From Deleuze and Guattari’s essay on “Minor Literature” to Alfred Arteaga’s work on Chicanx poetics, theorists have studied the relationship between power and language, describing how creative writers find inventive ways to interrogate monolingual and nationalist logics.[1] Often, personal as well as historical conditions shape an author’s linguistic choices. My interest here lies in how poets use citation and translation as craft techniques in forging poetic languages that challenge powerful configurations and histories.
Peter Minter: Feral habitus
Peter Minter is one of the greatest poets I read, and one of the greatest poets I know. I regard him, his conversation, his attention, his criticism, his aesthetics and his ethics as militantly tender, tenderly militant. Minter is uncompromising and committed in the things he makes and does, and his politics are manifest in his making and doing, interfacing variously with discourses and methodologies of an eco-anarchist left.