Corey Wakeling



Can Poetry Be Happy?

My uncle named his retro-fitted army van after Field Marshal Erick Von … someone. I’m hesitant to Google.

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Translation and Experiment and Translation: Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From by Sawako Nakayasu (and Friends)

This review concerns poet Nakayasu’s most recent major collection (as of March 2022), the self-translated hallucination that is Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (2020). Some Girls is one of the most advanced realizations of an experimental writing practice informed by modernist approaches to literature explicitly between languages, sensitive to a multilingual compass.

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Corey Wakeling Reviews Stuart Cooke’s Lyre

Stuart Cooke’s Lyre is the most ambitious work of ecopoetry in recent years. Few other writers could be employed to embark on this kind of project either, I think, considering Cooke’s long engagement with the central questions of ecocriticism not only by way of extensive reading and writing in this field, but also with immersed fieldwork in diverse ecologies found outside Australian metropolitan and suburban zones: notably, the Philippines, Chile, and the West Kimberley.

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Review Short: Corey Wakeling’s The Alarming Conservatory

The Sydney launch of Corey Wakeling’s second collection of poetry The Alarming Conservatory at Frontyard Projects in Marrickville upended the traditional build up of acts that most expect from a poetry launch, with poets reading in an order drawn from a hat.

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‘Geelong checks its modernist warranty’

In 1890, an American aeronaut named Millie Viola departs the Geelong showgrounds in a hot air balloon, in order to give an assembled crowd of onlookers a parachute jump display.

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durée

Eviction of the spy agency; what a bond of trust! The kids are fighting over cheese. When the golden fog appears, influenza. The last dregs of lager on a humid day. They say they adore how predictable I’ve become since …

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Owen Bullock Reviews A Transpacific Poetics

Lisa Samuels’s introductory essay, ‘What Do We Mean When We Say Transpacific’, begins with a quotation from Pam Brown that is particularly well-chosen for this volume. Brown claims that the ‘authentic’ pertains to someone who isn’t manipulated or being alienated from their context. There’s a good deal in this book about alienation relating to identity and culture; many of the authors have had to fight to preserve authenticity.

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Is Contemporary Australian Poetry Contemporary Australian Poetry?

Poet, if you’re looking for your name in this essay, jump ahead a couple of pages. There I begin talking about poets collected in this anthology. Those of you interested in a review about contemporary Australian poetry, let’s begin here.

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A Genetic History of Uncommons

They take some responsibility for your precipices, as much as following ought to raze the civic. Largely, however, obligation, smirking, abides. * Wanneroo drive-thru of the talking cars. It makes the terminations of diversity seem ternary, that is, complexly coded, …

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Élan vital

It’s hard to gauge the health of this interaction because I’m grateful, because the iron fist is long gone, gabled in the California bungalow of dementia breached, lead gone, gold siphoned. I have you crystalline like childhood’s glass statuary, perfect …

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John Forbes’s ‘Miraculous Fluidity’

In a book on comedy, philosopher Alenka Zupančič has inadvertently discovered the key to the correlation of late twentieth century Australian poet John Forbes’s mastery of cultural imitation and his deconstruction of the mechanics of national identity so often queried in his work.

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The New Reality in Australian Poetry

The generation of Murray is not my generation. The generation of Adamson is not my generation either. Nor is it Tranter or Kinsella.

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Interior Spaces: Reading Landscape through Jill Jones

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.

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Lingo Surprise

Lingo as a last keen sanctuary for the purpose come to the circle who saw philosophy and then turned back. The coral and the woods, and the ankle blisters from biting, were better, so we went. Then of course you …

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CONSTRAINT editorial

It appears that when given the license to constrain the otherwise presumably instinctual, inadvertent, unconscious, innate, putatively authentic centres of creative practice, poets still appear to liken constraint to permission to release responsibility from the personal and expediting the imaginary to the machines of the sonnet, the page, the code, the number, the constellation, the collage, the palindrome, and the aphorism. Is this a sign of a persistent binary at the heart of creative practice, or of a persistent desire to debunk the binary?

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Philip Mead Reviews Corey Wakeling

How do you hear the title to this volume of poems by Corey Wakeling? Goad Omen: two words that really slow you down as a reader, make you dwell on their unnatural pairing. Three dipthongal, molasses-slow syllables. They sound like a slip of the tongue, a conversational mishearing, or typo that should have been Good Omen perhaps.

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Corey Wakeling Interviews Javant Biarujia

Javant Biarujia is an iconoclastic Australian poet, at once an unparalleled linguistic confabulator and an exponent of Melbourne avant-garde poetics since the 1970s.

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Submission to Cordite 48: CONSTRAINT Open!

Poetry for Cordite 48: CONSTRAINT is guest-edited by Corey Wakeling. Submission is now closed for this issue, but open for Tracy Ryan’s Cordite 49: OBSOLETE. That poetry be raised to a pulpit of freedom and then celebrated as a picaresque …

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Cassidy on with Feature Reviews and Future Themes

The bad news first … I am sorry to see the departure of Lisa Gorton as Cordite’s Feature Reviews Editor. Over the past 18 months, her astute eye, impeccable judgement and gracious style has produced – and leaves us with – a superb legacy of robust and engaging feature reviews. Gorton’s work is testament to what can happen with excellent writing from reviewers and an engaged editorial acumen.

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Review Short: Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land

As I write this review, sunlight filtered through a pall of smoke casts a dull orange glow over my kitchen bench. The Blue Mountains are burning. Sydney’s haze resembles downtown Beijing’s and it’s only October. Such an apocalyptic scene – part of the ‘Australian experience’ I am assured by our Prime Minister – provides context for the world into which Outcrop and its ‘radical poetry of land’ emerges. This is not to suggest that the anthology’s outlook is primarily environmental, but that alternative ways of examining land are sorely needed.

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Charlatan

You say you want to end the charlatan, yet yours the standstill cruciform bleak daylight saved evening, starkly scapegoated. See, you say, sign of the bold made prone. Glad there the vanity at the Dandenong soak, your tight grip, it …

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Shooting “Correspondence” Gallery

for Toby Fitch Scrape hard for the ruins, duke, I am at Heide thinking of birth and you, you are at the NSW thinking of Bacon and me. Think hamburgers of slag metal and contortion scrapped. Agreed, cloister as bedroom, …

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Prize Maggot for Meat Hunk to Knock Twice on Wood

Wormwood hotspot, but narrow berth aping El Paso heat on the Great Northern Highway between civic duties. Diffident arsehole bristles in the glade but for convent up the way quakes, nun patience chides the rough diamantine of the standard liquored …

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Depot of Pain

first The sloth to my having being sandwich hand steep, so may we marquee sloth to not stoop Rolls Royce, don’t move, around them moves derby droves, strewn wishes of rebarbative stone fishes. NN. Struth ventriloquy. Through city I speaks …

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