Abstract
This thesis is a creative and critical intervention into current political and media discourses regarding the council estate. Utilising Henri Lefebvre’s triadic understanding of space, the thesis aims to interrogate dominant assumptions about the council estate environment and establish an appropriate poetics of this most culturally maligned of places. This poetics seeks to demonstrate how this space is socially as well as conceptually produced, and to expose and disrupt widespread vilification of estate inhabitants. Unlike previous autobiographical but monological poems about the council estate, such as those of Paul Farley, the poetry in this thesis presents a collage of perspectives from a multitude of sources (such as architectural manifestoes, oral histories, newspaper reports) - as well as observations from my own experience of growing up in this environment. Drawing from and building on the objectivist poetics of Charles Reznikoff, ‘the new sentence’ of Ron Silliman, and the docu-poetry of Mark Nowak, my poetry aims to create a textual dialectic that the reader is invited to synthesise. It is my hope that such syntheses will activate in the reader a renewed spatial practice of the council estate - that is to say, a new perceptual organisation of the factors that produce this space. In so doing, the hegemonic discourses of demonisation regarding the council estate may be ruptured, and each reader will be able to re-engage afresh with this stigmatised environment.