Those who require poetry to be semantically coherent, rather than welcoming all ‘patterns of utterance’, get short shrift, and the poetry that MacCarter selects is full of the free play of signs and signifiers. If poetry can operate on the same basis as art, music or film, without having to ‘make sense’, then it is poets like Berni M. Janssen who can make it so. Interestingly, in this case at least, the poets are all women, something that MacCarter leaves the reader to notice.

Cordite, by its nature as an online journal, encourages the loosening of definitions, for example with an interactive ‘poem’ created by running the script of ‘The Matrix’ through a speech-to-text program, some starkly graphic artworks created by Ian Friend ‘in response to poetics’, and a poetry film by Ye Mimi.

There is definitely something about the Internet that militates against stodge, and Cordite, even when over-excited, is thoughtful and interesting, so that Geoff Page’s critical, concise reading of John Kinsella’s ‘The Vision of Error’ plays off nicely against Javant Biarujia’s much denser take on the same text. There is also a lively exegesis of Apollinaire’s ‘Vendémiaire’, with the poem itself appended as evidence.

All this is ‘before’ (though of course there is no order of reading) Felicity Plunkett’s judicious selection of 51 new poems that anchors everything and justifies yet again Cordite’s longstanding guest poetry editor policy.