Overland literary journal

going out swinging

Going Down Swinging has been out and about recording during the 2009 Overload Poetry Festival. At the end of it all, they're left with hours and hours of audio, which will be culled down to twelve or so tracks to be released later in the year as part of a new Overload/Going Down Swinging highlights disc. In the early hours of the morning after the last event of Overload 2009 had finished

Written by Overland Overloaded on 15-09-2009, 4 user comments

haiku chain

At the beginning of Overland Overloaded, we sent out a call for haiku written about Melbourne poets. 2007 Australian National Poetry Slam winner Marc Testart responded with gusto. Here are his efforts, accompanied by the photographs from the  wonderful Michael Reynolds, who went home on Sunday night cradling an Overload award for his utterly outstanding contribution to Melbourne poetry. Please add to the comments section your own haiku about an Overload poet. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 15-09-2009, 5 user comments

look at what poetry does with us

The Overland Overloaded team will be handing the Overland blog back to Overland at the end of today. Today we'll be uploading our last few posts. We'll let you sit in on our musings with the exhausted but triumphant Lisa Greenaway from Going Down Swinging, and taking one last look at the people and poetry that made the Overload Festival 2009.  For the moment though, Alec Patric's getting sentimental about his time reviewing the festival. Almost makes  all us Overloaders teary...well, if we weren't half dead with exhaustion. Alec writes: ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 15-09-2009, 1 user comment

the word on poetry blogging

When I first started posting poetry on the Overland site, I was visited by Gingatao. And visited. And visited and visited and visited. I sent an email to Jeff: who IS this guy? But on further investigation Gingatao, aka Brisbane blogger-poet Paul Squires, is everywhere online that there is poetry, and poetry is everywhere on line he is, creating mayhem across cyber-space. If you are an Australian poet who blogs, you have most likely come across him. Poet-bloggers hate him. Poet-bloggers love him. They hate to love him and they love to hate him. Given the combination of poetry and blogging that's been the last two weeks of the Overland blog, I thought I'd vox-pop the man and reveal some of the mystery behind the poet not short on confidence or comments: ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 15-09-2009, 25 user comments

nobody comments when it’s love love love

Overland Overloaded's Alec Patric has instructed me to refrain from certain prefaces to this review of the final event of Overload, the Surprise Showcase. 'Just pretend worker bee Maxine doesn't know slam Maxine', he urged. So here the review is. No comment.

Glowing reviews aren’t my strong suit. It’s really difficult to find anything to write about the Show Case that doesn’t sound saccharine and sentimental. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 15-09-2009, 12 user comments

haiku rooku

Haiku are deluding. There’s always this sense that anybody could write them: grab a crumpled napkin, a spare three minutes and a pen and you have something you can call a poem: the right number of syllables staring back at you in all their self-contained smugness. 
 
Overload’s Rooku of Haiku on Saturday evening ripped apart the image I had of these tiny poetic morsels as the buttered cinema-popcorn of the poetry pantry: crunchable quickly without a second thought, gulped down with some soft drink or other. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 15-09-2009, 3 user comments

Nil By Mouth

An aggressive life-sized badger (the mascot of the Bristol Poetry Festival Slam), and a pixie-sized deranged masked ninja (mascot of the Overload Poetry Festival Slam), the impromptu staccato sound-poetry caused by technical glitches and web-cammed rooms of mad, excitable poets evidently weren't bizarre enough for Overland Overloaded's Simonne Michelle-Wells. Embracing the true chaos of Slam, Simonne emerged from the Overload-Bristol Skype Slam on Saturday evening seriously lamenting the lack of commitment to mayhem and disorder: ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 14-09-2009, 24 user comments

subliminal poegramming

...white feathers suffocating...
...my heart is a breath only...

Throughout the 2009 Overload Poetry Festival, poems have been broadcast at Federation Square as scrolling text. The ticker wall on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets became a giant poetry board with a selection of poetry edited by Matt Hetherington and Luis Gonzalez Serrano. The big screens in the main square and atrium also displayed a selection of concrete/

Written by Overland Overloaded on 14-09-2009, 3 user comments

it ain’t over till the last poet slams

The 2009 Overload Poetry Festival might be officially over tonight, but Overland has agreed for the Overland Overloaded team to have the blog until Tuesday, and we intend to hold on to it for dear life. That is, until those pesky non-fiction and prose writers over there come knocking at the door with baseball bats. Over the next few days, we will be talking with poet Eddy Burger, hearing haiku from poet Marc Testart (2007 National slam champion), and posting reviews from Westwords, The Whisperers (at NGV), the Rooku of Haiku, the Overload vs Bristol Poetry Skype Slam and the Overload Surprise Showcase. Ladies and gentlemen, it ain't over till the last poet slams. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 13-09-2009, 2 user comments

an angst disposal unit

Over the last few weeks, Melbourne's poet soulster Sean M Whelan has been so crazily busy working the stages with his new poetry-music collaboration, Sean M Whelan and the Interim Lovers, that he's barely had time to breathe, let alone ease out a pen and paper and scribble a little poetry. Whelan performed for the first time with the Interim Lovers during Overload 2009, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. The Overland Overloaded team finally backed Whelan into a corner and forced him to answer some questions. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 13-09-2009, 2 user comments

what poetry looks like in cyberspace

Coverage of Overload wouldn't be complete without a word from Melbourne poet Komninos Zervos. Komninos was one of the poets who was locked in the poetry workshop during Overload, while the rest of us were out sestina-ing the streets. The Overland Overloaded team caught up with Komninos:

Komninos Zervos...Sorry, that was self indulgent, I love saying your name. It's poetry in itself - Komninos Konstantinos Zervos. So ummm....let's start again for the sake of professionalism. How have you survived so long on the Melbourne poetry scene, when we hear tell it's just wild out there?
Well, I haven't. I left Melbourne in 1989 and moved north to Sydney, then further north in 1995 to Queensland. I decided to go back to study and got myself a Master of Arts in Creative Writing from UQ and started working with computers, trying to imagine what poetry looks like in cyberspace. So from about 1995 to 2007 I have been working mainly on the web creating animated text multimedia poetry, (I call it cyberpoetry) sometimes interactive, and didn't really write performance poetry for page and stage until I returned to melbourne in 2008 to resume my role as a performance poet. And you are right it is wild out there. there are so many great performance poets, yourself included, it is very competitive for audience and money. When I started off in 1985 I was one of few poets that had ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 12-09-2009, 1 user comment

the land of the oongolie doongolies

Overland Overloaded's Karen Andrews weathered poets drenching each other in beer, blinding each other with hairspray and waxing violent and lyrical about the 'land of the oongolie doongolies' and left the Overload Slam Final last night oddly inspired:

“I want a poem that takes you on a journey…”
“I want a poem that plays Russian roulette with life…”

These are the words of Vicki Thornton, one of the finalists of the Overload Poetry Slam last night. I was among the enthusiastic and unwearied crowd (we began late) at Dante`s, gathered to be entertained and taken to different places and perspectives. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 12-09-2009, 1 user comment

the basic butchery of what a human being is

Overland Overloaded's Alec Patric, the critic we all love to hate, attended the final of the Overload Poetry Slam last night. It was the first slam the Melbourne writer had ever attended and the odd mixture of fascination and bemusement was clearly evident on his face throughout the evening. Overloaded's Karen Andrews will also be reviewing the slam final.

Friday, Slam Final at Dante’s: Why do we do it? Those of us that get up on stage and those of us that listen? Why the mix of competition and farce in something as pathetically delicate as poetry? There were questions like these at the Slam Finals at Dante’s last night. I also found myself asking why the ill prepared poet, with a nervous poem read from trembling paper, reads to a room full of people who have vague intentions of listening and fluctuating efforts at concentration? If you’ve ever seen Crazy Elf MC a Slam you’ll know things get turned inside out and kicked around, brutally chopped down by his handy Ninja. He’s not kidding when he says, ‘love the poet — hate the poem.’ But since he doesn’t love the poets, and neither did most of the people at Dante’s, the question remains. Why the fuck do we do it? ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 12-09-2009, 5 user comments

we make no apologies. we’re poets

Okay, so it was bound to happen. For the first five days of the Overload festival, the Overland Overloaded team has been right on the money. But now the festival's two days away from being over, we're all tired, we've spent a little too much time wining and poetry-ing rather than typing, reviewing and posting. So this vox pop is one of a series we're left holding, thinking 'Mmm, yeah...probably should have gone up about Tuesday.' We make no apologies. We're poets. And those of us that aren't probably soon will be. But this here is an incredibly important vox pop with Teresa Bell, the amazing and very forgiving director of the Australian Poetry Centre. ... read more

Written by Overland Overloaded on 12-09-2009, 1 user comment