Poets as Experimental Geographers: Mark Nowak, Kaia Sand and the Re-composition of Political-Historical Space
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This essay explores how poets refashion space, pressing poetical experience in a political direction. Examining the work of US-based poets Mark Nowak and Kaia Sand, I analyze political-poetical interventions that concertedly push poems beyond the page and into history-drenched spaces of dissent. Along the way I explore the following themes: how poetry can surreptitiously slide into social protest against neoliberal capitalism without stepping onto the slippery slope of didacticism; how poetic interventions can galvanize a political scale shift from the local to the global and back again; how poets make tactical use of recombination and recontextualization to foment formally innovative platforms for politics. Nowak and Sand uncover the social relationships embedded in space, concertedly eschewing the idea of poet as expert, instead favouring the practice of poet as rigorous investigator of socio-political relations. Rather than claiming authorial authority, they inspire audience participation by embracing a tactical position of amateur.