Out of Order (a visual poem)

Open Letter to the Prime Minister (a poem)

dear julia

i will vote for you

when you put my child on your knee

& by my child i mean our children

& by i / of course / i mean we

bt chubby brown babes / r not

prime photo opportunities

& your careful selection / of
translucent bouncing babes

r like recruitment ads

for the hitler youth brigade

the right kind of migrants

for a sustainable Australia

dear ms prime minister

what the fuck

are you pretending

to be afraid of?

Warning Sign (a visual poem)

SLOG (SPUNC Blog) Guest Post

Some time ago, the editor of the SPUNC blog, Laurie Steed, contacted me and asked if I'd like to contribute a guest post to the SPUNC blog on spoken word and the aural tradition. I was delighted, and over the coming weeks sat down and tapped out a few paragraphs. It was one of those things though, where my best intentions fell by the wayside.

When I spotted Laurie across the room at the last Harvest launch some weeks ago, I got the urge to cower for cover: I really hate saying I'm going to produce something and falling short. Laurie sauntered over to where I was sucking on my poison (it was really lemon, lime 'n bitters, but the trying-to-be-ridiculously-hip venue we were at served it packed with ice and lime in an enormous marmalade jar - yes, literally, a marmalade jar - so it looked like I was chugging down some kind of skanky home-brewed-from-banana-peel deal), and laughed at my sheepishness, saying half of the Melbourne writing community was hiding from him because they owe him blog contributions. He also very thoughtfully assured me not to be coy about chugging down my potent drink in my state because he was sure that 'many a fine pregnant lady has sucked on moonshine'.

In any case early this week Laurie, sensing my now almost permanent state of scatterbrainedness, suggested I contribute some poetic work to the SPUNC blog instead. So finally, after much skillful evasion on my part, the latest post over at SPUNC features my poems Writer's Block, Random Google Search and Exile - thanks to Laurie, for his patience and persistence! It's an honour to be SPUNCy.

Black Lazarus

Whatever happened to my magnum opus fiction manuscript Black Lazarus? Wasn't it going to be published around now? Why haven't you heard anything about it? A.S Patric over at Verity La finally cornered me and got the full story. A very shrewd and persuasive interviewer indeed:

Alec Patric: Maxine Beneba Clarke is a name that in most Aussie minds of a literary bent, conjures the image of a Slam-Champ, kick-arse performance poet. But my first experience of that name was of the novelist of something called Black Lazarus in the Overland Master Class for Progressive Writers, a year ago today (give or take a week). I thought it was finely written prose with the lightning power of a poet lighting up each sentence. At the time it was selected for a project Overland was running–> a search for the best unpublished manuscript in Australia. Black Lazarus won that particular honour but that whole project seems to have dissolved quietly, into nothing. Would you like to talk about what happened?

Maxine Clarke: Black Lazarus and the Overland Novel Search seemed to be a match made in heaven: longstanding left-leaning literary magazine’s novel search discovers the heavily political first novel manuscript of a young, black female writer and publishes and distributes it to 2000 subscribers as a special edition of the journal, creating not only a new novelist, but a new (at least, post Australasian Book Society) and cost-effective way to distribute literary fiction in Australia. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out like that...

Read the rest of the interview here at Verity La and an extract from Black Lazarus here.