Publisher's Synopsis
Penniless Politics grapples with the problems of survival and protest in the blighted urban world of modern, multicultural America. The focus of this late 20th century 're-take' of The Decameron is the vital, violent city of New York, where Douglas Oliver lived on the Lower East Side, imagining the non-voting minorities coming together through the creation of a new kind of political party called Spirit. When Penniless Politics first appeared 'in a curious samizdat' edition, Howard Brenton hailed Oliver's 'great poem' in The Guardian as 'epoch-making…startlingly original'. 'As great writing will, Penniless Politics identifies a new era's themes that we all sense to be there, just beyond language, waiting for their first expression. The poem's theme is desire: a ferocious, overwhelming desire for the human spirit to change…Could it be that the most unlikely thing, a poem, can show the way out of the post-communist, post-modernist, "ideas are dead" miasma that is poisoning us? I suggest the reader hold on and take the rollercoaster ride through Oliver's amazing plot and the dizzying heights and water splashes of his poetic invention. It's worth it because the poem, with its ambitious-as-Milton first line - All politics the same crux: to define humankind richly - to its blistering final stanzas, could well be our Paradise Lost.' - from foreword by Howard Brenton
