Maxine Beneba Clarke



Poetry as Protest; Protest as Poetry

We’ve had reason, lately, to wonder at the effectiveness of protest. Movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too (or, earlier: the Occupy Movement) mobilised millions of people around the world, yet it feels – particularly in our current political moment – as though despairingly little has changed. This frustration is felt with acute horror in the face of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, which has seen protestors gathering in the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands every week for two years, demanding an end to the violence only to be ignored or painted as extremists by their governments.

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Review Short: Maxine Beneba Clarke’s Carrying the World

At the launch of Carrying the World, Maxine Beneba Clarke shared the mic with spoken word performers who were part of her decade long journey in poetry. The poignancy of Clarke’s gesture demonstrates how embedded she is in a literary community that erases the distinction between ‘high art’ (page) poetry and the spoken word.

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Rachael Briggs Reviews Maxine Beneba Clarke

The blurb at the back of the book touts nothing here needs fixing as ‘a stunning attack on the pretentious white male gits who see poetry as an exalted profession to keep away from those who are loud, black, female, happy, or even in possession of lives outside poetry.’

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Four Cutups from MBC

Click the image to launch the show … [EasyGallery id=’maxineclarke’]

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Plantation Rumours

[audio:http://cordite.org.au/audio/Clarke_rumourmill.mp3] Plantation Rumours (2:14)

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