Cordite 37: No Theme! is now online and features 40 new works by a whole bunch of poets who got super-excited by the opportunity to send us poems on any theme they liked. Or else, um, no theme at all.
Contributors:
Ali Smith, Andy Jackson, Angela Smith, Anne Carson, B N Oakman, Brendan Ryan, Bronwyn Lovell, Campbell Thomson, Claude Weller, Corey Wakeling, Emily Manger, Geoff Goodfellow, Graham Nunn, Greg McLaren, Jennifer Chrystie, John Jenkins & Ken Bolton, John Upton, Joran Monteiro, Kate Middleton, Ken Chau, Liam Ferney, Maurice McNamara, Michael Farrell, Michael Sharkey, Nathanael O’Reilly, Peter Boyle, Richard James Allen, Roger Clark, Rory Dufficy, Rose van Son, Sharanya Manivannan, Starkey David, Stephen Lawrence, Steve Brock, Suzanne Jones, Todd Turner and Tony Grey.
From the editorial by Alan Wearne:
An editor’s task should be exhilarating of course, if I hadn’t have thought it possessed this potential I would not have said ‘Yes’ to Cordite when approached. The attendant risks of course are very often those of ego, an editor’s true, but particularly of those you reject. How well I recall when as poetry editor of Meanjin under Judith Brett folk would send accompanying letters to the actual editor beginning Dear Sir … Well, since they didn’t bother to check we couldn’t be expected to publish could we? Mind you since a woman was now editor there were a number of female writers who sent in the kind of verse that assumed that Meanjin was now the flagship of sisterhood, mid 80s style. When one contributor received a note from me suggesting that her work might be shown to better effect as a sonnet I received a furious reply lecturing me as to how the sonnet was a patriarchal verse form, this amusing both the editor and myself.
