Ali Alizadeh



Invisible Walls: Poetry as a Doorway to Intercultural Understanding

The selection of poems we offer here is written by poets participating in a two-year intercultural exchange program between Korean and Australian poets.

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The Fall of the West

Despite cutbacks, delays, interruptions the poison in my stomach didn’t succeed. Had to walk from the station of course, no more buses after 11pm. Feet sincerely sore, the night suitably spooky, at least rain didn’t add to my despair. Public …

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The Non-Vegetarian

(after Han Kang) It makes perfect sense, really to make the most of this body before the rot sets in. Maybe a premature sky burial, and who better than the ghost in this deadbeat machine to preside as chef de …

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The 3rd Poem

(for Sin Yong-Mok) Cross-cultural implies there are cultures to cross. There are bodies and languages sure, but cultures? What is so innately different between kimchi and vegemite these things one eats, then one forgets about as they’re transformed into a …

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Joel Ephraims Reviews Ashbery Mode Edited by Michael Farrell

The presence of John Ashbery shines over contemporary literature, for many as an enigma, indisputably as a catalyst. Part of the post-World War II wave of new American poetry, his name is grouped not just alongside his contemporary poets but among their literary schools and movements: the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, the New York School, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, our own ’68ers and J.A.

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Poetry Against Neoliberal Capitalism in Ali Alizadeh and Melinda Bufton

Poetry has a long history of disruption, resistance, and revolution, overlapping the concerns of politics with literature and the boundaries of language.

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‘Beware! This is not a real biography!’: Ali Alizadeh Interviews Jessica L Wilkinson

To many, biographies are a generic section in a bookshop which showcase – as this interview will discuss – a supposed element of ‘truth’. Suggestions of worthiness through platitudes such as ‘based on a true story’ or a ‘definitive biography …

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A Poetics of a Politics

When delivering a thesis presentation based on rethinking the methodologies for reading Aboriginal Australian poetics, a fellow postgraduate student asked me, ‘Do you consider your thesis political?’

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EXPLODE Editorial: Awfully Passionate Egregious Demagogueries … reflections on absolutes, straying, anguish and bees

If poets are in the business of cultivating ‘voice’ then, logically enough, to which ends? Is there an onus not only to learn how to speak but to also become versed in what to speak of?

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Plato, Badiou and I: an Experiment in Writerly Happiness

I have many irresolvable arguments with a close and particularly argumentative friend of mine. We regularly disagree, in a civilised, congenial way, on specific topics to do with politics, love, the weather, Asian food and ethics.

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Off Kilter

This be the fulcrum, order’s pivot. Powers oscillate my words the rivet, evil, chthonic, to show you malfeasance, the urgency to recompense, the levers wholly off kilter: 1) The tigerfish is the carnivore of the Congo. Obtruding fangs eyes tenebrous …

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews Chris Andrews

In a recent article published in Sydney Review of Books, Emmett Stinson argues that Australian reviewers’ and readers’ responses to Australian short story collections are regulated by the receptions of these authors in the US. And so, according to Stinson, the so-called cultural cringe lives on. But is this really the case? And should we really be suspicious of internationally recognised Australian writers such as Chris Andrews whose second collection of poems has been published by Baltimore’s Waywiser Press, the publishers of such giants of US poetry as Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur and W. D. Snodgrass?

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Ali Alizadeh Interviews Paul Kane

Paul Kane is the Professor of English and Co-Associate Chair of English at Vassar College in the Hudson Valley, 75 miles north of New York City. In addition to being a prolific poet and scholar of American literature, he is one of the world’s foremost scholars of Australian poetry.

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews ‘The Best Australian Poems 2012’

Whatever one may expect from an anthology of contemporary poetry released by a mainstream commercial publisher – an accessible selection of diverse voices and styles, one for both the non-specialist, general reader as well as the (less snobbish) connoisseur, a selection featuring promising emerging writers as well as more prominent authors, and so on – Black Inc. Publishing’s annual Best Australian Poems Series has been meeting these expectations, more or less consistently, for close to a decade. And despite the series’ many specific strengths and few weaknesses, the latest addition to the series follows the same general tradition successfully.

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THE REALPOETIK MANIFESTO

FOR TOO LONG has poetry been disregarded as a valid vehicle for the exploration of real world experience. Too often has poetry been filed in the ‘too hard’ basket and deemed ‘irrelevant’ and ‘inaccessible.’

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Act #12

Vintage in verisimilitude. Private Sale – Vacant Position – Business 1 Zone. Scent of sandalwood, inconsequential bells, organic food and runes. Fortitude begs futurism. Health store – Home ware – Souvenirs. Unrequited regret: fetish value fades from my wallet, untold …

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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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Ali Alizadeh Reviews David Brooks

‘Ern Malley? Again?’ asks David Brooks at the outset of this new reading of what is, arguably, the central event in the history of modern Australian poetry. Brooks’s account is an engrossing, at times exhilarating journey through the landscape of early-mid twentieth century Modernist poetry, but it also leaves the question of the need for yet another volume about the infamous hoax more or less unanswered.

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Tina Giannoukos Reviews Ali Alizadeh

Ali Alizadeh’s latest collection, Ashes in the Air, blows across the fault lines of our manifold present. These are poems of strong rhetorical force. With remarkable alertness to volatile complexities, they engage in an argument with barely comprehensible realities of exclusion and inclusion. They are radical, philosophical and profoundly affective.

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews Maria Takolander and Claire Potter

In his 2007 essay ‘Surviving Australian Poetry: The New Lyricism’, David McCooey identified the prevailing mode of poetry in contemporary Australia as a negotiation between experimentalism (the new) and traditional composition (lyricism). This view is apposite in describing the work of many important poets of the last couple of decades; but a number of newer Australian poets have gone beyond and broken with this conciliation.

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Aa-zaa-dee (아-자-디)

How can I define this Real of language in words? Signs betray its unsayable being like a hoax. Has no authenticity cheated by fakeness; condemns all things to fantasy. How can I praise this enemy of appreciation? When it’s around …

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Grey (회색빛)

for Felicity Plunkett i In this World – which is not a world – black and white withhold truths. In a world we’d have multiplicities, the purity of unqualified impurities. In ours we possess , are possessed by, the comprehension …

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Ali Alizadeh Reviews John Mateer

Since the publication of his startling first collection Burning Swans in 1989, John Mateer has established himself as one of the key Australian poets who, for the absence of a better term, can be broadly labelled post-Generation of ’68. What my clumsy terminology seeks to indicate is that Mateer (alongside other younger poets such as those appearing in the seminal 2000 anthology Calyx) follows in the general direction of earlier innovators while making crucial, although not necessarily generational, departures.

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Vicki Viidikas Rediscovered: Ali Alizadeh’s Q&A with Barry Scott

In May 2010, Melbourne-based publisher Transit Lounge will release a much-anticipated collection of published and unpublished poetry and prose by the iconic Generation of '68 poet and l'enfant terrible, Vicki Viidikas (1948-1998). The book, simply titled Vicki Viidikas: New and Rediscovered, has been edited by Transit Lounge co-founder Barry Scott. Cordite's reviews editor Ali Alizadeh spoke to him about Viidikas, her iconoclastic work, her unconventional life, and her legacy.

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