The Organisation
Overload Poetry Inc is a Collingwood-based organisation that was set up to oversee the annual Overload Poetry Festival. The festival showcases a wide range of poets from diverse backgrounds, and from throughout Victoria and Australia. As an organisation we have become one of the main ‘go to’ points for poets new to or visiting Melbourne wanting to find out what’s happening here and how to get in touch with various members of the poetry community.
Overload was incorporated in 2003 to keep the organisation accountable to our biggest supporters: Melbourne’s writers and performers of poetry and ‘spoken word’. Becoming incorporated gives those writers the opportunity to take out membership of Overload Poetry Inc, and become directly involved in decisions that affect the organisation. It also means that each year people within the community have the opportunity to become directly involved in the organisation by becoming members of the Overload Poetry Inc committee or any of the various sub-committees (working groups as we prefer to call them) that extend from the main committee.
The Festival (3-18 August 2007)
The Overload Poetry Festival (OPF) is an annual sixteen-day festival that showcases some of the best poets in Australia and overseas. The basis for Overload is promoting the regular readings and various poetry events around Victoria by creating a program that is vibrant, exciting and much more than merely the sum of its parts. The festival itself runs each August across Victoria – Melbourne, Ballarat, Geelong and Warburton in 2004, with Bendigo and Hepburn Springs joining the festival in 2005.
Our goal is to reach the widest, most diverse audience possible and to attract new audiences with each festival. We believe there is an untapped audience of people with an interest in poetry that simply do not know where to go to find readings or contemporary publications, and it is – to a large extent – this audience that the Overload Poetry Festival was set up to reach. Our goal is to challenge pre-conceived ideas about what poetry means and the place that it has in the lives of people in all sectors of the community.
The Overload Poetry Festival began in 2002 after many years of discussion within the Melbourne poetry community regarding the need for a festival that was inclusive of the regular poetry venues that run weekly/fortnightly/monthly. The idea was simple: to base a festival around those readings and then add special events such as Slams, workshops, book/CD launches, tribute readings, multi-art nights and various showcases. In this way we hoped to increase audience numbers at the regular readings throughout the year, rather than pulling audiences away as in the case of single-venue based festivals.
The idea of the festival took hold quickly, with people being eager to get involved and willing to perform for nothing, or at least very little. We had no office space, little equipment, but many volunteers put various other work or study on hold to see if the idea would work. It did. The first festival ran on a budget of less than $2,000 and was considered to be a groundbreaking event in the history of Melbourne poetry. After this success, the key festival staff committed to running the festival for a minimum of another four years. It was, and still is (to the best of our knowledge) the only poetry festival in the country that is based around the city’s regular poetry venues. Without the overwhelming support those venues offer us, the festival would not be possible each year.
Overload and the International Poetry Community
From its modest beginnings the Overload Festival has begun to attract some of the cream of international poetry. In 2004 we were privileged to play host to two Canadian poets, Robert Priest and Corey Frost. Dutch poet Arjen Duinker travelled to Australia for the Overload ’05 Festival. We have also had interest from poets in Italy and the US with regards to coming to this next festival. During the 2006 Festival we were pleased to welcome a number of international poets from Belfast and New Zealand as well as Victoria Stanton from Montreal, Canada.
Other Projects
Overload also produces the monthly Deadline poetry street-press, which features articles, reviews, letters, photos and a comprehensive Melbourne poetry gig guide. In addition to this we are responsible for the OverloadNation e-group, which is another avenue of promotion and networking, and we provide an advisory service for people looking to organise poetry events or seeking performance opportunities.