Theoria

Paul Harrington’s ground breaking attempt to develop a new avant-garde poetry is now available on the Kindle platform for the first time. Taking its cue from Heidegger’s (highly contentious) discussion of the origins of the word “theory” Harrington’s poetry rapidly transcends its phenomenological starting point, instead re-conceiving aesthetic practice in the terms of a “poetry of the event” which overflows from this or that specific temporal moment to open up an instant of revelation in the history of the oppressed. An extended dramatisation of the problem of perception, this deeply mysterious and enigmatic work seems at times to be as much a work of philosophy as of literature, thereby fulfilling its author’s stated aim of bending literature to the production of a new Subject, and of restoring the category of the new in poetics. The echoes of the great revolutionary works of aesthetic modernity are audible here and if it seems scarcely credible that such a work could still be produced in the early 21st century then read it and judge for yourself - for, against all the odds, Harrington would seem to have written it.