remixes



On Creative Commons II

The notion that poetry is primarily self-expression has often seemed to me a seductive (but conveniently commodifiable) mistake. We all like to think that we are makers of language, but anyone poking around in the engine of poetry uneasily realises that it is just as likely to be the other way around, that just as DNA shapes our morphology, language is the shaper of our consciousness.

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Jonathan Ball, Ryan Fitzpatrick and Jay Millar: Ex Machina and the Creative Commons

Ex Machina (BookThug, 2009) is a long poem written as a series of poetic and philosophical statements. Each page contains a titular number, and each line of the poem refers the reader to another page through a footnote. The book thus resembles the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books of yesteryear, only instead of developing a progressive narrative, the system recurs and loops endlessly. If one attempts to read the book as directed, not only will one never reach a terminal position, but certain pages that exist outside of the system will remain forever unread.

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Creative Licences and CCMixter

Do you remember a time when you completed the written draft of a poem and signed it with the © symbol beside your name? By including the copyright symbol you probably thought you were asserting your ownership of the poem and establishing yourself as the creator, as well as protecting your exclusive right to publish, perform or otherwise deal with your creation. However, you do not need to include this symbol in order to be protected by copyright law; in Australia, this protection is automatic when an original work is written and you retain control of your work unless you sell or transfer the exclusive rights.

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Post-Epic Editorial

We're thrilled and excited to say that we've now gone live with the second part of our Epic issue. Cordite 31.1: POST-EPIC aims, in the spirit of Ko Un's Maninbo (Ten Thousand Lives), to produce 1,000 lines of epic poetry. Towards this end, the poets featured in our Epic issue have each nominated a line from their work to be used as the title and starting point for a new Post-Epic poem.

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Laurie Duggan: Cover Me [borrowed title]

It's in the nature of poetry that sampling, covering, or borrowing, conscious or unconscious happens all the time. We all try to write like people we admire. In the case of satire we may try to write like people we don't like at all. In language there are only so many riffs there for the taking and what makes a poem interesting is the manner in which it performs its little (or big) thefts.

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