As part of the research project 'Poetry in Public Spaces', based at the University of Santiago de Compostela, I presented a paper at this conference organized by a project on the same topic, based at Louvain-la-Neuve. In my paper I discussed the work of, and the critical response to, the so-called Mersey Poets, with a focus on the interaction of spoken word poetry with the urban environment, and on the ideological links between critical disdain towards the poetic claiming of urban culture 'from below' and the normalization of cultural dispossession of urban communities by the discourse of critical elites.