Adrian Wiggins



The Sydney Launch of Harkin, Gibson, Loney and Hawke

OBJECT: Australian Design Centre, Thursday 25 June, 2015 I’m pleased to say that I was at the launch of the very first issue of Cordite Poetry Review, way back in 1997. Good heavens, is that eighteen years ago? The journal …

Posted in GUNCOTTON | Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Cordite Ave vs. Electric Ave

I rediscovered these images from the Cordite vault this morning. Real photographs printed on photo paper. These were taken by David Prater in the final gasps of the 1990s I believe. Although the Cordite Ave (as threaded through Melbourne’s outer …

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At the Darling Harbour Convention Centre

At the conference lunch the industry chatterboxes turn a gavotte, then prop and scythe about the buffet loading up pot roast, pumpkin salad, rendang. Says the keynote speaker bignoting counterflow down the queue: “Hey I’m on the Be More Biodynamic …

Posted in 49: SYDNEY | Tagged

Comings, Goings and GUNCOTTON

There is only one appropriate way to begin my first news post as Managing Editor of Cordite – that being to extend, then extend further, then possibly dislocating my e-arm in extending further still, a massive thank you (for all …

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Blinkie ‘Bill’ O’Malley: The fête

“When an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” – Carl Jung   Let me start by saying you are unstable. Eight deaths in eight days. At the home you thought you’d send your mum to. …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

Blinky ‘Bill’ O’Malley: F#!* Yeah

“And man shall be just that for the overman: 
 a laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment…” 
 — Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra   At the outset, let me just say this: this poem has Tourette’s — it wanted to be …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

Blinky ‘Bill’ O’Malley: Dithyrambs of Dennis

If I had any ambition I’d make you a bouillabaisse in the Provençal in St Marks Square. To create intimacy in the poem, I turn up the volume & this piece conforms to an emergent post-OMGWTFBBQ cast in acrylic in …

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Blinky ‘Bill O’Malley: Arts & Crafts

“… you can’t have art without resistance in the material.” — William Morris   Ah, don’t feel guilty about the GM soy in the baby formula— those activists are arsehats & breastfeeding zealots & it’s unpiloted drones dropping in on …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

Blinky ‘Bill O’Malley: Love Story Metabolites

Dear Nuala, oh noes, you’ve left your starting-a-new-life job in the bait’n’ice for that no-hoping armed & dangerous escapee again!?  It’ll just lead to headlines:   Fantasist poses as playboy &   Headless body in topless bar   you & …

Posted in 42: CHILDREN OF MALLEY II | Tagged

When I met you in the hall

When I met you in the hall you were all inclement weather on a stony coast and you held my hand as though we were more than we could be: preppy kids in a pop-song duet retrofitting dignifying deniable half-truths …

Posted in 40: CREATIVE COMMONS | Tagged

Adrian Wiggins: After The Party

About the face she's photovoltaic. “There's marriage to make men lecherous,” she says, “I see it all the time in characters like you.” Still, a casual mention of the yacht by Lion Island sends her into a lather. She's dramatic; …

Posted in 32: MULLOWAY | Tagged

Flannery O’Malley: Bitter William

Flannery O'Malley was born in 1971 in a slab hut near Sassafras in the Turpentine Range. He attended the local school at Nerriga, but left at 15 after getting a job with a ride operator at the Braidwood Show. He then toured the state working at all the big shows — Bathurst, Dubbo, Cobar. He was killed tragically last year when a hydraulic ram failed on the Crazy Mouse Spinning Coaster at the Mudgee Show. This poem was found in his papers.

Posted in 24: CHILDREN OF MALLEY | Tagged

[the open plain, or mesa]

Sometimes, when you're a cowboy gunslinger, all you're left with is your boots and hat and lariat, your trick paint horse, your Colt and your Winchester, your bedroll, the open plain, or mesa, the tins of beans and strips of …

Posted in 23: EDITORIAL INTERVENTION | Tagged

A Climber’s Farewell

Satellites really knock me out, the way they join the dots, the way a carpet-trader deep in the Soud calls his uncle Faisal at the Moore Park Supa Centa, the way a called-up beleaguered Little League coach calls in an …

Posted in 23: EDITORIAL INTERVENTION | Tagged

71 Monaro

Adrian Wiggins was one of the founding editors of Cordite.

Posted in 17: DRIVER | Tagged