Jo Langdon



Making

Rivka Galchen had a puma and I a palindrome, meticulously recording her minutiae. Three kinds of yellow daisy each morning walk: da and da and da. The billy goats cough, the baby says, and the verb demonstrates. There is a …

Posted in 111: BABY | Tagged

Escalations

The baby at my breast displays manners of an astronaut [title case —italics] —the poet’s face clean in greyscale. The baby’s face is opening towards milk & sensation, close reading—that is to say resemblance budding in the double I/eye of …

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OPEN Editorial

‘to make is to risk making a botch’ —Harry Gilonis As we sit down to write this introduction it’s reaching the end of winter in Geelong (Djilang), on unceded Wadawurrung Country – close to a year since we first considered …

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Alina

‘As for me, I produce awkward objects’ —Alina Szapocznikow To know her completely by name—starting points—friend of my friend offers by text lessons in pronunciation that begin by ‘soft n’: midway or further still, & annoying, as though impersonating a …

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Submission to Cordite 106: OPEN

For OPEN, we’re interested in doublings, triplicates etcetera, and/or play and suggestion.

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‘To map the language I write in’: Jo Langdon Interviews Albena Todorova

Image courtesy of Albena Todorova Albena Todorova is a Bulgarian writer currently living and working in London. She is the author of three books of poetry: an award-winning self-published debut, poems (stihotvoreniya) (2014); Poems That Make You Want to Love …

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Review Short: Vahni Capildeo’s Seas and Trees and Jennifer Harrison’s Air Variations

Numbers 8 and 10 in the IPSI (International Poetry Studies Institute) limited-edition chapbook series, Vahni Capildeo’s Sea and Trees and Jennifer Harrison’s Air Variations comprise crystalline, eidetic poems that attest to language’s capacity to renew and reinvigorate.

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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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Apropos

At the wedding he says I took my wife off the pill, it wasn’t easy. I say, Oh that’s terrible. (Imagine being a wife, being taken, taking off somehow, what kind of weight I don’t know— The men at work …

Posted in 86: NO THEME VII | Tagged

Landing

Hour of bright & dim; such stillness you could skate, crack to beneath – Circling out, not yet dark enough to watch traces of universe, blinking down. Only the glimmer & still. One last swerve & you are returned, the …

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Review Short: MTC Cronin’s The Law of Poetry

MTC Cronin’s ‘The Flower, the Thing’ is a favourite poem; one to which I often return. What strikes me immediately – and what stays with me – is its first word: ‘urgently’. That word sucks its reader in; it says that what comes after is ‘urgent’, is going to pull at you. It says, read on.

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Tree kit (for Zoe)

‘A few almond trees / had a few flowers, like a few snowflakes / out of the blue looking pink in the light’ —James Schuyler We sleep through its becoming, the growth a mimicry of ice & bud – Do …

Posted in 66: OBSOLETE | Tagged

Review Short: Angela Meyer’s Captives

Fittingly tiny by way of physical size, Captives is a beautifully produced collection of micro-fiction by the Melbourne author and critic Angela Meyer (known also as the blog writer, Literary Minded). While in a poetry-dedicated journal such as Cordite Poetry Review, it may seem odd to be reviewing a book that makes no explicit claims to being poetry – or, more specifically, the difficult-to-define mode of prose poetry – Meyer’s micro-fictions do seem to invite comparisons with contemporary prose poetry.

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Review Short: Jill Jones’s The Beautiful Anxiety

Frank O’Hara has a poem unambiguously and humorously titled ‘You Are Gorgeous and I’m Coming’. As pastiche or homage – even incidentally – the first two poems from the six-part sequence that opens Jill Jones’s stunning new collection The Beautiful Anxiety are titled: ‘1. Hold On’, and ‘2. I’m Coming’ (‘My Ruined Lyrics’). The present continuous tense of the verb ‘to come’ is thematically apt everywhere in this collection. Not only are poems throughout The Beautiful Anxiety sensual and frequented by moments of desire or quiet ecstasy, they are constantly ‘coming’ in the sense that they are arriving.

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Review Short: Rebecca Law’s Lilies and Stars

It is often interesting to read a poet’s work in relation to comments they’ve made about their own poetry (with whatever cautions you may wish to place upon such self-readings). Rebecca Law’s poem ‘Mirror and Girl’ was commended for the 2011 Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets, and in an interview with the prize’s judge – poet, scholar and Overland’s poetry editor, Peter Minter – Law commented on her writing more generally: “I am reading Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo and Paul Eluard because I am interested in the surreal, the symbolic and the sublime as romantic concepts that displace and liberate the word from a human preoccupation with living and dying. Contemporary French authors such as Michel Deguy, Philippe Beck and Jude Stefan transcend these concepts a little further and ‘follow’ language, allowing the word to ‘say’ rather than be ‘said’.”

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Making Love & Omelettes

After a line by Veronica Forrest-Thomson Slight kitchen views from white sheets —warmth of breath and skin— there are tile shapes in the lino, just enough window sun to mistake for a lit globe, a yellowing of day taking shape …

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Review Short: Jo Langdon’s Snowline

It can be argued that one way to begin to make your ‘mark’ is to settle on a theme; in marketing, it’s a handle or a simple angle. In creative realms, it can be an oeuvre or a period, with a descriptor. Ideally, it should never be held too close to its object/subject for fear of typecasting, but for an emergent poet, it may well be the thing that reassures readers and helps them with a doorway into your work. For a first chapbook, a theme can also be the way to find publication. Jo Langdon’s Snowline is the 2011 winner of the Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, a welcome initiative for emerging poets from the Geelong-based Whitmore Press. It’s a deserving winner, and a pleasure to experience.

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HCI and The Muses of Poetry: Calliope Recites Jenkins, Lilley, Langdon and Williams

The Muses of Poetry is one of the current projects at the Research and Development Department of the Institute of Animation at Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in Germany, that intends to bring poetry – its emotionality, auditory structures and nuances when words meet elocution – to a larger audience.

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Ellipsis

Rain streaks the window. Somehow her hair holds the smell of matches struck. The wind is loose around walls outside, tying itself up in trees (birch leaves soft as ash). She watches: breath showing and fading on glass. He said …

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