The thirty-fifth issue of Cordite features new poetry from Australia and Korea. Timed to coincide with the Australia-Korea Year of Friendship, which celebrates fifty years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, Cordite 35: OZ-KO aimed to stimulate creative collaborations between Australian and Korean poets and readers, and features one hundred new poetic works, plus a variety of features and other articles.
Contributors:
KO Un, KIM Kyung Ju, KIM Ki-Taek, KIM Myung-in, KIM Sa-in, KIM Sun-Woo, KIM So Youn, KIM Un, KIM Hyesoon, RA Hee-duk, PARK Ra Youn, PARK Hyung Jun, SONG Kyung Dong, SIN Yongmok, SHIN Hae Wook, SHIM Bo Sun, LEE Seong-bok, LEE Si-young, JIN Eun-young and HWANG Tong gyu.
This special issue was made possible through funding provided by the Korea Language Translation Institute, the Asialink Centre at the University of Melbourne, the Australian International Cultural Council and the Australia Council for the Arts.
Cordite Poetry Review was established in 1997, and is Australia’s premier Internet poetry magazine, having garnered a reputation for publishing experimental and innovative works by both established and emerging Australian poets. Cordite receives funding from the Australia Council for the Arts, the federal government’s peak arts funding body, and boasts a large and varied readership.
From Eun-Gwi Chung’s editorial:
Compared to the Western countries where poetry has been marginalized for a very long time, poetry in Korea has constructed a rather happy domain of discourse, taking its existential root in the real history of people, in the politics of everyday life. The overall division between poetry and politics – the one, passive, swoony, not in the business of doing things, and the other, active, gritty, and concerned with reality – does not seem to be applied to the history of Korean poetry. In terms of poetry, Korea has been the real republic of words and the representatives of poets drawn here would prove the wild, wide landscape of contemporary Korean poetry and its vitality. Getting its surviving energy from its unpractical usefulness or useless practice, poetry in Korea has also undergone changes. As noted by various writers, in the Republic of Korea, poetry has long occupied a very active social domain where aesthetic and political aspects of words have been expanded, modulated, experimented altogether. Especially since the 1990s, at once being liberated from the burden of politics or political representation, it has evolved into a more experimental republic of words. The onset of the new poets usually born around in and after 1970s, with their self-reflexive exploration of language and its relation to reality, marks a shift in Korean poetics from what a poem says to how a poem says.
