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Though poets have always written about cities, the commonest critical categories (pastoral poetry, nature poetry, Romantic poetry, Georgian poetry, etc.) have usually stressed the rural, so that poetry can seem irrelevant to a predominantly urban populati. Explores a range of contemporary poets who visit the 'mean streets' of the contemporary urban scene, seeking the often cacophonous music of what happens here. Poets discussed include:
Ken Smith, Iain Sinclair, Roy Fisher, Edwin Morgan, Sean O’Brien, Ciaran Carson, Peter Reading, Matt Simpson, Douglas Houston, Deryn Rees-Jones, Denise Riley, Ken Edwards, Levi Tafari, Aidan Hun, and Robert Hampson. Approaches contemporary poetry within a broad spectrum of personal, social, literary, and cultural concerns. Includes ‘loco-specific’ chapters, on cities including Hull, Liverpool, London, and Birmingham, with an additional chapter on ‘post-industrial’ cities such as Belfast, Glasgow and Dundee.
MAPPING
1. Introduction
2. ‘The roads to hell’
3. Three urban tropes
4. Writing the inner city
LOCAL SPECIFICS
5. ‘North of the word’ or ‘Why, this is Hull’
6. ‘The hard lyric’: Re-registering Liverpool poetry
7. ‘Take off your shoes in Kings Cross’: Envisioning London
8. ‘Birmingham’s what I think with’: Roy Fisher’s cities
9. ‘I remember when all these fields were factories’
Bibliography