A Poet’s Guide to Venice and the Veneto

Drawing upon scholarship around literary nomadism, flânerie, self-translation and cultural geography, the author shows how a personal relationship to a creative space opens a Third Space that challenges fixed ideas about belonging, alienation and nationality.

Those of us who identify as multi-cultural and exist in-between and across places, spaces, cultures and languages are in search of poetic means to understand and represent the experiences of being an insider-outsider. This volume responds to that challenge: taking Venice and the Veneto as a creative site, the author demonstrates how poetry focussed on hybrid, interstitial subjectivity can be mapped into this storied location. Using the structuring metaphor of the archipelago, the book exemplifies how the islands of the Venetian lagoon reflect the way that poetry – as individual works that coalesce to form a focussed collection – can be used to create a cartography of the self that is multiple but interconnected. Drawing upon scholarship around literary nomadism, flânerie, self-translation and cultural geography, the author shows how a personal relationship to a creative space opens a Third Space that challenges fixed ideas about belonging, alienation and nationality. In doing so, in-between-ness is revealed as a generative position from which to write and translate poetry.