Which alternatives to the capitalist and neoliberal status quo is the poetic involved in constructing, by participating in expression, response, spatial occupation or collective organisation? Conversely, in what ways has poetry in public spaces become a tool for readying urban spaces for gentrification? Which strategies do poets and cultural organizers employ to resist such re-signification of poetry by those in power, and to defend and recuperate the poetic word as processes that practice radical democracy and are committed to social, political and spatial justice?

We invite essay proposals that explore the ways in which poetic words engage with the material and the immaterial in the contemporary urban world, marked by spatial injustice (in line with Edward Soja's "thirdspace"), racism, sexism, and the related phenomena of segregation, marginalization, gentrification, or deliberate decay. This specifically includes essays that pick apart neoliberal and authoritarian mystifications and instrumentalizations of "Poetry" in the contemporary urban context. We welcome investigations of the relationship between poetry and the city's role in producing categories, such as "illegal" immigrant, that criminalize and exclude, as well as considerations of poetry generated in response to the production and policing of "internal borders" within the cityscape. We are looking for research on poetry and the city's complicity in neoliberal legal, carceral and penal systems that have targeted migrants, the poor and racialized populations. How has poetry participated in discourses, or been instrumentalized by forces, that have remade the city as a zone of privilege, homogeneity, and wealth?

Our planned edited volume seeks essays that explore the role of the poetic word as a critical response to, and as an engaged critique of and intervention into, the social, affective and political realities of today's cities that are marked by post-industrial, neo-colonial and neoliberal structures. We are looking for analyses and experiential engagements of a variety of poetic expressions from diverse urban zones, and particularly invite research on cities and towns that are not capitals, a relatively less studied topic in the broader area of investigation. 

Many examples of contemporary urban poetry speak about, and from within, spaces marked by the watershed of neoliberal policies and beliefs, and the financial crises of the beginning of our century. The short form, read, performed, exchanged, and written on the urban surface, or hidden within the palimpsestic layers of the city, can challenge notions of possession or productivity. This world-making poetic expression, which is sometimes the fruit of cooperative or communal endeavors, and sometimes the cherished hidden gem in a hostile environment, furthermore problematizes traditional ideas of the public and the private and reexamines conventional notions of enunciation and authorship. In the best cases, it is an exercise in democratic, urban imagination that allows for an active, sense-imparting relationship with the environment. 

Studies may include, but are not limited to, strategies of writing against monumentalization, poetry in relation to the city as tourist attraction and object of consumption, street art's sensory responses to urban rhythms (in line with and beyond the historical vanguards), poetry and touch in an urban context, poetry of resistance to the language of advertisement, art in relation to an economy of sharing, and lyrics of dispossession and discarded objects. Other possible topics include: poetic resistance to, and defense against, neoliberal violence, and poetries of occupation and solidarity, what Kristin Ross (along with the Communards) calls "communal luxury." 

Please send your 3-4 page proposal (max. 1,100 words MLA style) to [email protected], [email protected],[email protected] by September 1, 2016. The deadline for submission of complete essays (max. 8,000 words) is November 1, 2016.