ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a poetic project imagined as writing back and against the narrative of “progress” that accompanied the gentrification of Washington Park, located north of the downtown business district in Cincinnati, Ohio. These investigations peel back layers of political, economic, cultural, racial, and social antagonisms hidden beneath the rhetoric of “improvement,” deploying a poetics as dense, complicated, and obtuse as these multiple, clashing, perspectives. In short, the chapter attempts to document the forces of gentrification, the restructuring of physical, narrative, and symbolic urban space that realign real estate, institutional, and socio-cultural zones with a consequence of removing and/or marginalizing institutions and people ineligible for “improvement” (due to class, race, or gender). What follows is a tentative meditation on the methodology, forms, goals, and limits of the resulting urbopoetic project, set to be published by Delete Press in late 2019.
