- 115: SPACE
with A Sometimes
114: NO THEME 13
with J Toledo & C Tse
113: INVISIBLE WALLS
with A Walker & D Disney
112: TREAT
with T Dearborn
111: BABY
with S Deo & L Ferney
110: POP!
with Z Frost & B Jessen
109: NO THEME 12
with C Maling & N Rhook
108: DEDICATION
with L Patterson & L Garcia-Dolnik
107: LIMINAL
with B Li
106: OPEN
with C Lowe & J Langdon
105: NO THEME 11
with E Grills & E Stewart
104: KIN
with E Shiosaki
103: AMBLE
with E Gomez and S Gory
102: GAME
with R Green and J Maxwell
101: NO THEME 10
with J Kinsella and J Leanne
100: BROWNFACE
with W S Dunn
99: SINGAPORE
with J Ip and A Pang
97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
with M Breeze and S Groth
96: NO THEME IX
with M Gill and J Thayil
95: EARTH
with M Takolander
94: BAYT
with Z Hashem Beck
93: PEACH
with L Van, G Mouratidis, L Toong
92: NO THEME VIII
with C Gaskin
91: MONSTER
with N Curnow
90: AFRICAN DIASPORA
with S Umar
89: DOMESTIC
with N Harkin
88: TRANSQUEER
with S Barnes and Q Eades
87: DIFFICULT
with O Schwartz & H Isemonger
86: NO THEME VII
with L Gorton
85: PHILIPPINES
with Mookie L and S Lua
84: SUBURBIA
with L Brown and N O'Reilly
83: MATHEMATICS
with F Hile
82: LAND
with J Stuart and J Gibian
81: NEW CARIBBEAN
with V Lucien
80: NO THEME VI
with J Beveridge
57.1: EKPHRASTIC
with C Atherton and P Hetherington
57: CONFESSION
with K Glastonbury
56: EXPLODE
with D Disney
55.1: DALIT / INDIGENOUS
with M Chakraborty and K MacCarter
55: FUTURE MACHINES
with Bella Li
54: NO THEME V
with F Wright and O Sakr
53.0: THE END
with P Brown
52.0: TOIL
with C Jenkins
51.1: UMAMI
with L Davies and Lifted Brow
51.0: TRANSTASMAN
with B Cassidy
50.0: NO THEME IV
with J Tranter
49.1: A BRITISH / IRISH
with M Hall and S Seita
49.0: OBSOLETE
with T Ryan
48.1: CANADA
with K MacCarter and S Rhodes
48.0: CONSTRAINT
with C Wakeling
47.0: COLLABORATION
with L Armand and H Lambert
46.1: MELBOURNE
with M Farrell
46.0: NO THEME III
with F Plunkett
45.0: SILENCE
with J Owen
44.0: GONDWANALAND
with D Motion
43.1: PUMPKIN
with K MacCarter
43.0: MASQUE
with A Vickery
42.0: NO THEME II
with G Ryan
41.1: RATBAGGERY
with D Hose
41.0: TRANSPACIFIC
with J Rowe and M Nardone
40.1: INDONESIA
with K MacCarter
40.0: INTERLOCUTOR
with L Hart
39.1: GIBBERBIRD
with S Gory
39.0: JACKPOT!
with S Wagan Watson
38.0: SYDNEY
with A Lorange
37.1: NEBRASKA
with S Whalen
37.0: NO THEME!
with A Wearne
36.0: ELECTRONICA
with J Jones
Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Tatjana Lukic
With the success of novels and short story collections such as The Slap and The Boat, it seems multicultural writing is enjoying something of a revival in Australia. Yet poetry written by non-Anglo-Celtic Australians does not usually garner much recognition. It is the prose narratives of dislocation and cultural transition, and not poetry dealing with these themes, which are de rigueur.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Tatjana Lukic
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Jen Hadfield
Jen Hadfield's winning the 2008 T. S. Eliot Prize for this collection seems truly sensational. Since the UK's most prestigious poetry prize is usually given to older male poets, the 30 year-old woman poet's success could be seen as a radical event. Furthermore, the ecologically conscious discourse of Nigh-No-Place can also be seen as a new, exciting development in the context of mainstream English poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Jen Hadfield
Epic Editorial
When ‘Epic' was suggested as a theme for an issue of Cordite, I was expecting it to be either rejected outright or at least modified into something less archaic. When it was actually chosen as the theme for issue 31 with myself as the guest editor, I was faced with a more pressing concern: would we receive enough suitably epical submissions to justify our choice of this theme? Or would the dearth of appropriate contributions confirm that, as literary critic Tom Winnifrith has written, the epic is ‘as antique as a dinosaur', or, as Mikhail Bakhtin would have it, the epic poem is ‘an already completed genre … distanced, finished and closed'?
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, epic
Ali Alizadeh Interviews John Kinsella
John Kinsella’s most recent book Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography is an incredibly ambitious and meticulous rewriting of that great epic poem of the Middle Ages, Dante's The Divine Comedy. Our guest poetry editor for Epic, Ali Alizadeh, interviewed Kinsella recently, via email. Their discussion ranged from traditional notions of the epic form, and Kinsella's relationship with it, to ecological manifestoes and collaborative projects, and the concept of 'pushing against form'.
Posted in INTERVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, John Kinsella
Joan of Arc
She and the fire fight adjectives. Their concreteness deflects reification by language. She simply is a pronoun. It may signify say, my wife (coming from me 'she' often does) or, yes a medieval French woman, her being so roughly abridged …
Posted in 35: CUSTOM
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart
One of the most prominent features of these two recent titles – by two of Australia's most successful poets, published by one of the country's most exciting literary publishers – is their emphasis on the erotic. By engaging with unambiguously sexual themes and imagery, Bronwyn Lea and Kevin Hart have produced texts that beguile and entertain their reader through the evocation of, or a yearning for, romance and sensuality, whilst also running the risk of reducing allusion and openness in meaning by describing a definite, rather familiar, concept.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Bronwyn Lea, Kevin Hart
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Philip Mead
Once every decade, it seems, a scholar succeeds in writing an all-encompassing account of the practice and development of poetry in modern Australia. The 1980s saw Andrew Taylor's Reading Australian Poetry; and in the 1990s we had Paul Kane's Australian Poetry: Romanticism and Negativity. Now, Philip Mead, senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania's School of English, Journalism and European Languages, has provided what is perhaps the most ambitious and provocative overview of the agonistic and at times conflicting discourses of Australian poetry in the 20th century.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Australian poetry, Philip Mead
Hidden Signs of a City
How does one read a city? More specifically, how does a poet decode, and in turn re/present, the language of a man-made space? In Australia (and other 'New World' constructs) much poetry has been devoted to the natural world; but …
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, secret cities
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Charles Simic
An interesting aspect of Serbian-born Charles Simic's being chosen as the United States' 15th Poet Laureate is that Simic, partly due to his experience of a European childhood during the Second World War, has often been something of an 'anti-war' poet. What makes this dimension of Simic's work somewhat odd is that the United States is, of course, currently engaged in an interminable 'war on terror'.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Charles Simic
The Suspect
Over there, in the Other land, I was gharb-zadeh, Farsi to the effect of west- smitten. Over here, in 'Our' land, I am Muslim immigrant, nomenclature with grave allusions: unemployment, anger, and unpredictable police attention. Over there I was an …
Posted in 30: EXPERIENCE
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Dimitris Tsaloumas
In a recent article titled 'Only Pinter remains to question authority', English literary theorist and thinker Terry Eagleton bemoans the decline of politically-engaged writing in English. He criticises, among others, the once radical, now conservative migrant writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie who, after an initial period of producing exciting work, have become 'more interested in adopting than challenging the conventions of their place of refuge'.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Dimitris Tsaloumas, multiculturalism
Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Luis Gonzalez Serrano and Ali Alizadeh
If Australian poetry is meant to reflect the lives and times of the people who inhabit this red and green land and its blue surf turf, then it is essential that the diminutive canon embrace the émigrés. They are the voices of a multi-culturally inclusive (or exclusive, as sometimes the case may be) society and what is truly unique is that they have a certain amount of inherent distance from the Australian culture which enables them to go where others have not the means to consider.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Heather Taylor Johnson, Luis Gonzalez Serrano
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Anthony Joseph
One of the great challenges facing artists from post-colonial and/or ethnic minority backgrounds is meeting the demands of two potentially conflicting ideals. As surrogate – and often unwilling – cultural ambassadors, such artists are required to be 'responsible' and represent the reality of their communities/ethnicities for a mainstream Western audience; but as artists they need to be adequately 'irresponsible' in order to produce provocative new works that do not merely replicate but (as Russian Formalists would have it) violate reality.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Anthony Joseph, Caribbean, Césaire, négritude
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Ian McBryde and Tim Sinclair
Two recent Australian poetry titles – one from a 'cult' adult (and at times 'adults only') poet, another from a newcomer writing for 'young adults'; the former published by a new small press and the latter by one of the world's most recognisable publishing empires; the former experimental and minimalist and the latter conventional and extensive; and so on – offer formally different yet discursively complimentary views of the state of the poetic word.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, ian mcbryde, Tim Sinclair
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Mohsen Soltany Zand
There is a spectre haunting Australian poetry – it is the spectre of spoken word. The explosion of spoken word publications (mostly in the form of CDs) and live events (such as poetry soirees, 'slams' and 'open microphones') across Australia's poetry scene over the past decade or so may in due course determine the future of Australian poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, detention, Mohsen Soltany Zand, refugees, spoken word
Wandering in Wuhan
I am astounded to find that ancient and medieval poetry occupies a uniquely central presence in Wuhan's contemporary identity; that, in spite of ideological and legal issues and restrictions, new cutting-edge poetry grows across China's cyberspace; and that all of this is happening in spite of a rapid, and some might say rabid, modernisation and commercialisation.
Writer in Prison
Your cell is a cavern; the guards grinding teeth outside your grotto marginally refined ape-men; you the last human in the world of triumphant beasts. Is your pen the key to emancipation? No. The lock has no keyhole and welded …
Posted in 23: EDITORIAL INTERVENTION
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Call Me Filth
Ali Alizadeh is Cordite's reviews editor.
Posted in 23: EDITORIAL INTERVENTION
Tagged Ali Alizadeh
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Geoff Goodfellow
The concept of working-class poetry may seem like an oxymoron to the uninitiated. Isn't poetry, after all, as Harold Bloom would have it, “the crown of imaginative literature”; an elitist, royalist member of the family of letters, on par with other 'high art' and upper-class forms and genres such as Classical music, opera and ballet?
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Geoff Goodfellow
Paul Mitchell Reviews Pushing Words
“Pushing Words”, a poetry reading held as part of the Castlemaine State Arts Festival, featured Melbourne poets Dorothy Porter, Ian McBryde, Lauren Williams, Kevin Brophy, Ali Alizadeh, Jennifer Harrison and Myron Lysenko.
Organiser Ross Donlon promoted the event as a chance to catch top poets who you'd never see reading together on the one bill. Each poet gave a strong performance, no doubt influenced by the company around them.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Castlemaine, dorothy porter, festivals, ian mcbryde, Jennifer Harrison, Kevin Brophy, Lauren Williams, Myron Lysenko, paul mitchell
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Ouyang Yu
´Multiculturalism', when all has been said and (often very little) has been done about it, remains a difficult, even paradoxical, idea. It is an English-language term invented by, and used for the purposes of, the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture; yet it supposedly represents the reality of being from the ´minor' cultures that, at least in Australia, do not have English as a first language.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, Ouyang Yu
Ali Alizadeh Reviews Ian McBryde
In the media release for Ian McBryde's latest collection, Domain, Peter Porter states that World War II and the Holocaust — the content of McBryde's collection — have been “subjects defiant of poetry”. Here, I think, Porter is trying to make a claim for this collection's uniqueness.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Ali Alizadeh, ian mcbryde
