Abstract
In A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism & schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari, pose the question: ‘Problem II: Is there a way to extricate thought from the State model?’ in relation to war machine of Nomadology that they propose (that which exists outside of the State as mechanisms of resistance). This is also a question that William Rowe’s poetry of resistance in his collection, Nation, raises and attempts to address. This article examines ways in which Rowe’s innovative poetry, in the context of revolution and resistance, provides a nexus for thinking through the space of the language of change. In this book, Rowe seeks to expose, undermine, reposition and remake the language formulations of imposed, orchestrated and co-optated oppositional stances that the State, and the organs of the State (military, police, finance, justice, politics, religion), foster and reformulate into its own managed space. It proposes a poetic war machine of 'response'. I examine the strategies of resistance that this text brings into being and offers to the reader, both in relation to its own poetic action and to that of other innovative poetries. In so doing, I demonstrate the poetic war machine and its shifting, variable intermezzo spaces as a mode of resisting not just languages and strategies of control, but also the very processes of co-optation that these employ in stealing and negating the spaces of resistance and revolution from the language of the populace and of poetry.