Radical Spaces of Poetry

This is a book about the politics of alternative poetries and poetic practices, and the ways that experiments in poetry have provided 'spaces' within which radical or revolutionary perspectives can be developed. It explores social and cultural ideas that more normative mainstream cultural representations might seek to suppress. It demonstrates the ways that poems say things about cultural and social issues, and can say them in new and different ways. My work is conceptual, drawing on a variety of theoretical positions to help read poems that are resistant to giving up an easily digested meaning. It is also empirical, and begins with the material evidence of the poems, worrying away at individual words in detailed analyses of the semantic and syntactical relationships in the work. I try to show that any difficulty is worth the effort, and that poems that try to reflect the complexities of modern and contemporary culture and society are not only sometimes difficult to read, but they often have to be.