- 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
Louis Armand
Conspiracy Theory is Contemporary Genre Literature
1. the task isn’t to tell the truth / but to induce in the reader / the belief that they’ve discovered it 2. only the poet finds Abyssiania inside the toe of their shoe 3. there are / worlds / …
Posted in 97 & 98: PROPAGANDA
Tagged Louis Armand
A House for Hanne Darboven
I’m not. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not. Describing. And. Sundial. Three nine seven one five. Drei neun sieben nul funf. And. No. She spent her childhood in Hamburg. She spent her. Five zero zero zero one. Plus. Funf nul …
Posted in 83: MATHEMATICS
Tagged Louis Armand
Truck & Trailer Approaching a City
(Jeffrey Smart, 1973) Europe in a thousand container terminals – the sat-nav recalibrates, the one language. Tollgate, tunnel, interchange. Who knows which roads get switched in the confusion. This welfare city or that doppelganger on the other side – this …
Posted in 80: NO THEME VI
Tagged Louis Armand
Review Short: Louis Armand’s East Broadway Rundown and The Rube Goldberg Variations
Louis Armand’s poetry is unbending in its loyalty to the aesthetic and moral responsibilities of the avant-garde. In these new chapbooks, both published by Vlak Records, Armand mines culture for its buried messages, showing how fraught with uncertain track is any search for truth and authenticity in a world made knowable by language.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Louis Armand, Nick Xuereb
Unitary Pleasures: Masturbating in Space
The day Apollo traded his pipe for an appearance on the Eurovision Song Contest: “Living on Borrowed Time.” Absolutism isn’t the solitary pursuit it once seemed. Out of hours, display receipt. There’re other words for con- tainment, she said, but …
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT
Tagged Louis Armand
Unsanitary, or: The Candy-Coloured Clown
Solo for Dennis Hopper Light everlasting! Jacked-up on a century’s backwash, knee-deep in it. The Cambodia of their dreams lay on a dirty mattress, amputated at the hips. A whole nation could bury its heartbreaks there & never know they …
Posted in 64: CONSTRAINT
Tagged Louis Armand
Brunswick Street Nocturne
(for Bill Moussoulis) Gamblers and parrots in polyvinyl acetate. Heads on blocks. The film runs backwards from the dénouement, a profile en face like a filled-in Rorschach blot coming closer. The street’s all hard encroachments, things ricochet, blur, united in …
Posted in 62: MELBOURNE
Tagged Louis Armand
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.
X Marks the Parataxis: Louis Armand, John Kinsella and Jessica L Wilkinson
Displacement is apparent both geographically and textually in Letters from Ausland by Louis Armand, The Vision of Error by John Kinsella (subtitled, ‘A Sextet of Activist Poems’) and marionette by jessica l. wilkinson (written here all in lower-case and subtitled, ‘a biography of miss marion davies’). All three poets are or have been editors of literary magazines: Armand edits VLAK, out of Prague; Kinsella, SALT; and Wilkinson, Rabbit (why does this name always remind me of Wittgenstein’s drawing of a rabbit that can also be perceived as a duck?) Armand and Kinsella have also collaborated on a number of books.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Javant Biarujia, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Kinsella, Louis Armand
John Hawke Reviews The Organ-Grinder’s Monkey: Culture After the Avant-Garde
The dream of a compact between revolutionary politics and a poetics of radical experimentation has haunted the avant-garde since its inception in the wake of the failed European uprisings of 1848. Rimbaud’s activation by the events of the Paris Commune, and Mallarmé’s sympathies for the Bakuninite anarchists of his day, signal an alignment between Modernist aesthetics and extremist politics (of both Left and Right) that is central to debates within twentieth century literature. The politics of the Cubo-Futurist avant guerre movements were notoriously unstable, informed by a mélange of Nietzschean and Sorelian violence, an apotheosis achieved in the cataclysmic events of the Great War.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged John Hawke, Louis Armand
Submission to Cordite 47: COLLABORATION Open!
THIS IS NOW CLOSED. Cordite 48.0: CONSTRAINT is accepting submissions. Poetry for Cordite 47: COLLABORATION is guest-edited by Helen Lambert (Moscow) and Louis Armand (Prague). What kind of poems are we looking for?: Two (or more) people working together to …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Helen Lambert, Louis Armand
Notes from New York, New York
New York Diary, 6 November 2013 The day begins at the Hollywood Diner on West 16th and Sixth. I used to keep office hours at Joe Junior’s down at 12th but they closed it two years ago and shifted it, …
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Louis Armand
Monument
1. Play the fluted column. Treasury of the consciousness of Man. Ring the emperors’ bells. The disappearing hat-trick. Replace chipped crockery. One copy among others. Animal furnishings. Will make nature obsolete? And so they cluster. Picture, fresco, miniature and stained-glass. …
Posted in 57: MASQUE
Tagged John Kinsella, Louis Armand
Wandering through the Universal Archive
One of the sequences produced by the collaborative entity, A Constructed World, renders the phrases ‘No need to be great’ and ‘Stay in Groups’ in a range of media – silk-stitch, screen print, photography and painting. One of the painted versions of the image shows a naked woman covered in yellow post-it notes overseen by a hulking, shadowy male. These figures represent the artists Jacqueline Riva and Geoff Lowe. The image appears again in the form of a photograph and the installation was staged in various places around the world – as if the only way to get the message across would be to subject it to constant repetition in as many different formats as possible. Indeed, a number of the collective’s performances and installations attest to the impossibility of communication – even as these take the form of images that can’t fail to deliver. Avant Spectacle A Micro Medicine Show, 2011, features skeleton-costumed performers inexpertly singing and playing instruments while six knee-high wooden letters – S, P, E, E, C and H – burn like small condemned buildings at front of stage.
Posted in CHAPBOOKS
Tagged Amaranth Borsuk, Astrid Lorange, Brad Bouse, Charles Bernstein, Eddie Hopely, Fiona Hile, Jessica L. Wilkinson, John Jenkins, John Kinsella, Justin Clemens, Kate Middleton, ken bolton, Louis Armand, Maged Zaher, Marty Hiatt, michael farrell, nick whittock, Oscar Schwartz, Pam Brown, Patrick Jones, Richard Tuttle, Sam Langer, Tim Wright, Timothy Yu, Toby Fitch
Juvenilia
Standing in line with haircut to join the Air Corps circa 1989 – & failing that, a George St boarding house (firetrap w/ kindling for stairs), shoesole counter-dinner, chips, tomato sauce. Squadron Leader says lost cause, gulping schooners & ducksoup …
Posted in 49: SYDNEY
Tagged Louis Armand
Ryan Scott Reviews Louis Armand
To say Louis Armand is a thoughtful poet is both obvious and an understatement. His reach extends beyond the expression of an idea to capture the sensation of the thought itself. He gives thought its heft, urgency and gravity and thus separates himself from being a mere poet of ideas. In his latest collection, Letters from Ausland, he finds that elusive ground between intellect and artistry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Louis Armand
Ryan Scott Reviews The Return of Král Majáles
This book positively brims. With words, with pictures, with experiments and experiences. At eight hundred pages plus, it is as a definitive testament to Prague’s so-called International Literary Renaissance. Apart from the prose and poetry, there are photos of those involved and an extensive bibliography of journals, zines and newspapers which have been published in Prague over the last two decades.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged anthologies, Louis Armand, Prague, Ryan Scott
John Kinsella’s Poetics of Distraction
Like Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings, John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography has firstly had to address the question of its status with regard to “the allegorical requirement of a master text.”
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged John Kinsella, Louis Armand
1. sleepless thirty days:
there was a fork sticking out of my orange wires and random messaging the language of television and the synaptic schizophrenic snufflings of streetlights where crows in bad taste laugh at death and electric eels writhe in delight But overlapping, …
Posted in 38: POST-EPIC
Tagged Louis Armand
Louis Armand Live at the Globe
[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/Louis_Armand_Prague.mp3] Louis Armand live at the Globe Bookstore (15:29) Prague, 15 April 2009
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Louis Armand
Stephan Delbos: The Prague Micro Festival Poetry Series
In our latest feature, Stephan Delbos recalls some highlights from the inaugural Prague Micro Festival Poetry Series, held in Prague and Brno between 14-18 April 2009. To accompany the words and images, Cordite presents five live recordings of readings by Australian poets Jill Jones, Philip Hammial, Michael Farrell, Pam Brown and Louis Armand at the Globe Bookstore on 15 April 2009.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Czech, Jill Jones, Louis Armand, michael farrell, Pam Brown, Philip Hammial, Prague, spoken word, Stephan Delbos
Michael Aiken Reviews Louis Armand
The title of this book is an early manifestation of its endless intertextual referencing, as well as one example of the author's restrained penchant for relatively silly puns. It is also an understatement of the viciousness of some of this poetry.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Louis Armand, Michael Aiken