Linguistic fragmentation as political intervention in Calgarian poetry

Abstract

This essay deals with how poets Jordan Scott and Ryan Fitzpatrick reject the conservative prairie representation in favour of a poetics informed by urbanity and Sianne Ngai’s “poetics of disgust.” Using fragmented dictions, Scott and fitzpatrick create unmovable interruptions to the consumable, constructing language which disrupts typical representations of rurality and geography. As Calgarian poets, they are constrained ideologically by the political emphasis on growth and oil exploitation and distance themselves from the Modernist urge to construct either structure or meaning.