Published 26 August 2009 · Main Posts if you can’t handle the poetry, get off the blog. Maxine Beneba Clarke The leader of the free world is a poet, and it’s about time things changed around here too. Poetry runs Melbourne city. It’s on our trams, in the bars, temples and churches, on the streets. So during the Overload Poetry Festival 2009, poets will run this blog. From September 1-15, the Overland blogsite will be crashed with all things poetry. The Overland Overloaded blogging team will be chatting with the likes of Steve Smart, Komninos Zervos, Josephine Rowe, Sean M Whelan, Benjamin Theolonius Sanders (aka IQ), Ben Pobjie, Anthony O’Sullivan and Angela Meyer. We will be talking about Pi.O, Cate Kennedy and Graham Nunn. We will be sneaking into Spinning Room features, Dan O’Connell readings, the Bar Open slam and the Passionate Tongues showcase. We will be reviewing poetry pub crawls, slams, performances, readings, writings and rantings. We will be shooting the breeze with dancing poets, blogging poets and singing poets, with poets who publish and poets who refuse to publish, with hopeful poets and bitter poets, page poets and performance poets, Melbourne poets, international poets and interstate poets. You will be asked to poetry down. You will be poetried up, poetried out and poetried around. Any blog posts which are not poetry related will be heckled and deleted. If you can’t handle the poetry then get off the blog. Maxine Beneba Clarke Maxine Beneba Clarke is an Australian author and slam poet of Afro- Caribbean descent. Her short fiction collection Foreign Soil won the 2015 ABIA Award for Best Literary Fiction and the 2015 Indie Award for Best Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize. Her memoir, The Hate Race, her poetry collection Carrying the World, and her first children’s book, The Patchwork Bike, will be published by Hachette in late 2016. More by Maxine Beneba Clarke › Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places. If you like this piece, or support Overland’s work in general, please subscribe or donate. Related articles & Essays 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 5 March 2024 · Main Posts Andrew Charlton’s school assignment Alex McKinnon Australia's Pivot to India exists for three reasons: so that when Andrew Charlton is interviewed on the radio or introduced on Q+A, his bio includes the phrase "he has written a book about Indian-Australian relations"; to fend off accusations that he is another Kristina Keneally engaging in electoral colonialism in western Sydney; and to help the Albanese government strengthen economic and military ties with Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.