The Politics in a Poem: ‘Peripheral reading’ North End Love Songs and Estate Fragments

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Abstract

This article examines Welsh poet Gavin Goodwin’s Estate Fragments alongside Canadian poet Katherena Vermette’s North End Love Songs as examples of text which resist the – in David Harvey’s words – ‘creative destruction 'initiated by ‘the process of neoliberalization’. It argues that both texts represent marginalised peoples and places in all their nuance, and in doing this are able to make poignant political statements that draw from looking closely at experience. The article examines Goodwin’s work in the wider context of Welsh Writing in English, and Vermette’s in the context of indigenous(particularly, Métis) people in Canada. From this, it then suggests this way of reading as compatible with Peter Barry’s ‘peripheral reading’, a mode where the specifics of a place a text depicts are related to its wider context, in what could be consider a ‘documentary’ practice. Finally, the article concludes that such poetry might commemorate and immortalise threatened communities such as the ones discussed
Original languageEnglish
JournalC21 Literature: Journal of 21st-century Writings
Volume11
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2025

Keywords

  • Welsh Writing in English
  • Indigenous Poetry
  • Canadian Poetry
  • Working Class Poetry
  • Estates
  • Neoliberalism
  • David Harvey
  • Peter Barry
  • Resistance
  • Sociology
  • Poetics

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