes just left hanging, which is not an easy technique to get your heart around, especially if you need poems to end on epiphanies. The syntax might be critiqued as loose, emotional, but I think they feel released. Another technique that unshackles the poems is their eschewing of punctuation. These are the only marks that appear in the four sequences across the book: one comma, one asterisk, two slashes, three ellipses, four dashes, four hyphens and four question marks.

But what are these sequences of untitled fragments, accrued over time, all about? The Helen Anne Bell Award judges write, of Running time: ‘Amid doubt, shame, need and fear, there is courage and insouciance, the subtle pleasure of stretching meaning into a variety of imaginative spaces that open up the limits of conventional language and syntax.’ So, in these poems, what they’re about is entwined in what they’re doing – and Stewart has metapoetic stuff to say about that to boot:

‘I tend towards listing / showy concepts’
‘I can say a lot about the opposite side of things / the alluring challenge / of the unprocessed event’
‘I bring home epoxy filler / truncate an atmosphere’
‘what I’m giving off / is a feeling not a lecture’
[and] ‘of course the details matter’

Here are some random details that might matter:

‘Toyota Echo (intrusive image)’
‘the real work wives of publishing’
‘am I not the gender you asked for’
‘the brain’s rewards centre’
‘I’ll find a job tomorrow / afternoon’
‘dolphin coffee table’
‘dislodged brick / wraparound sunglasses / a toddler’s sock’
‘the building called Oceanic out near Mascot’

In the opening fragment, we find the biggest clue to Stewart’s mode (or mood): ‘at the new pool / I dive into my cerebral offcuts’.

From there, each fragment of offcuts is ‘pushing forward / conceding another day’, at times ‘trying to galaxy brain it’, at other times ‘giving some control back’. There’s a tension between Frank O’Hara-the-art-poet-guru’s manifesto of ‘go on your nerve’ and Stéphane Mallarmé-the-French-aesthete’s doctrine of ‘ceding the initiative to words’.

Pages: 1 2
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS | Tagged ,

Anupama Pilbrow on as Reviews Editor

Posted on January 31, 2023 by Anupama Pilbrow

I’m honoured to announce that Anupama Pilbrow has joined Cordite Poetry Review as Reviews Editor.

Anupama Pilbrow is a PhD student at the University of New South Wales researching early science fiction and representations of water. She is the author of chapbook Body Poems, released as part of the deciBels 3 series (Vagabond 2018). Her poems, reviews, and essays have been published in journals and anthologies including Rabbit Poetry Journal, JEASA, Liminal, Southerly and The Hunter Anthology of Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry.

She was editor-in-chief of The Suburban Review from 2017 to 2021, and now holds the role of Vice President of The Suburban Review Inc. Her poetry often deals with delight, disgust, diaspora and the abject.

Posted in GUNCOTTON |

Introduction to Pooja Mittal Biswas’s Hunger and Predation

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Mani Rao

BUY YOUR COPY HERE

In this fifth book of poetry, Pooja Mittal Biswas’s voice achieves musicality. While strong themes lend coherence to the whole, the language cascades and moves forward with an inner force.

The collection’s second poem is in the voice of a pregnant Indian woman with a panoptic view of immigrants in Australia. It defines hunger as the hunger for freedom ‘to be, to be allowed to be, untouched and uncontained, spoken and heard’, and it ends with the resolve that ‘my child will speak.’ We quickly discover that this child, or childlike voice, is the poet herself, as she pores over memories, including those traumatic, to locate herself.

Biswas considers Nigeria her first country; however, in Hunger and Predation, she sets claim to her heritage as Indian. She conducts a dialogue with this Indianness, drawing from it as well as not fitting into its framework. She comments on the restrictive social mores that deny selfhood – ‘a ghost like all women are urged to become.’ By contrast, her own passions are blatant (‘a wolf hiding in the tall grass’).

Biswas uses Indian vocabulary with ease, importing her immigrant voice into Australian literature. Interior monologues with the gods of Indian mythology have a freshness and clear vision that can only come from a distance.

A second theme of this book is gender queerness, which is interrogated as Biswas works through a sense of being ‘agender.’ The yearning to be free of categorisations goes along with the assertion that she is much more than identity. In the poem ‘hir’ she writes ‘of gendered traits, a cartography of the mind that history has mapped onto people as borders are onto nations.’ In another poem, ‘anatomy of an orgasm’, she notes the dissonance – ‘the wiring’s off.’ In ‘glitch’ she writes – ‘& I ask myself one thousand times an afternoon/whether the way I perform gender/ is artificial or the real thing.’ ‘Immunity’ articulates the horror of having been sexually abused in childhood.

Whereas confessional poetry can deteriorate into fetishism, in Biswas’s hands the first person narrative soars – detailed, raw, palpable, her poems have a sense of immediacy.

Hunger and Predation ends with a transported long poem titled ‘madness’ that more than hints at the poet’s mental state and therapy. Stunned, I found myself anxious for the poet – so human is this book, her hunger and predation included.

Posted in INTRODUCTIONS | Tagged ,

Erika M Carreon on as Philippines Literature Editor

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Erika M Carreon

I’m honoured to announce that Erika M Carreon joined the Cordite Poetry Review Philippines Literature Editor.

We have worked hard to develop a significant readership in the Philippines, and this posting is a long time coming.

Erika M Carreon co-founded the independent journal Plural Online Prose Journal and published hybrid art and prose projects under Occult’s Razor together with Neobie Gonzalez. Her poems, short stories and translation work have appeared in High Chair, Kritika Kultura, TAYO Literary Magazine, Philippines Free Press, Katitikan, Anomaly Journal, Kalliope X and in Ulirát: Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines. She is currently taking her PhD in creative writing at the University of Melbourne with a special interest in eco-fiction.

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged ,

Submission to Cordite 109: NO THEME 12

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Caitlin Maling

We are now up to one dozen issues where there is no theme.

But Caitlin Maling mentions, ‘Probably because I now spend a lot of the time I used to spend writing with a two-year-old in playgrounds, I’m interested in the idea of poetry as risky play: poems up-in-the-air, working towards something new, clumsy, rough and having fun, but still with something real at stake’

And Nadia Rhook notes, ‘I love the claim of U.S. poet Carolyn D Wright that: ‘It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.’ I’m interested in poems that fill their lungs with permission. What internalised norms and expectations might be un- or re-wired through poetry, what zones of one’s life made free?’

Send us up to three poems.

This podcast sheds some insight on how Cordite Poetry Review (and Cordite Books) works.

Submission to Cordite 109: NO THEME 12 closes 11.59pm Melbourne time Sunday, 5 March 2023.

Please note:

  1. The guest editor(s) has sovereign selection choice for all poems submitted.
  2. Masthead editors will also contribute to the issue.
  3. We will only read submissions sent during our official submission periods.
  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 …

submit


Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , ,

The Email May Contain Information: Eda Gunaydin on Toby Fitch

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Eda Gunaydin

Read this essay over on Liminal magazine.

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged ,

Peripheral Peripheries: Robert Wood on Alvin Pang

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Robert Wood

Read this essay over on Liminal magazine.

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Open Relations: Angela Biscotti on Lucy Van

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Angela Biscotti

Read this essay over on Liminal magazine.

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Notes on the Archive: Chi Tran after Timmah Ball

Posted on December 5, 2022 by Chi Tran

Read this essay over on Liminal magazine.

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Let’s Pull Things Apart Together: 7 Works by Karima Baadilla

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Karima Baadilla


Karima Baadilla | Purple Does Not Mean Sad | Oil on found board | 36 x 42cm

My painting practice explores the emotional and psychological aspects of a person’s life, and is informed by my own quest to find my place in the world as a migrant settler in Australia. Painting new paintings on top of old paintings is a way to create spaces on existing ones, understanding that the present is made up from elements of the past. Painting directly on top of another painting is not about erasing the past, but creating a new perspective, a mosaic of things that makes a new place.

By choosing to de-frame, re-paint, re-frame and then re-define an existing painting is to demand space where there was none, to add a new time dimension to an existing one. The physical act of adding a painting on top of another image or painting is to add layers of time, space, place and history instead of creating a wholly separate figurative world – rejecting the notion of othering. This rejection is the driving force behind my artistic practice as I seek to create works that do not explicitly showcase my identity but rather, allow the action of reclamation to be my agenda.

Let’s Pull Things Apart Together was developed by Karima Baadilla during her time in RESIDENCE at Footscray Community Arts, 2021.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Posted in ARTWORKS |

Bad Naturalisations

Posted on December 1, 2022 by James Jiang

‘Criticism is committed … to helping us to understand poems as significant utterances. But it must ensure that in its desire to produce ultimate meaning it does not purchase intelligibility at the cost of blindness: blindness to the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world.’ (Veronica Forrest-Thomson)

I take my title and epigraph from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s separatist manifesto, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. First published posthumously in 1978, Poetic Artifice is more than what its unassumingly vague subtitle suggests. In addition to being a ‘theory of twentieth-century poetry’, it is also: an ABC of reading, an extended argument with the critic William Empson, a critical genealogy of technical innovations from John Donne to Dada, and a fanatically clear-sighted insistence that poems use language other than to exchange facts and observations about the world outside themselves. The ‘Artifice’ in Forrest-Thomson’s title is the name for the total process by which a poem marks language – adding emphasis through typography and lineation, rhyme, metrico-rhythmic patterning, etc. – so as to hijack its ordinary communicative usages and arrive at a meaning that is as much about itself as it is about the world at large, a meaning that subsumes thematic content under a larger concern about the efficacy of its own meaning-making structures.

Forrest-Thomson was by no means the first person to make such a claim. Much in the way that Artifice works through a play of poetry’s continuity and discontinuity with other language games, her theory is less a radical break than a pivotal node in an experimental tradition running from Russian formalism to American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, a tradition which we might define as broadly ‘anti-realist’. While this is not a tradition to which Australian poetry has historically been indifferent, Forrest-Thomson’s critical and creative work, curtailed by her early death at the age of 27, remains largely unread outside of relatively small coteries in North America and England,.

So why bring Veronica Forrest-Thomson into a discussion of Asian Australian poetry? There are a couple of circumstantial coincidences: she was born in British Malaya (her father was a rubber planter) and found an able and sympathetic expositor in the Australian poet Martin Harrison, who gave a 1979 ABC Radio talk on Poetic Artifice. But the main reason has to do with the critical austerity that is her counsel, the vehemence of her objection to what she calls ‘bad naturalisation’ – a way of reading that by-passes or liquidates ‘the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world’. It is an arresting and somewhat aggravating provocation: that in our ‘unseemly rush from words to world’ (as she puts it), we overlook much – if not all – that makes a poem, well, a poem.

While the categories of identity that are part of our critical orthodoxy do not feature in Forrest-Thomson’s study (all her case studies are white and only two – Edith Sitwell and Sylvia Plath – are women), I find her notion of the ‘bad naturalisation’ particularly suggestive. For ‘naturalisation’ also happens to denote the legal process by which a non-native resident of a country becomes a citizen; and Poetic Artifice’s main argument, we could say, pertains to poetry’s equivocal citizenship in the many worlds of discourse it constantly traverses. Rootlessly cosmopolitan – as fluent in the parlance of the office as in the language of the bedroom, in the theorems of science as in the paradoxes of theology – poetry is a perennial migrant in the republic of letters.

In what follows – a close-reading of three of the thirty poems sedulously edited by Bella Li – I wish to elaborate upon this hint that our negotiation of poetry’s generic difference may set a kind of precedent for our encounters with difference in other orders of meaning and being. I’ve chosen work by three younger poets representing what I take to be a generational congeniality towards Artifice and a shared instinctive appetite for the effects of aesthetic distancing. In their Artificing, one notices a sense of belatedness, a removal from – and perhaps a certain skepticism about – more securely transparent forms of personal testimony with their attendant authenticating affects.

****

The interplay between the two senses of ‘naturalisation’ – as the domestication of meaning on the one hand and the legitimation of community membership on the other – appears to offer a way into a poem such as Vidya Rajan’s ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’, a mashup of Mary Oliver’s much anthologised poem ‘Wild Geese’ and the indie video game Untitled Goose Game. A ‘bad naturalisation’ of it may read something like this:

‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ is a migration poem askew – one that displaces the pathos of the diasporic crossing of geographical latitudes (a residue of which persists in the conventionalised image of the goose) with a wry awareness of the behavioural latitude (or the lack thereof) permitted under model minority citizenship (‘very few / of the people I know enjoy / the grace of mistakes’). The ambivalence of the poem’s attitude is captured perfectly in its subtitle: ‘[sorry Mary Oliver] [sorry House House]’, where the ‘sorry’ transfuses an unrepentant insouciance (‘sorry I’m not sorry!’) into a pro forma display of filial piety (an acknowledgement of sources being a kind of ancestor worship, textually speaking). This way of being bad at being good is, of course, the inverse of the objective in Untitled Goose Game, where, as the eponymous goose charged with wreaking havoc on an English village, one ‘gets good’ (in gamers’ parlance) at being bad.

This reading, while capturing some of the poem’s ironic inflections, proceeds from certain assumptions about who the ‘I’, ‘we’, and ‘the people’ in the poem are – that is, from fixing the identity (with some help from the geographical coordinates provided in the poem itself) of what linguists call shifters, those grammatical constituents (pronouns or adverbs such as ‘now’, ‘then’) whose meanings shift according to the context of utterance. What about this poem do we recoup if we forego these assumptions? What part of our vision is restored if we lose this crux of intelligibility?

We might be able, for instance, to think about the poem’s concern with the relationship between permissiveness and kinship – as well as its comic improvisations upon its source material – through the conventions of pastoral. When we substitute a generic ‘I’ for an empirical one, we see that the speaker’s unforced eloquence, ranging from the slight wistfulness of ‘very few / of the people I know enjoy / the grace of mistakes’ to the rancor of ‘this or that / shithole country of origin stress’, is reminiscent of that of a figure such as Meliboeus, one of Vergil’s herdsmen in Eclogues I, whose fortunes are similarly hostage to the arbitrary determinations of the imperial centre. That very sense of arbitrariness is also conveyed by the anecdotal informality of the lines in ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ that most explicitly engage with the history of empire:

why’d the brits leave
so much scrap metal – was it our own fault – we should
have cleaned it up

well, when we were young we didn’t have
all this, and the rice, the grains, if you trace them back, 
were of poor quality, the best exported elsewhere, 
for the empire? 
and now all these illnesses, I guess I guess

Tonally and typographically, these lines are bracketed, passed off as a kind of small talk (which in pastoral is always thinly-veiled big talk). If there is a ray of migrant pathos here, it passes through the diffractive medium of pastoral melancholia – it is not just a family story being presented here, but a story about ‘the history and family of things’.

In examining ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ under the aspect of pastoral conventions, we might also be alerted to the way in which human-animal relations are mediated through this poem’s cacophonous soundscape. More than any of its discursive statements, it is the poem’s sonic exuberance that performs the most wholesale critique of Oliver’s catholicity about ‘the family of things’ (the concluding phrase in ‘Wild Geese’), a disclosure Oliver arrives at through a stateliness of repetition and address over which Rajan rides roughshod. Bits of verbal spare change – ‘like’, ‘cute’, ‘ew’, ‘um’ – are placed at line-endings to emphasise the porousness of the boundary between the semantic and non-semantic. It is a poem highly attuned to its own trafficking in noise. We can detect, for instance, a sort of counterpoint between the lexical and phonological repertoire centred around -es words (‘geese’, ‘knees’, ‘less’, ‘stress’) – all of which thematise psychic and corporeal vulnerability – and the cluster of -on words (‘honk’, ‘dominion’, ‘imagination’, ‘lonely’, ‘moon’) – words which mark moments of self-possession. The decisive change is rung at the conclusion, where an adaptation of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ (‘Honk me to the moon! / Let me honk among the stars! / Let me see what honk is like on / Jupiter and Mars!’) tunes the poem to a new key – of wilfulness, if not freedom.

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Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , ,

Zoa

Posted on December 1, 2022 by A J Carruthers 

Let
Liboteur	
do	
the	
work		
of	
Prophet	
who	
is	 
NOT	
ACCEPTED	
YET.

Let 	
Huitzilopochti 	
Gerzil	
Rongo	
Set		
Hachiman	
Inanna almighty	
Indra	
Junda	 
Jiutian Xuannü	
Nemain	
Laran	
&	
the 	
Kydoimos	
Neit	
Idis	 
Ullr	 
Jarovit		
Sekhmet		
&		
Ogoun
&
Resheph
&
Enyo
REJOICE 
with
Roberto
the
Clown
who
would
U
believe
VERTICALLY
REGISTERED ZERO	
more
on
it
later.


Let 	
Nicholas
Pounder	
the
PRINTERPŔETER	
rejoice	
in	
the		
Spirit	
of	
his	
ways
with	
Blake	
Hokusai	
Hogarth	
who	
legislate	
shape.


Let
Nick
Whittock
&
(Bk 1)				
Cathy
Vidler
VISUALISE	
the 
Quantum
Universe
&
Wicket
Pitch
SPATIALLY
INTUIT
spontaneously 
exercising 
caution
O,
o.
Posted in 107: LIMINAL | Tagged

Rotation About a Fixed Axis

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Benjamin Laird

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eternal recurrence

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Christy Tan

in the middle of we are always
boarding a train returning to

my mother sends me a picture
from 2004 she tells me memory

is transient
remembering is eternal in the image

I am carrying a small orange both hands full

somewhere
uncaptured in the frame

the train stops
moving

Posted in 107: LIMINAL | Tagged

The Schnee Stone

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Debbie Lim

He brings it home one ordinary afternoon,
cupped in his hands like a fresh piece of hail.
When he rolls the rock between his palms
a fine precipitation sifts down, barely visible,
and the air between us crackles, falls several
degrees colder. We marvel at the rare find:
this tiny blizzard for the pocket, a child’s fist-
sized conjuring of snow. If only I too, as a girl,
had found such treasure. He slips it in a bowl
of steaming water. We watch in silence, solemn,
as the surface slurries, begins to knit its dull
cataract of ice. The schnee stone darkens ever
so slightly, and refuses to melt.

* Schnee: German for snow

Posted in 107: LIMINAL | Tagged

Bed of Winter

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Derek Chan

Po Po dreams / of glaucoma moon / a white meihua flowering / through alluvial
night / she dreams each strand of light / a stemmed grief / stirring the parable
of her face / dreams each eye unhinging / like swollen figs / as the wok-dark
smoulders her deeper / into the fever of steamed fish / into the incorporeal salt

of ever dissolving dreams / where some nights she awakens / nestled in the strange /
grasses of a half-parted world / seeding the soil with her astonishment / as she slow
dances amongst schisandra leaves / as she skips stones like unhoarded decades /
as she calls out to her grandchildren / gathered on distant plains / their feathery

heads aglow / like meihuas thawing / into impossible morning / & sometimes there
grows a silence / which glistens like apples / the music box of nectar / she cleaves open
to fill the aching / fermata of her hollowed gums / & sometimes she watches meihua
sun / blossom brutal black / beneath reddening sprig of dusk / & she understands

the sea’s greyness / to be a mirror without / the home of its reflection / & all through
alluvial night / she digs out the compass of the horizon / to etch divinations /
into the cicatrix of stars / to omen herself into sky / before geographies of sight /
harden into cataracts of maps / before the slow trains of sleep / bear her back through

the dark wheat of dreams / into the shimmering station / of this snow-rocked room /
of this world she could never / part with / where the blankets sculpt her bedlam /
body into the impermanence of summer frost / & the pale plosives / of her breath
unpetal over her / a white meihua mourning / something unspeakably soft

Posted in 107: LIMINAL | Tagged

Glitter

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Eileen Chong

Write how quiet it is.
‘Starvation Camp Near Jaslo’, Wislawa Szymborska


The lines stretch out like a child’s drawing,
wavering, circling the block. These are people;
they clutch envelopes, papers, proof of lack.

They are hungry, they are afraid of going hungry.
The price of dignity. A reporter says No, she will not
go to the front of the line to demand answers—

The cafes are shuttered. There are no rooms
to while away the hours of the night, drinking.
A narrow bed will fit precisely the contours

of a single body lying flat on its back. Sheets
rumpled and pulled back like a discarded shroud.
Behind the glass whole alphabets are set loose.

Imagine the touch of a stranger—an unknown gift,
a leap of faith. A breath and its attendant dangers.
The carpet glitters with piles of spilled-over numbers.

Posted in 107: LIMINAL | Tagged

Pattern Analysis

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Eleanor Jackson

At the hinge
of before and after,
the boycott expands:
me from ordinary life,
ordinary life from me.

Nostalgia summons
the once finely calibrated
habitus of advertising:
the very mint cashmere shawl indie
film festival new vegan restaurant
I didn’t know I did but wanted.

Not so much real intimacy,
just capitalism’s deep, surveillant interest
in my anxious homo economicus
(being looked at lovingly sometimes being close
enough to being loved).

Now all seems random:
news reel, conversation, meeting
invitation — hasty incisions, knife slipping
over thumb and no dark metaphor for
salvage. I do not really yearn for the best
ten exercises to lose my stubborn belly or
how to lean in as a remote-working feminist;
all of my passwords feel compromised,
no simple hack gets them sleeping like babies.

The expensive calm of now,
pruning things I know how to do
and people I know how to talk to,
leaves light shining down, me squinting at
questions — how to name a child so they know
they belong, how to name the body
so it doesn’t fail you, how to taste the sticky
corner of your mouth, how to fast forward
through all this, the very best day of life.

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