Published 20 May 200920 May 2009 · Main Posts Poetry Slamming with the President Maxine Beneba Clarke The Obamas held a poetry jam at their big White House last week. James Earl Jones was there, and Poetry Slam Champion Mayda de Valle. And yet, despite Obama’s frequent emails to me, I didn’t receive an invite. How could he have left me off the list? I mean, he even wrote me the evening he was elected, saying: Dear Maxine, I’m about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there, but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history. And I don’t want you to forget how we did it. You made history every single day during this campaign …I’ll be in touch soon about what comes next. But I want to be very clear about one thing… All of this happened because of you. Thank you, Barack… I swear to God that is, word-for-word, what came through to my hotmail from Obama (ie: his publicity team) about ten minutes before he walked on stage. The only possible explanation for me being left off the readers list is that Michelle saw my serenade to her husband, and got insanely jealous…Still, as a poet, it’s heartening to know the high emphasis the ‘leader of the free world’ and our ‘orator in chief’ puts on words. God knows, they got the man to where he is today. May he never forget that. This entry is cross-posted here 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 › 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 28 March 20249 April 2024 · Main Posts Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise Sukhmani Khorana In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on 'lived expertise' and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body. 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.
