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)