Overland literary journal

Racist #1 – The ute driver

It’s the end of semester, and I’m bloody tired. In fact, I’m probably looking forward to the school holidays even more than my son. Boy’s totally spent as well. He’s five and a half. It’s his first year at school and believe me, you can tell when the end of term is coming. The poor little critter has been absolutely smashed with tiredness come three thirty pick-up over the last week. He shuffles his feet out of school each afternoon babbling and incoherent, offering random nonsensical insights into various parts of his day.

Man has the kids’ weekends – so much of the week for me is the lunch-box-packing home-work-hassling dinner-bath-bed-out of bed-breakfast-dressed-school mayhem. So this afternoon I’m happy: wheeling nine-month-old Girl along the main street of our white-picket-fence suburb looking forward to the next two weeks of jama-clad French toast mornings, museum trips and non-school-assigned reading. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 8-07-2011, 15 user comments

Osama lives

you cn feel him now:
a small boy
on the riyadh streets
shifting arabia's
bare / cracked childhood feet
in volatile unease
as US army tanks roll by

the bullet blew the flesh
bt he is written in the wind:

osama
osama bin
osama bin laden
osama bin laden lives

Written by Maxine Clarke on 13-06-2011, 1 user comment

Child’s play

(or Strategies for buying an hour and a half of writing time from your eight-month-old)

Turn on the laptop, crank up the gas heater and choose one of the following:

1. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with a tub of cottage cheese
2. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with an entire loaf of bread
3. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with a pot full of lukewarm spaghetti
4. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with an entire copy of the Age newspaper
5. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with a pot full of lukewarm rice
6. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with a pot full of lukewarm baked beans
7. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with a tub of grated cheese
8. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet with a pot full of mashed potato
9. Sit her naked on a plastic sheet
10. Sit her naked ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 2-06-2011, 2 user comments

Still Waters (part 2)

Some time ago I introduced you to the women of Still Waters. So much has happened for this storytelling group for women of African descent since I last spoke of them properly on this blog. There was that second meeting, where the group consolidated themselves into a core collective of six, including myself as mentor.

Girl, do us black women know how to talk, and that second meeting, though we’d moved from the lounge space of the Institute for Postcolonial Studies to the conference room, the serious work of knuckling down to write a collective manifesto under founder Fadzai Jaravaza’s able guidance didn’t always come easy. Conversation veered off into black women’s business – Tariro spoke of the unbearable whiteness of Australian beauty, of working within the local housing commissions and being asked by young African women ‘Why do you shave your head? Why do you wear headwraps like that? Don’t you want to look pretty?’ Teurai chimed in with her experiences as one of the few black faces in the Australian modelling industry. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 26-05-2011, 2 user comments

The end of the affair

poetry and i / we broke up last week
we just kinda grew apart
it wasn’t her / it wz me

well / ok just quietly / between me and you
it wz wild while it lasted
bt poetry / she got all single white female
for the last part there on me
it’s true

she wanted to be my everything
i wasn’t sure i still loved her like that
& needed some time to think
bt poetry / she said
i am not gonna buy that let’s have a break shit
poetry knew i wanted out
& started following me / everywhere
i couldn’t work / or leak / or eat or sleep
walk without her calling on me

you know poetry
at times / she can be so fucking needy

after we split/ i’d be out somewhere
& poetry wd just happen to turn up
she’d pull that fancy meeting you here crap
as if she hadn’t been hiding outside the house
to see where i went / all that time

i never thought it wd end like this /
i cd see poetry and i / old
in rocking chairs together
hands wrapped around steaming mugs
reminiscing about the good times

when we first met i wz always thinking
now poetry / she is beautiful
you know what i mean
i mean it wz like poetry
cd have anyone she wanted
& poetry chose me
(not/you understand/ tht I have low self esteem)

people were always saying
man / you & poetry
were just meant to be together
you are so lucky to have found each other
& poetry wd smile my way / as if to say
i will never leave you / maxine
we will be together always
you & me

& now
i am starting to get
just what that might mean

First published at slam up.

Written by Maxine Clarke on 23-05-2011, 7 user comments

My (not so) secret poetic shame

I’ve heard so many writers wax lyrical about their early poetic influences and, indeed, I've done it myself in interviews. Musicality plays a great part in my poetry and some time ago, a young writer asked me what the first album I bought was. They might have been expecting Tracey Chapman, or perhaps even Gil Scott Heron, The Last Poets or Public Enemy – and indeed, they did come later. But here, ladies and gentlemen, for your viewing pleasure, is my ultimate secret shame.

In 1989, I bought my first ever cassette tape album: Bobby Brown’s gem Every Little Step I Take. It played on loop on my sunflower yellow boombox till the tape got twisted and Bobby began to sound chipmunk-like. Whitney Houston and Brown hadn’t hooked up yet and I knew deep down that somehow, Bobby and I were gonna marry someday. Bel Biv Devoe and Arrested Development were soon to follow suit, though none of them would steal my heart anywhere close to the way that skinny-legged black-shoulder-padded-tux-with-bare-chest-underneath Bobby did. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 9-03-2011, 6 user comments

So you think you can write poetry: noetry and constructive criticism

So you want to be a poet. When you desperately want something, it’s difficult to get past the wanting, and look into the mechanics of achieving that thing. It’s not enough to want to be a poet, just like it’s not enough to want to be a dancer. Dancing requires grace, agility, athleticism, rhythm and unwavering dedication. The tall, gawky kid with two left feet hiding out at the back of gym class might have early fantasies of being discovered on So You Think You Can Dance, but those fantasies probably disappear in their late teens when reality kicks in.

Unfortunately, in the case of poetry, the requisite talents are not so clear-cut. If only there were an equivalent So You Think You Can Write; we could all just turn up at the cattle call audition and have our hopeful hearts broken by a Simon Cowell-esque judge wielding a quill and a dictionary. Even then though, there’d be those few tragics left staring forlornly but defiantly into the camera whining: ‘What would he know? He wouldn’t know a decent poet if they smacked him in the face with their next manuscript. My MUM and all my mates LOVE my writing, and they should know, they’ve read it ALL.’ ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 4-03-2011, 7 user comments

Still waters

It’s 22 January, and the first gathering of the Still Waters Black Womens Storytelling Network. The group founder, Zimbabwean writer Fadzai Jaravaza, pauses, takes a breath, looks around at the group of beautiful brown women gathered for tea in a small room at the Institute for Postcolonial Studies in North Melbourne and asks ‘Any questions?’ There’s a short silence. Tinashe Pwiti, a young Zimbabwean woman of 22, clears her throat. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘why are we called Still Waters?’

I smile, wondering the exact same thing, and shuffle my three-month-old daughter into the red sling strung across one shoulder, eager to hear Fadzai’s response. One of the baby’s eyes opens suspiciously but she ultimately succumbs to sleep. Still Waters doesn’t seem, to me, to be an obvious christening for this newly formed storytelling sister-circle. Water is such a life force – so all-powerful in its movement and strength. Water floods, drowns, devastates, replenishes and revives. Water slides land, washes away foundations and even erodes stone. Still Waters seems somehow helpless, ominous, melancholy. It makes me think of stagnant ponds and lifeless children, of time standing still. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 23-02-2011, 7 user comments

i is the revolution

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item: revolution
number of items: 1
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the revolution thanks you for choosing itself

the revolution is downloading onto your ipad
& being transferred onto your iphone
it is an irevolution
the revolution is i
i is the revolution

the revolution is available in e-book form
the revolution/s full text is available for 99c on amazon
the revolution comes in 4 short podcasts
that can be worn as a USB bracelet
the revolution hz been turned on
you must follow the revolution
it will be abbreviated to fit its own twitter feed:
the revolution will drop all vo

Written by Maxine Clarke on 14-02-2011, 10 user comments

Do you want myself or do you want my song? Poetry & truth

While I was pregnant with my (now four-month-old) daughter, I was performing a feature poetry set in Melbourne and during the break a woman came up to me and said: Congratulations! I’m so glad to see you’re expecting. That poem about your son dying is so sad, it makes my heart break.

My response was to stare at her blankly. I thought she’d probably confused me with someone else, and asked whether she had. She looked a little confused. You just performed that poem – the one about your son being shot. I looked at her again, blankly. The poem you JUST read, she insisted, it’s in your book! I wracked my brain and realised she meant the poem ‘mali’, which appears in my book Gil Scott Heron is on Parole (Picaro Press, 2010). The poem is about the anxiety of carrying a black child in the womb, with the mother (myself) imagining all of the things that could go wrong: ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 2-02-2011, 9 user comments

Poetry review – Music for broken instruments

Music for broken instruments
A.S. Patric
Black Rider Press

Music for broken instruments, an e-book by Melbourne writer A.S. Patric, has already been endorsed by a formidable group of writers and poets, including Aural Text’s Alicia Sometimes, and Page Seventeen’s Tiggy Johnson. Reading the collection, this comes as no surprise.

Each page of the book has been beautifully typeset by Black Rider Press, against their trademark olde worlde crumple-watermarked pages in typewriter font. The tactility of the collection is frustrating, in part, for a digitally delivered book: Music for broken instruments begs to be printed on thick recycled paper, ribbon-bound and covered in leather or cloth for those winter afternoons with blanket, cat and cocoa. On the other hand, the aesthetics of the book cleverly serve as an enticement to press print. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 28-05-2010, 8 user comments

It was already political

It was November 2006 and I knew I was going to be on stage that night. Already it was political: I took the tiny newspaper cut-out Tarzan had stuck to the fridge and left screaming baby Boy in his arms. I wore stretched maternity pants and a fast beating heart. I knew I’d come home with some kind of trophy, but never realised I was carrying it before the taxi even arrived.

The Writers Centre was in the grounds of a former mental asylum. I was late to register, but somebody took pity on me. It was already political. Before I arrived or spoke a word, before anyone knew I would be taking the mic, before anyone told me to write poetry about everyday life, before I had a chance to use my ninety seconds to say fuck you in a hundred different ways to a hundred different already-thinking-they-were-listening-to me people who needed to hear it a hundred different times and would carry it away in their hearts without maybe even realising. Before I left the house, it was political. That night a young brown woman left her child to stand up in a room full of mostly white, perhaps even mostly hostile, people. It was political. There was a vomit stain on my shoulder. I didn’t notice it till afterward. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 6-05-2010, 6 user comments

La Mama Poetica – Monday 19 April

Written by Maxine Clarke on 19-04-2010, No comments

The bloggers are out tonight

It was uni summer holidays when Y2K was supposedly going to hit. I was working full-time in the kitchen of a major New South Wales hospital. Hospital electricians were powering up generators in case the life support and other medical equipment went berserk, nurses filled up baths and sinks with water and reassured terrified patients, and down in the kitchen we had ordered enough food to plate cold meals for the next week in the absence of working ovens – and rostered on an extra ten staff for the following day in case the industrial dishwashers stopped working.

Despite being an avid blogger, to me the hysteria being generated by ‘media commentators’ regarding the e-book’s ambitious plans to change our reading habits forever is the literary equivalent of the Y2K madness. ... read more

Written by Maxine Clarke on 14-04-2010, 9 user comments