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Remains of a Future City

Remains of a Future City is the practice-based element of a research project that also encompasses my monograph Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities. As in my critical work, my focus in these poems is on challenging traditional, metropolitan and often masculine imaginations of the city by exploring alternative visions of urban space. Written from the semi-rural perspective of Wales, my poems unsettle distinctions between rural and urban spaces by cutting between the two and writing back to Situationist and psychogeographical texts. Living in bilingual Wales creates an awareness of inhabiting language itself as tangibly as architecture, and while the countryside is often viewed as a neutral or innocent space, my poems explore it as crossed by lines of power and histories of inequality just as much as the city or more so. Claiming a revolutionary Parisian tradition for a place like north Wales (which is so often seen as 'peripheral') questions certain cultural hierarchies during a process of devolution and change. Frequent performance of the work, involving treated vocals and often with the accompaniment of field recordings from different cities, has been an investigation of the boundary between language and noise.The chapters in my monograph on Erin Moure and Lisa Robertson expand on the critical dimension of this process.