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 September 202315 September 2023 · Main Posts Announcing the 2023 Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize ($6500) Editorial Team Supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, and named after the late Neilma Gantner, this prize seeks excellent short fiction of up to 3000 words themed around the notion of ‘travel’; imaginative, creative and literary interpretations are strongly encouraged. This competition is open to all writers, nationally and internationally, at any stage of their writing career. First published in Overland Issue 228 8 September 202326 September 2023 · Main Posts Announcing the 2023 Judith Wright Poetry Prize ($9000) Editorial Team Established in 2007 and supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation, the Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets seeks poetry by writers who have published no more than one collection of poems under their own name (that is writers who’ve had zero collections published, or one solo collection published). It remains one of the richest prizes for emerging poets, and is open to poets anywhere in the world. In 2023, the major prize is $6000, with a second prize of $2000 and a third prize of $1000. All three winners will be published in Overland.
