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[Image source: http://www.nottinghampost.com/nottingham-is-third-best-place-to-work-in-the-uk/story-29506576-detail/story.html]


So first, Zoë Skoulding , who has written about Lisa Samuels' Tomorrowland and Gender City in her 2013 book, Contemporary Women's Poetry and Urban Space: Experimental Cities


You can read the lucid introduction in Google Books:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=GQbRAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=zoe+skoulding+tomorrowland&source=bl&ots=4d4eRzaFx_&sig=v_gG1cUi1klVIUwMCGaVtQYCn2M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjz5K7Qk8nRAhWJL8AKHZEIC2MQ6AEIOzAF#v=onepage&q=zoe%20skoulding%20tomorrowland&f=false


She says: "Acts of looking have been a recurrent interest in my discussion, particularly in relation to the panoptic overviews of mapping and surveillance. Notley, Samuels and Carol Watts, particularly, engage with various forms of resistance to vision as a form of control, asserting the poem as site of perceptual and embodied disobedience."  (This probably makes more sense re Gender City than Tomorrowland...)


I can't help relating this to my own experience as a compulsive mapper (e.g., of Samuels' Tomorrowland). Laura and I tend to argue when we're navigating around a new area, especially under time pressure. Laura uses entirely different psychogeographic signals to me. I tend to memorize maps and use them to "prove" where we must be going. However, I often make mistakes. Laura's instincts usually work out well. So I'm not really sure which of us is "better" at navigating but I know it's difficult to articulate our points of view. When we're not under time pressure we make a great team!


Skoulding's own poetry includes the Room poems, some of which I first saw in Out of Everywhere 2. There's also some here in Blackbox Manifold:
http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue8/ZoeSkoulding8.html




Brd new, are these VENDÉMIAIRE poems:
http://mollybloompoetry.weebly.com/zoeuml-skoulding.html


A sort of french-revolutionary harvesting vintage calendar, with memories of the wineshop in A Tale of Two Cities. Here's two of the epigram-like poems:




17. Citrouille Pumpkin

time to turn into another
sunset globe hold steady

            after all what do I know about
where this carriage is heading
with its windows all on fire


18. Sarrazin Buckwheat

even grain doesn't escape otherness
a dark seed an unstable element

            the time doesn't come
as if arriving from somewhere else
you move and it's what you are