Swoony: that's the feel-good-term I'll use for being notified that one of my fav codeworks [or code poems, if you will] has just been published as part of a Special Issue cooked up by Cordite Poetry Review and The Lifted Brow [who'll publish their half in mid-October, which will feature textual remixes, visual illustrations, songs, and gamified versions of some of the poems that feature in the Cordite issue]. And the icing-on-the-news-cake? Luke Davis, the guest editor for this UMAMI issue selected the published works from 700 others [all blind reviewed, don't worry]. Amazing. Read "\oriGaM[e,]i[,+ U]/" + the other shiny UMAMI selections right here.
Luke Davis
In the selection process I found myself drawn to pieces that hovered at this edge of knowing: where the 'messiness' is. It wasn't that I was discarding form; it's just that in the interest of variety, I tried not discriminate between whether in any given poem (or prose piece) energy trumped form or vice versa... I juggled and revised a jumble of Yes, No and Maybe lists. There were poems that hit me in the gut. There were others I couldn't quite get my radar on, but I kept coming back for subsequent re-readings. In the end, I reduced the 700 submitted to the 50 or so poems that make up this issue.
