- 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
Pam Brown
Christopher Brown Reviews Pam Brown and Nicholas Powell
The last poem of Pam Brown’s Stasis Shuffle, ‘(fundamentals)’ begins with the lines: “make a distinction / between imagery / & reality” (103). As much as the distinction in question evokes the verisimilitude of the fake, a need to separate unreliable image from truth, Stasis Shuffle’s interest in reality and authenticity goes deeper.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Christopher Brown, Nicholas Powell, Pam Brown
Pulp to reform
this is my first interview since my death (predictable suspense) i swallowed a cotton bud i had only just recovered from the teardrop curse by then it had become popular to pulp to reform everyone’s dad shredded their rhetorical filler …
Pam Brown Reviews Angela Rockel’s Rogue Intensities
It’s January. As I begin to write this review it’s over 40 degrees celsius outside our small non-air-conditioned house in inner suburban Sydney. I’m indoors, perspiring lightly, with a desk fan on, windows closed, blinds drawn, listening to wails of gusts of hot wind.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Angela Rockel, Pam Brown
Pam Brown Reviews Kait Fenwick
In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a surge in material on gender and sexuality being produced by a profusion of switched-on contemporary thinkers. In Australia, Puncher & Wattmann published the anthology Out of the Box – Contemporary Gay & Lesbian Poets almost a decade ago.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Kait Fenwick, Pam Brown
Liam Ferney Reviews Kate Lilley and Pam Brown
In 1915, H G Wells published Boon, a satirical novel that featured long passages pastiching the literary style of his erstwhile friend, Henry James. It kicked off an epistolary barney over what art should be about.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Kate Lilley, liam ferney, Pam Brown
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.
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.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Alan Gould, Corey Wakeling, David McCooey, David Musgrave, J S Harry, James McAuley, Judith Beveridge, Judy Johnson, les murray, Martin Langford, Max Harris, Pam Brown, Paul Hetherington
Courrier des Antipodes – Notes on Michel Butor’s Letters from the Antipodes
Just over a week later we heard the sad news that Michel Butor had died on 24 August, 2016 at the age of 89.
Posted in ESSAYS
Tagged Michael Spencer, Michel Butor, Pam Brown, Raymond Roussel
Review Short: Poems of Hiromi Itō, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai
In the winter of Pokémon Go, I read quite a few new books of poetry. The collection Poems of Hiromi Itō, Toshiko Hirata & Takako Arai was the most cogent. These three Japanese poets are taboo-breaking women who write without reservation about ‘female experience’ in the political context of contemporary transnational capitalism.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Hiromi Itō, Jeffrey Angles, Pam Brown, Takako Arai, Toshiko Hirata
Bonny Cassidy Reviews Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead
As Feature Reviews Editor and sometime reviewer for Cordite Poetry Review it is an unusual (and therefore fun) privilege to consider a title in which poetry is critically addressed in the company of other forms. Too often it is it either quarantined within poetry-only criticism, or mentioned as an embarrassing aside to discussions of prose.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Bonny Cassidy, John Kinsella, John Mateer, Nicholas Birns, Ouyang Yu, Pam Brown
THE END Editorial
I think I was thinking of a big concept like ‘The End Times’ when I made up a theme for poems for this issue of Cordite Poetry Review. There is general consensus that the times we’re living in are endtimes.
Submission to Cordite 53: THE END Open!
Poetry for Cordite 53: THE END is guest-edited by Pam Brown. Read Corey Wakeling’s interview of Pam from 2012. Let me start at the very end, the dead end, the living end, at wit’s end, the end of the line. …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Pam Brown
Cordite Book Launch: Loney, Gibson, Hawke, Harkin
Collected Works Bookstore, Wednesday 6 May, 2015 I will begin with a bit of spontaneous resentful metaphysics. I am sorry to do so, for a number of reasons, but there we are. If it can be justified at all, it …
Posted in GUNCOTTON
Tagged Alan Loney, Gig Ryan, John Hawke, Justin Clemens, michael farrell, Natalie Harkin, Pam Brown, peter minter, Ross Gibson, Zoë Sadokierski
Dan Disney Reviews the deciBels Series
These ten tiny tomes each speak (squawk, swoon, glitch, muse, lyricise, confess) of how there is something not ticking precisely inside the reality machine. Or perhaps these books shine light onto how we’ve all gone slightly spectral within our anthropocenic phantasmagorias, lost and unmoored in an experiment that’s become dreadfully strange. Some of these books turn exclusively toward the world, others perhaps come from particular critical engagements; each serves to extend conversation both on what poets do, and what poems are for.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Angela Gardner, ann vickery, Anselm Berrigan, Dan Disney, Don Mee Choi, Jaimie Gusman, Maged Zaher, Pam Brown, Rachel Loden, Stephanie Christie, Susan Schultz, Toby Fitch
Introduction to Ross Gibson’s Stone Grown Cold
Cover design by Zoë Sadokierski
The works that Ross Gibson has written and edited over the past thirty years could be classed as political aesthetics. In books like Seven Versions of an Australian Badland, chronicling the wretched historical miscreants of Queensland’s Brigalow country, or 26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788–1791, speculatively tracing English astronomer William Dawes’s scientific work and his relationship with the Indigenous Eora people of Sydney Harbour in a few late years of the eighteenth century, Ross Gibson’s method is procedural. Seven Versions and 26 Views form a compositional design that he has described as ‘fractal’, allowing unfixed multiple views and patterns. The author’s practice of creative fragmentation, applied to the poems and short prose pieces in this new collection, eschews linearity and dull chronology.
Posted in INTRODUCTIONS
Tagged Kent MacCarter, Pam Brown, Ross Gibson, Zoë Sadokierski
Fiona Hile Reviews Lionel Fogarty
Lionel G. Fogarty is an indigenous Australian poet who is recognised for the excavation of a poetic space in which, as Michael Brennan has written, ‘his community and culture is recuperated and asserted’ whilst ‘dominant discourses, both political and poetic’ are subverted and destabilised. These qualities make Fogarty’s work difficult to review in a context in which the status of indigenous literature remains, for some institutions at least, seemingly unapproachable.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alain Badiou, Andrew Reimer, Daniel Boyarin, Fiona Hile, Giorgio Agamben, Lionel Fogarty, Pam Brown
Blank lyric
What does the street know? both of its centuries have disappeared this was a manufacturing warehouse now a fitness gym a cafe an imported fancy european bike outlet this was a corner shop the police never come here to this …
Posted in 66: OBSOLETE
Tagged Pam Brown
Riposte
Coming back to their neck of the woods, a shout was as good as a wolf and a basket as full as a boot full of tarnished medallions and useless keys, pugnacious as costume on a moonlit patio, swilling prosecco …
Posted in 63: COLLABORATION
Tagged John Kinsella, Pam Brown
Review Short: Beyond the Ohlala Mountains: Alan Brunton, Poems 1968-2002
The mask on the cover of ‘Beyond the Ohlala Mountains’ suggests that there’ll be some odd theatrics inside the book. It’s a plain papier-mâché mask of a slightly jowly head with a bulbous nose and a pair of puckered, pouting, full red lips. What does it express – is it a superior sneer? Is it bourgeois disdain? Is it about to say ‘oh là là’? The mask was made by Sally Rodwell, the now-deceased partner of the New Zealand poet collected here, Alan Brunton. It was made for a theatre work called Cabaret of the Unlikely that was performed three years after Brunton had died at 55, in 2002.
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Alan Brunton, Martin Edmond, Michele Leggott, Pam Brown
Justin Clemens Reviews Pam Brown
What does it mean to be ‘Home by Dark’? Is it a parental instruction to a potentially wayward child? Is it an expression of relief after a day of threat and uncertainty? Is it a navigational expression, a crepuscular refiguration of ‘North by North-West’? Is it a simple description of an accomplished movement, or another possibility altogether? To open this book is not to find such questions answered; it is rather to move and be moved with and by somebody who, as the epigraph from Kevin Davies has it, is prepared to ‘just keep staring into that English-language night sky.’
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Justin Clemens, Pam Brown
Justin Clemens Reviews Pam Brown and Ken Bolton
If there is one true love in the history of Australian verse, it’s perhaps the love of Pam Brown and Ken Bolton. As you should expect, it’s not a normal kind of love at all – or maybe it’s the only normal love, depending on how you’re predisposed to taking the word or the thing (‘normal,’ I mean), and depending whether you think you can tell the difference between the two (‘word’ and ‘thing,’ I mean).
Posted in BOOK REVIEWS
Tagged Justin Clemens, ken bolton, Pam Brown
Two Poems For ‘M’
close to mononia espinacas con garbanzos, a rich pepper. orders have been scrawled in chalk to form a form, yes, it is El Rinconcillo, the oldest tapas dishes, and 30.03 kilometres from Mononia, plates designed to be shared. so I …
Posted in 55: RATBAGGERY
Tagged Pam Brown
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
