AustLit

'As I sat down to write this, I realised that this is the second project that we’ve worked on together during a lockdown. Although we devised the theme for this issue between lockdowns (sitting in a café – imagine that!), the bulk of the reading and curating was done while the city we both live in was well into its fifth (or sixth – I’m losing count) lockdown. And solitude makes for a strange context in which to work creatively, and collaboratively.' (Sarah Gory and Elena Gomez Editorial introduction)

'As we write this, we are living in cities that are both in lockdown. Our days see us bouncing from one device to another, room to room to room. In these days that feel increasingly unreal, it’s invigorating to look back over the selections for this edition and step back into the magic circles marked out by each poem.' (Jini Maxwell  and Rory Green , Editorial introduction)

'A callout for a poetry of consciousness ‘that enacts and is responsible for what it considers’, that has been written with an awareness of ‘crises, brinks and redress’, was always going to bring some powerful and confronting work. We also hoped for poetry with contiguous capacity for social justice, community awareness and social and emotional wellbeing, and we feel that we have been able to select and collate such poems here. There are many different causes, convictions and concerns addressed in these poems, but the act of showing concern and suggesting a wish for positive change – for asserting a sense of justice and seeking that justice – is inherent in different ways in most if not all of the poems in this issue.' (John Kinsella and Jeanine Leane, Editorial introduction)

'When Cordite invited us to put together a folio of contemporary Singapore poetry, it seemed like a straightforward business. The usual suspects are called, a few new names sprinkled in for progress, a grant applied for, a spreadsheet assembled … but instead, we paused.'  (Alvin Pang and Joshua Ip, Editorial introduction)

'‘This is not a Warning, it is a Threat! Happy new year!’ So tweeted the American President before launching a missile strike in Iran that almost began World War Three. The American President (for separate reasons) was impeached, and then he was acquitted. Australia burned and did not stop burning and in the middle of that national crisis the Australian Prime Minister flew his family to Hawaii. He was an Australian being an Australian, and if we, like him, keep on being Australians, we will, as Australians, get through this. (This not being the national crisis of the past but the international crisis of the present.) Unprecedented rain flooded the North of England at the same time as new-normal rain emptied biblically into East Africa, quickly followed by a plague of hundreds of billions of locusts, forcing Somalia to declare its own national emergency. The Indian Prime Minister revoked the articles in the Indian Constitution that protected the safety and autonomy of the Muslim state of Kashmir, and, in Delhi, mobs burnt Muslim homes and lynched the people who lived in them, while the government and the police stood by and watched, and, in some cases, participated. The United Kingdom was paralysed by the extended death throes of Brexit, then Megxit – following one on the other like a fever dream of Empire’s end. And then came the collapse of our global health care system, a cataclysmic failure that held capitalism to the light like a soiled white cloth.' (Mindy Gill, Jeet Thayil, Editorial introduction)

'Why ‘Earth’? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else. Because to think about anything else right now feels like dissociation.

'The theme of this special issue isn’t radical. It’s not political. It’s not alarmist. It’s simply about drawing attention to a clear and present danger, something that is true: life on Earth, as we know it, is under threat. As for the relationship between this matter and poetry, isn’t truth-seeking what we like to think of as the job of the artist? Or are we just being poetic and self-regarding when we say that?' (Maria Takolander, Editorial introduction)

'In Arabic, ‘bayt’ means house and also a line of poetry. Welcome. I hope you enter and explore. The poems in this issue are universes, every one of them an ode of sorts: to food, to music, to home(s), to language(s), to (be)longing, to cars, to the body, to dogs, to neighbors, to family, to friends, to god, to cities, to the self, to grief, to love. There’s so much love in these poems; I felt held re-reading them this morning.' (Zeina Hashem Beck, Editorial)

'On 23 April 1979, Blair Peach, a teacher from New Zealand, was killed by a blow to the head delivered by an officer of the Metropolitan Police Force Special Patrol Group (SPG). He had been demonstrating against a meeting to be held by the Nazi National Front (NF) in Southall, West London.

'Peach did not set out to be a martyr. He did not set out to die. His acting in solidarity with the community under attack that day was probably, had it not been for his death, as unremarkable as his less recollected actions, such as spending nights on the cold, wet street corners of Brick Lane to prevent the NF from holding paper sales. Yet the tragedy of his death, compounded by the ensuing miscarriage of justice, has been remembered as a galvanising moment of anti-racism in the UK, and has inspired a number of poetic works, including Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Reggae fi Peach’, Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en banlieue, and Chris Searle’s edited collection One for Blair. In the early 1980s a Southall primary school was named after Peach. A touching tribute. Naming is touching. To name is to touch.' ( Lucy Van, Ling Toong and George Mouratidis, Editorial introduction)

'Nothing makes me feel my fallibility more than editing a literary journal, marking papers or judging a literary competition. I can be wrong. I can be unclear. I can miss things.

'There was a lot to read in guest editing this edition of Cordite. Anything done repetitively makes me question purpose. Reading poem after poem and marking them ‘yes’, ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ I never once questioned why we write poems, that was blatantly obvious. We are moved to from ‘inner necessity’ as Carl Jung says. It is evidence of being alive. It’s an exchange, a product, a reaction, a response to stimuli like sweat. I did however question what makes a poem. Every poem I read is a poem. But is it poetry? Is it living? Intent is clear, but what is purposefulness and does it matter? Reading for meaning is the first thing that needs to be put aside to come at a poem. If there is meaning it needs to come upon you, not be imposed by reader or writer, to actually be meaning. A judgement is not an insight. A judgement is not an idea. Solely expressing a sentiment does not make poetry. Expressing a preconceived idea is not alive. There needs to be some personal risk some not knowing and the unknown in it for it to alive. If there is no meaning it is part of a conversation or simply and validly being. I looked for poems that the writer let be.' (Claire Gaskin , Editorial introduction)

'I’m writing this after news that W S Merwin has died. His Selected Poems still sits on my bedside table, never far away in case of a spare moment. The poem ‘Leviathan’, was something of an inspiration for this issue, a rolling, musical masterpiece that echoes, for me at least, Tennyson’s ‘The Kraken’. It was first published in Merwin’s Green with Beasts in 1956, and speaks with memorable power and control, like Darth Vader.' (Nathan Curnow : Editorial introduction)

'In an interview with Dami Àjàyí, Kwame Dawes speaks on his large and generous offerings – the work that he has contributed towards and within a greater African Diasporic poetics. Àjàyí asks after what drives him towards curation, when the work requires so much time, and when tending towards one’s own creative impulse can seem like enough.' (Editorial Introduction)

'I invited you to lean into this DOMESTIC sphere in all its homely undoing; to rupture the masquerading shape of cosy bliss; to plant seeds and haunt with your words; to unsettle and shape what survival looks and feels like – and you did. You lured me into other-worlds with your heart-on-sleeve, body-on-the-line words; a DOMESTIC fever-immersion that broke my heart and made me rage, laugh out-loud, question and delve deeper when I needed to know you more. You kept me awake. You got under my skin. None of it was easy.' (Natalie Harkin, Editorial Introduction)

'When we put out the call for TRANSQUEER we asked poets ‘to explore trans identities not as positions to defend but as modes of becoming and thus ways of being human’ (Joy Ladin, Trans Studies Quarterly, 2016: 640) and ‘to believe that the world is QUEER, or that oneself is, or both, [and that this] is a window of doubt through which all creative possibility comes into being’ (Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World into Word).'  (Stuart Barnes and Quinn Eades : Introduction)

'When people say ‘difficult’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence they are usually referring to the experience of reading a certain type of poem. It is often a poem that seems to make little sense, that doesn’t have a strong sense of narrative, that uses strange words or strange forms, that does not follow rules of grammar and syntax, that may not even communicate any coherent message at all. Difficult poetry, for some reason, is a phrase that refers to these weird poems and the people who try to read them. Difficult poetry is about the tension and struggle to make sense of this weirdness.' (Oscar Schwartz and Holly Isemonger : Introduction)

'Four years ago, writing an essay on David Malouf, I learned that Hawthorn Library held a copy of his first poetry collection, Bicycle and Other Poems (1970). I borrowed it, and, sadly, I returned it, too. Today, I rang the library to find the book. The friendly librarian on duty told me that it had been ‘deleted’ from the catalogue. She could find no record of whether they had given it away or thrown it in the recycling bin.' (Lisa Gorton, Introduction to No Theme VII)

'To enter the mind of Philippine literature in English, it is important to note the evolution of English in the Philippines. We were colonised by Spain in 1521 and sold to America in 1898. According to eminent Filipino poet and scholar, Gémino Abad, Philippine poetry in English only took flight in the 1920s – it is a considerably young poetry, being less than a hundred years old. At this point, Filipinos spoke so many vernacular languages and even variants of ethno-languages that the establishment of a stable literature in English seemed an unlikely project.' (Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta and Shirley O Lua Editorial introduction)

'We begin with two recent voices in Cordite Poetry Review.

'‘There is an assumption that real art only comes from the city,’ writes Winnie Siulolovao Dunn in her 2017 essay, ‘FOB: Fresh off the Books’. Dunn is writing about the stigma of hailing from both Mt Druitt and Tonga. For the young Dunn, the ethnically diverse Western Suburbs of Sydney seem far removed from any cultural centre. Indeed, as Dunn recounts, it took her twenty-one years to write and own ‘the literature of being a Fob in Mounty County.’

'The second voice is Corey Wakeling’s, and it comes from his brilliantly provocative review of Puncher & Wattmann’s Contemporary Australian Poetry. Here, Wakeling argues that ‘the suburban is a preeminent register of the Australian contemporary’ and that ‘much Australian poetry already seems embedded in the suburban condition.’ For Wakeling, the huge CAP volume is a testament to the various ways that contemporary poetry is implicated in or grappling with notions and legacies of suburbia.' (Lachlan Brown and Nathanael O'Reilly : Editorial Introduction) 

'I was already quite a few years into a creative writing PhD titled ‘Generic Engineering’ and flailing around quite spectacularly in a galaxy of words when an academic friend, perhaps hoping to spare me the indignity of a completed thesis and potential employment, flipped to the middle of the 526-page book he was reading. Wordlessly, pointed to a single sentence. ‘Due to a predilection whose origin I will leave it up to the reader to determine,’ it read, ‘I will choose the symbol ♀ for this inscription.’ The symbol had been summoned to designate what the writer called ‘generic multiple’. The generic, the writer noted, is ‘the adjective retained by mathematicians to designate the indiscernible, the absolutely indeterminate’. Another PhD student who was in the room sniggered, disparagingly, I thought, as if dubious that I could be capable of understanding what had been read aloud. In retrospect it was more likely a beleaguered exhalation, a stockpile for the future, of sympathy and despair.' (Editorial)

'When we chose to edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review around the theme of ‘Land’, it was with an interest in the inherent openness of the word. Similarly, we came without a strong affiliation to any particular poetics, though of course our own aesthetic, moral and intellectual predispositions followed us. The process of reading through the many submissions was exploratory and open-minded.' (Editorial)