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

This article examines the political dimensions of poetry through the lens of ‘peripheral reading’, considering textual representations of a place in relation to its socio-political context. It focuses on Katherena Vermette’s North End Love Songs and Gavin Goodwin’s Estate Fragments, two works which depict communities in urban places. Vermette’s lyric poetry considers North End, a neighbourhood in Winnipeg, Canada, while Goodwin’s found poetry explores Bettws, in Newport, Wales. Poetry is positioned as a mode of commemoration, resisting the erasures enforced by colonial and neoliberal ideologies. Vermette and Goodwin challenge binaries of the rural and urban, individual and collective, and Indigenous and settler identities. By drawing connections between local specificities and global processes, poetry not only documents but also critiques the forces that shape human relationships to place. Ultimately, the essay underscores poetry’s potential as a political act, fostering dialogue across contexts.