'In his retelling of the myth of Orpheus – where Eurydice is described as ‘the profoundly obscure point to which art and desire, death and night, seem to tend’ – Maurice Blanchot charts the relationship between poetry and loss, by which to desire is to necessitate, even to invoke, obscurity: to confine the object of desire, along with the poet, to song; to translate life into word, and, through word, into dream. In this conception, to write is always to admit to, but also to dwell with, loss – to experience the loss of a once-loved person as a mode of living. When Nerval writes that dreams are a second life, he not only refers to the dreams we experience in sleep, but also to the dreams that arise as a consequence of lost desires, dreams perhaps thwarted by chance: of lives once meant, but never lived.
'These lives often coexist with our own as lost alternatives, counter-experiences or impossible possibilities; they lie within the everyday like a subtext, or a haunting. To transmute desire into language is to erect a monument to that desire, to announce it as permanent, but also to profoundly transform both the subject and the object of desire: to confine them, in their relationship, to the monument and the tomb. Since evocation presupposes loss or absence – as Mallarmé showed – then to write is to desire something that continually slips away, and must once again be invoked in a series of repetitions and beginnings that both conjure and obscure. '–John Hawke' (Publication summary)
'Just one of the many really interesting trails that thread through the seeming wilds of Australian poetry over the last two or so decades (cripes, has it been that long?) is the slow, constant morphing one of Cordite. Sydney poets Adrian Wiggins and Peter Minter, founders of Cordite Poetry and Poetics Review, launched their first issue in 1997. After five issues in a broadsheet format and an oscillating editorship that included Margaret Cronin and Jennifer Kremmer, the editorship was handed over in 2005 to David Prater, whose key innovation was to appoint guest editors for mini- and, later, entire issues.'
(Introduction)
'Just one of the many really interesting trails that thread through the seeming wilds of Australian poetry over the last two or so decades (cripes, has it been that long?) is the slow, constant morphing one of Cordite. Sydney poets Adrian Wiggins and Peter Minter, founders of Cordite Poetry and Poetics Review, launched their first issue in 1997. After five issues in a broadsheet format and an oscillating editorship that included Margaret Cronin and Jennifer Kremmer, the editorship was handed over in 2005 to David Prater, whose key innovation was to appoint guest editors for mini- and, later, entire issues.'
(Introduction)
