Published 16 July 201812 September 2018 · Poetry / Announcement / Main Posts / callout Poets, we want your writing about the internet! Editorial team Important details Overland is seeking poetry submissions for a special online edition – ‘Tribulations of the digital frontier’ – to be guest edited by long-time Overland volunteer, Mitchell Welch. Submissions close 11.59pm (AEST), Monday 10 September. The special issue will be available online in early November. Contributors for this edition will be paid $150 per poem. Our guest editor on the ‘Tribulations of the digital frontier’ issue Friends, these digital days are trying times, indeed. The symptoms of Munchhausen-by-proxy-server are creeping further and further into our collective unconscious; anonymous identitarian rage collectives grow strong; cynicism and nihilism are opening shopfronts on High Street for the first time in a long time, and the immense, inevitable and ever-widening disconnect between the connected and not (which maybe ain’t so different from what we used to call ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’) just keeps on widening. So what I’m hankering to know is this: has the great emancipatory promise of the internet been realised? Or have we collectively herded a veritable stampede of culture industry cattle – and make no mistake good people of the late Holocene (or, as it were, early Hologram-o-scene), it is an industry – into a deep theatre of dark metaphysics where not even the critics, let alone the audience participationists commenting from their stalls, have had a chance to get a measure of the hall? Has the human language, and have our long-abiding faculties for signaling and receiving data, adapted to the physics of frictionless exchange? And, importantly, is it still OK to be a Luddite? Yes gentlefolk, one and all, I suppose there is an irony in taking this discussion online, but irony’s damn near a linger franker out here on the boundless plains of the virtual prairie, and some of that old-fashioned poesy might just be the tonic we’ve been thirsting for. Submit your digital frustrations in the form of frontier pomes, ballades, lyricks, or com-po-sitions, up to three per contributor, online, or – for those folk without means of accessing Internet – by way of Pony Express. About the guest editor Mitchell Welch is a writer, communications advisor and would-be method editor from Melbourne. Ready to submit? Kindly note: for this special edition, we’re accepting all poetic forms – poems, ballads, lyrics, compositions, rants, etc – but please no more than three submissions per poet. Submit your poem as a: Current Overland subscriber? Click here to submit your poem. Not yet an Overland subscriber? Click here to submit your poem. (You can help support Overland by taking out an annual subscription, which start at $45) Editorial team More by Editorial team › 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 First published in Overland Issue 228 8 March 20248 March 2024 · Poetry POETRY Gareth Morgan as if a poem were a person, me, i get up in the morning / i buy coffee in a can, and wait / you have to keep calm, “don't get upset” / or it fucks everything up. the bosses who tell me this / are wise but stupid troopers. this is a political poem First published in Overland Issue 228 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.