if you can’t handle the poetry, get off the blog.


121The 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 ›

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