Cirrus@Austlit

Editing this issue of Cordite Poetry Review with Joel has felt a bit like a global cultural exchange, one that has expanded and enriched our respective literary worlds in unexpected and enriching ways. I’ve relished the opportunity to read and think deeply about the poems submitted for consideration, and to get a glimpse of what is occupying the hearts and minds of poets in Australia and beyond. Unsurprisingly, there is much common ground despite our geographical differences. (Chris Tse Editorial introduction)

'It is, by itself, a privilege both for myself and Chris to be given a chance to co-edit an issue of Cordite Poetry Review. And, as I’ve been told by publisher Kent MacCarter, this is the first time Cordite has entertained and invited two non-Australian poets to select entries for the literary journal. Making the experience also—and more importantly—an honor. And I’m grateful for the opportunity and the trust afforded us.' (Joel M. Toledo Editorial introduction)

'Why the theme TREAT? Because, as I said in the call-out for submissions, ‘Who couldn’t use a treat in these difficult times?’ Though the word ‘treat’ also has other meanings, which I encouraged poets to explore.

'Nearly half of the poems I selected for this issue address the most familiar meaning of treat, though the type of treat varies. There were many poems about food and drink – like Zephyr Zhang’s rambunctious ‘Cucumis sativus parvus’, a poem in praise of mini cucumbers, or Megan Cartwright’s ‘My shout’, which has fun with the office coffee run – and also food as a vital component of culture, as in Lesh Karan’s ‘My mother’s kitchen’. There are unusual treats, as in Diane Suess’s sly yet bold ‘Better than to receive a treat, I would like to know the taste of a treat in someone else’s mouth’. There are poems in which the treat is existence itself, as in Moira Kirkwood’s exuberant ‘Fullest’ (‘I’ve had it with eking’). There are celebrations of the natural world, of music, language, friendship, and the freedom of solitude.' (Tricia Dearborn : Editorial introduction)

'We released the call-out for BABY on 30 May 2023. We were thinking of baby projects, the spark of something new, thinking of the person who we call ‘baby’, thinking of Liam Ferney, bard of the bubs, who writes the best baby poems this side of town.'  ( Shastra Deo and Liam Ferney : Editorial introduction)

'We have had the honour of editing this issue as two poets with collections published and forthcoming with Fremantle Press, and invited by Cordite in the spirit of ‘shining a light’ on the thriving and amorphous field and bush that might be called ‘Western Australian poetry’. By virtue of the no-theme nature of the issue and the blind model of submission, the ‘WA-ness’ comes from where we were both editing on beautiful, unceded and sovereign Whadjuk Noongar boodja, and our attunement to poems referencing places utterly west such as Geraldton and Perth, of which there were many. We wish here to acknowledge the collective indebtedness of Western Australian poets to contemporary First Nations poets, whose wordcrafts and poetic knowledges profoundly shape the landscape in which we and various poets in this edition write.' (Nadia Rhook and Caitlin Maling : Editorial introduction)

'We came about this issue’s theme by dumping loved words into a shared document: nouns, verbs, phrases and onomatopoeia that stirred a shared love of intimacy with language, of play and tricksterism. It came organically to us to follow the ones we especially adored through to their etymological origins, excavating what has been evaded over time, what surprises were nested in a patina of use. As poets, we liked travelling these pathways of speech, as much evolutionary biographies of language, as they were a kind of epistemic cypher for the logics of empire, historied English. It was telling that devotion reappeared as dedication’s close friend and placeholder, an almost-malapropism that gave way to a network of linkages, each becoming the other’s obverse at nodes in a web of quotes, synonyms and citations that enfleshed the theme.' ( Lou Garcia-Dolnik and Luke Patterson : Editorial introduction)

‘Criticism is committed … to helping us to understand poems as significant utterances. But it must ensure that in its desire to produce ultimate meaning it does not purchase intelligibility at the cost of blindness: blindness to the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world.’ (Veronica Forrest-Thomson)

'I take my title and epigraph from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s separatist manifesto, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. First published posthumously in 1978, Poetic Artifice is more than what its unassumingly vague subtitle suggests. In addition to being a ‘theory of twentieth-century poetry’, it is also: an ABC of reading, an extended argument with the critic William Empson, a critical genealogy of technical innovations from John Donne to Dada, and a fanatically clear-sighted insistence that poems use language other than to exchange facts and observations about the world outside themselves. The ‘Artifice’ in Forrest-Thomson’s title is the name for the total process by which a poem marks language – adding emphasis through typography and lineation, rhyme, metrico-rhythmic patterning, etc. – so as to hijack its ordinary communicative usages and arrive at a meaning that is as much about itself as it is about the world at large, a meaning that subsumes thematic content under a larger concern about the efficacy of its own meaning-making structures.' (Bad Naturalisations: James Jiang, Introduction)

'As we sit down to write this introduction it’s reaching the end of winter in Geelong (Djilang), on unceded Wadawurrung Country – close to a year since we first considered the issue and its theme with Cordite’s Kent MacCarter. OPEN. What to say? Wattle’s blossoming in the park; magnolias are opening along suburban streets.¹ The pandemic isn’t over, even if lockdowns have ended and, for many, masks are no longer. The government has changed, though as Behrouz Boochani wrote recently, in fundamental ways so-called Australia remains unaltered, seemingly unwilling to imagine itself anew. And so – amid continued violence across parts of the world including Ukraine, Gaza, and this colony – our approach to ‘Open’, at least thematically, remains an ironic, uneasy one.' (Jo Langdon and Cameron Lowe : Editorial introduction)

'A lot happened over the months we spent working on this issue, from November when we published our playful, hyperactive call-out, to now, the beginning of winter, a date that marks a shift in the year’s trajectory. It’s time to take a breath and then what …' (Emily Stewart and Eloise Grills : Editorial introduction)

KIN explores how kinship, our understandings of who we are and where we come from, engages with dynamic senses of Country and belonging to Country. Country is storied, we are storied and kinship is nurtured and sustained by living and emergent stories about place and belonging.' (Elfie Shiosaki : Editorial introduction)

'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)