Friday, January 6, 2023

Roots are bitter, but fruit is sweet

 "Let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons." 

                                                  — Malala Yousafzai, 2013

 

"What was the duty of the teacher if not to inspire? 

                                                  — Bharati Mukherjee, 1988

 

"Knowledge itself is power"

                                                  — Francis Bacon, 1597

 

"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."

                                                  — Aristotle, 330 BCE

 

"The content of the curriculum should never exclude the realities of the very students who must intellectually wrestle with it. When students study all worlds except their own, they are miseducated."

                                                  — Johnetta B. Cole, 1993

 

"The trouble with education is that we always read everything when we're too young to know what it means. And the trouble with life is that we're always too busy to reread it later."

                                                  — Margaret Ayer Barnes, 1930       

 

"For easier 'tis to learn and recollect / What moves derision than what claims respect."

                                                  — Horace, c.14 BCE

 

"Our self-imposed task is thus to seek out the simple: to find broad explanations, satisfying solutions, reliable answers to those questions which affect the health and growth of that democracy under whose banner we live and hope. So we shall use our metaphysics and our philosophy in just this sense. They are to be our tools; [and] we are to use them; [but] they are not to burden us."

                                                  —Louis Sullivan, 1918

 

A selection of quotes from the latest edition of Lapham's Quarterly, on "Education". Get yours here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/education-2022   (I don't myself agree with every word, and this is perhaps the point.)          


 



Thursday, July 28, 2022

Alfred Jarry's Time Machine is still happening

In 1899, Alfred Jarry published his 'Commentary and Instructions for the Practical Construction of the Time Machine', under the pseudonym of Dr. Faustroll. In it, Dr. Faustroll explains: "The machine consists of a jointed, ebony frame, analogous to the steel frame of a bicycle... Under the seat and a little in front are the storage cells of the electric motor... The anterior fly-wheel clicks with each complete revolution, and four ivory dials, concentric or juxtaposed, mark the days, thousands of days, millions and hundreds of millions of days, by the agency of a grooved wheel and an endless chain... We shall later see that the return to the present from the future is achieved by slowing down the Machine's motion, and that travelling forwards into the past requires an even greater speed... than that required for travelling into the future. To stop at a chosen point in the duration, simply pull the lever of the triple brake to lock it. / The machine, once up and running, always sets off in the direction of the future… Travelling back in time consists in the perception of the reversibility of phenomena… since the Machine cannot reach the real Past until it has first shot into the Future, it must pass through a certain point, symmetrical to our Present.. Which we should call the imaginary Present. To the Traveller on her machine, Time thus presents itself as a curve…" — Alfred Jarry, "Practical Construction of the Time Machine" [1899] in Adventures in Pataphysics, Collected Works 1 (Atlas Press, 2001) p.215-217.


associative image, Jean Tinguely "Cyclograveur" (1960)






Saturday, July 23, 2022

The origin is now, and we are in the middle of it

 

“The origin of our world does not reside in an event that is infinitely distant from us in time and space, millions of light years away; nor does it reside in a space of which we no longer have a trace. It is here and now. The origin of the world is seasonal, rhythmic… like everything that exists. Being neither substance nor foundation, it is no more in the ground than in the sky, but rather halfway between the two.” 

 

Emanuele Coccia



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

associative image:
a paper wheel cosmos, or "volvelle", from a 16C edition of Johannes Sacrobosco's 13C De Sphaera Mundi (via. wikipedia) 

Sunday, June 5, 2022

Listening Spaces to build and defend!

"As an activist on the left, I long assumed that my role consisted entirely of raising awareness, sounding alarms, and deploying arguments. It took me years to realize that I needed to help build and defend spaces in which listening could happen, too."

     — Astra Taylor, "Right to Listen" in Remake the World (Haymarket Books, 2021) p163.

#listening #architecture #democracy

https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1635-remake-the-world



Thursday, May 12, 2022

Poetry is in Everything?

 Understanding poetry as human making, makes the poetry of architecture easier to comprehend, but risks obscuring poetry’s meaningful, musical, and magical complexity.

“It’s not just building… it’s building worlds.”

— John Hejduk

Architectural imagination suspends disbelief in the shared dream that human situations can embody and inspire poetic experience. Every act toward this goal can be moving and transformative. ...One way to reopen human practices of worldmaking — architecture, theatre, poetry, teaching — is by risking more inclusive collaborations.

“Poetry is in everything / the city / this table / the streets,

in each minimal, common, and ridiculous motion”

— Fernando Pessoa

 Where do the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture meet? 

Find more here: http://www.artslettersandnumbers.com/calendar/2021/9/6/archi-poetry-amp-invisible-theatre 

Thank you Lisa, Andria, Max and Saba; thank you Grant Guy and David Gersten. 

Saturday, February 5, 2022

Getting Lost in the Act of Poetry

"...getting lost is an act of the imagination, one that redefines reality, often through moral implications..."

"...poetry often occurs beyond or outside 'the way', extending the borders of language."

"The poet resembles the paramedic in that she or he arrives first at the accident of language. Poetry is born of crisis or will seek it, often beginning in medias res... to find an emergency through language that leads to... new realities..." 

— Mark Irwin, "Poetry Reality & Place in a Placeless World of Global Communication" in Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry (Peter Lang, 2017)

Saturday, January 22, 2022

For a friend: "that work is being done on"

(you perhaps):

"...all things change in time; some are made of change itself, and the poem is of these. It is not an object; the poem is a process... it is available, heard once, or... always at hand... that climate of excitement... announcing with the poem that we are about to change, that work is being done on the self."
— Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry [1949] (Paris Press, 1996) p174-175.

Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Arundhati Roy wins the 2021 Ubu Loca Prize!

 "the place for literature is built by writers and readers. It’s a fragile place in some ways, but an indestructible one. When its broken, we rebuild it. Because we need shelter. I very much like the idea of literature that is needed. Literature that provides shelter. Shelter of all kinds."
— Arundhati Roy, architect-turned-critic, and novelist), from her
PEN America Freedom to Write lecture. 13 May, 2019

video of the lecture https://youtu.be/DvQZkMs-pa0

partial transcript https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america

   

Her entire lecture is powerful, but don't miss her response to last question, which touches on the Architecture / Literature connection, being transcended by the complex metaphor of a Novel as City / World City / Portal to Utmost Happiness.


 

 

Saturday, September 18, 2021

Join Oct 2, 2021, for an "Archi-Poetry and Invisible Theatre" event with Ted Landrum and Grant Guy - Act 3 of "Theatres of Archimagination" in collaboration with Arts, Letters, Numbers "SunShip" to the CityX Venice Virtual Pavilion


"Archi-Poetry + Invisible Theatre" - Act 3 of "Theatres of Archimagination"
(online) Saturday Oct 2, 2021: 11am Central; Noon, Eastern; 6pm Venice

 
The full video recording of the event is now available on the Arts, Letters, Numbers youtube channel

Ted Landrum and Grant Guy will share and discuss recent work as Act 3 in a series of 5 "Theatres of Archimagination" curated by Lisa Landrum at the invitation of Arts, Letters, Numbers (NY) and CityX Virtual Venice Architecture Biennale 

In response to difficult questions, this event offers collaborative experiments aimed at renewing the architecture, theatre and poetry of the world! Architectural imagination suspends disbelief in the shared dream that human situations can embody and inspire poetic experience. Every act toward this goal can be moving and transformative. One way to reopen human practices of worldmaking — including architecture, theatre, poetry, and teaching — is by risking more inclusive collaborations.  Grant Guy’s Invisible Theatre Events will bring humor, and the everyday, to this #architecture, #theatre and #poetry conversation.

Thanks to Grant Guy, award-winning theatre artist, writer and poet for joining the fun; to my partner Lisa Landrum for sharing with us the opportunity to participate in her ambitious "Theatres of Archimagination" series; and to David Gersten of Arts, Letters, Numbers, for his generous invitation to share some of what we've been up to.

For me, this includes a recent series of collaborative poetry projects and experiments, including poems-in-progress made at the invitation of Grant Guy, and two fresh poems made in dialogue with architectural students collaboratively responding to challenging "SunShip" and Venice Biennale questions. "If a Bubble" and "The Flood Poem" will stream a few days prior to the Oct 2 event, on my own youtube channel, where curious people can find recordings of other Archi-Poems.

View the full Oct 2 event here!

To keep up with related events, follow Lisa Landrum on Instragram.


  


 




 




Thursday, March 25, 2021

Exquisite Corpse - for Michael Sorkin

This archi-poem was made in memory of Michael Sorkin, who died one year ago today. Curious comrades can hear the poem here.

Learn more about Michael Sorkin here
Purchase a copy of Sorkin's book here

Ted Landrum


Sunday, February 28, 2021

Poetry was not in the order of things.

"When I first decided to be a poet... this itself was a disordering of the world and its orders in which I had been raised. My father had been an architect and, until he died, when I was sixteen, I had been preparing to enter that world. Ideas of architecture still continue in my art today as a poet, but my conversion to Poetry was experienced by myself and by those about me as my being at war with every hope the world before had had of me. Poetry was not in the order of things." 

—  Robert Duncan, "Man's Fulfillment in Order and Strife" in Fictive Certainties [1955] (New Directions, 1985) p112. 

 

Duncan's first collection "The Opening of the Field" (New Directions, 1960), begins with what is arguably his most famous poem:

 

Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
 
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made-place,
 
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
 
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
 
Wherefrom fall all architectures I am
....
 
 






Wednesday, February 17, 2021

On Living-Together: the Gift of Space, Pathos, Eros, Sophia, Tenderness and Tact.

 "The thirteenth lecture won't be taking place... for contingent reasons, I didn't have time to collect your contributions; when it came to cheerfully constructing a happy utopia, I found I lacked the necessary enthusiasm... [and] for a theoretical reason... from Plato to Fourier, all written utopias have been social: an attempt to fix upon the ideal organization of power. Personally... I've often felt the desire to write a domestic utopia: an ideal (happy) manner of figuring, of anticipating... search for... the Sovereign Good as concerns living space."

"...even in what appear to be the most gregarious species, there's always an attempt to regulate inter-individual distance: it's the critical distance. This would probably be the most significant problem of Living-Together: how to identify and regulate that critical distance, on either side of which a crisis occurs. (However [remember...] the aim of criticism is to provoke a crisis). A problem that's all the more acute today... what's most precious, our ultimate possession is space.  In houses, apartments, trains, planes, lectures, seminars, the luxury is to have space around you, in other words, to be surrounded by 'a few people,' but not too many... The gift of space... The utopian tension... stems from this: what is desired is a distance that won't destroy affect ('pathos of distance' [Nietzsche's] excellent expression)... a grand clear vision ['waking vision'] of utopia, a distance permeated, irrigated by tender feeling: a pathos ['affective' Imaginary'] that would allow for something of Eros and Sophia (grand clear dream). ... Here we'd [also] rediscover... Tact[ful] distance and respect, a relation that's in no way oppressive but at the same time where there's a real warmth of feeling."

— Roland Barthes, "Utopia" (seminar notes, May 4, 1977) in How to Live Together (Columbia University Press, 2012) p130-132.

Sunday, November 22, 2020

much variety in a single panorama we cannot understand

When John Cage died in 1992 he left behind a red spiral notebook - presumed to be material for part 9 of his unfinished Diary.

Here are a few excerpts (retaining J.C's numbers, I've added quote marks):
 
48 "In a way that escaped our notice New York became beautiful. Everywhere you look. Maybe it's because the buildings aren't automatically torn down anymore. We seem to be holding onto them, taking care of them. Architectural details. As much variety in a single panorama as in Rome."
 
16 "When d'you suppose the sun'll come out? Maybe we've done something to permanently damage the weather."
 
32 "Going to school not in order to prepare for a job but just to find out what it is that interests us, what it is you want to spend your life doing."
 
16 "This is the first of the global commandments: Thou shall not divide the world into nations."
 
10 "Music gives us practice in reading things we can't understand."
 
— As found in John Cage, Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), Siglio Press 2019. *Buy it here.*

Sunday, September 13, 2020

Find common ground [and] subject things to change

 "Objects! For me there are no such things! What counts are the relationships. They are infinite. ... And what is between ... I started by painting a space and then by furnishing it. The object is a dead thing. It only comes alive when it is activated. That is what poetry is, don't you see? Find the common ground between things. ... You have to subject things to change, to stop living on automatic."

— Georges Braque (in conversation with Paul Gruth), cited by Bernard Zurcher, Georges Braque: Life and Work p154, n17.

 

Elsewhere: "...the quality I value above all else in art ... [poetry] ... a matter of harmony, or rapports, of rhythm, and - most important for my own work - of 'metamorphosis'"

— Georges Braque (Richardson, Georges Braque 1959), cited by Dieter Buchhart, Georges Braque: Pioneer of Modernism (Aquavella, 2011) p50.

Monday, August 10, 2020

the moment has suddenly come to switch the ceiling lights back on... architects poets artists... see things in eternity rather than in the temporal.

 

Francis Ponge: "... it seems that some architects still forget electricity at times. I mean, that some still do not account for it - that is, as being of an importance equal to that of either air or daylight - when they draft their plans. This work has only one aim: and that is to be - I do not say convincing - but rather unforgettable, so that not a single one, as readers, will ever forget that electricity exists... Is that clear? / And now, we are going to turn off the ceiling lights on this book and on our intentions and instead, turn on the desk lamps or the bedside ones, and, with your permission, we are going to become more intimate... Isn't it already evident, in parenthesis, how pleasant it is thus to vary the lights instantaneously according to our state of mind, or according to the setting, the atmosphere or, as the saying goes, the ambiance that one wants to create? / And so, a layman was called in... himself a technician in another field... Language, quite simply... Because, all things considered, our language is the only one that has, in the Tower of Babel of techniques, some chance of being understood by one and all. / ...and yet, it had to be written... Architecture houses all the techniques. Electricity sheds light on them and animates them. And speech? Well, Speech (in another sense, it is true) houses them, animates them and sheds light on them, all at once. ... And now I must go on... I must suddenly turn aside and dig in: I must go back to my plan. / According to my plan... I must call myself a poet. What does that mean? Well, a layman, but lay in all things, systematically.... and in a paradoxical manner... for the enjoyment of his readers. / And now, the moment has suddenly come to switch the ceiling lights back on. / ...(but a moment, if you please) - to remind myself in my personal notebook to ask my architect, in the house he is building for me, to put in light switches near the windows (and not just close to doors and beds) so that I may better savor the night. / Here we are, then, in the night, and here is the open window. Whether the sky is overcast, as the saying goes, whether the darkness is without a break, and we should, for example, expect a storm, or that myriad stars, on the contrary, appear in the firmament, our basic feeling remains the same: we are placed, all of a sudden, and once again, in the presence of natural forces, and the infinite - spatial and temporal at the same time. / If we were, first of all, going to feel spatial infinity, the astronomical one, we now know that it is only a matter of electricity... let us put that aside for the moment, and let us rather plunge into temporal infinity, in the Night of Time. / Let us remain in the night a while longer but let us once again become aware of ourselves, and of the very instant, this instant of eternity through which we are living. Let us gather together, in this type of amusing, the most recent knowledge that we possess. Let us remember all that we were able to read... / How should I then consider the spectacle that night offers to my eyes? ...the very striking image... made us conceive of the atom as a solar system and its free electrons as comets. And, indeed... I am willing to concede for a moment that everything is an electrical charge, an electrical field, etc. But, in the final analysis... there is nothing there that does not remind me, given the quantum notion of action and of the principle of uncertainty (which only confirms it), of the famous 'clinamen' of Democritus and Epicurus... / And then, I reread Lucretius and I said to myself that nothing as beautiful has ever been written... And I know that he has been described as an anxious person, and as a madman... But since we are still on our balcony, with the lights out, looking at the nocturnal sky, I can also maintain, remembering Electra, that one might find in it an example of divine behavior... that he too had been placed among the stars... where his light has not yet diminished. / And now... I am beginning to see, although still indistinctly, a few reasons that had prevented me from explaining... / Note that we still haven't turned the lights back on. ...I must benefit a little longer from the darkness and... the possibilities of 'constructions' that it contains; the monstrous abstractions that it allows. / ... What would you want us to do? Well, exactly what we are doing, we artists, we poets, when we work well. ...It happens when we too dig into our matter: into meaningful sounds. Heedless of ancient forms and melting them back into a mass, as it is done with old statues, in order to make cannons out of them, ammunition... and, when necessary, new columns according to the demands of the Times. / Thus, we may perhaps, one day, create new Figures that will allow us... to traverse curved Space, non-Euclidean Space. / Not bad at all... as of that moment, I think now we have become one. I must admit there is something agreeable about all that. But to tell the truth, knowing myself as I do, if I have indulged in this fantasy, it was only because I knew how to suppress it instantaneously. What did I have to do? Well, suddenly switch the lights back on. / And here I am, without delay back on my feet in the visible world. And as I had better savored the night, by eliminating dusk... At that instant, in the glare of the electric bulbs, I see how wrong I had been about several things that the night had led me to construct. / Admittedly, at times, this can be rather unpleasant: a short-circuit or an atomic bomb. But we shall take it in stride... / We have now adopted washing machines, tape recorders, and electric razors. Why not? We would be foolish to get along without them. However, we will neither be the last ones to use them, nor the first, definitely not the last... Electricians have understood this. Isn't it about time architects understood it, too? / The way that man presently feels about electricity [1954] has not yet produced any major work, any major poetic work. Couldn't this lag, among architects and poets, be due to the same causes? Architects like poets are artists. As such, they see things in eternity rather than in the temporal. For all intents and purposes, they are wary of fashion... / Wouldn't the very speed of the progress of science prompt architects, like poets, to a certain resistance insofar as their deep commitment, their affiliation, their 'connection', is concerned? / Out in the street once more, I was stunned by all sorts of light. I then went to the home of a duchess friend of mine where I dined by candlelight. / Because of this, I soon became aware of a new fact. Electricity is a lasting marvel, not only because it determines our conquest of the future but because it does not, in any way, stop us from appreciating the pleasures of the past, and perhaps makes us more sensitive to them. / ...And I said to myself that I too could aim those beams on the pediment of a monument in order to bring out, as never before, a particular detail... I could dazzle an assailant or fascinate a prey... double or multiply my observations... provoke scandals or surprises, amazement or those grimaces that sometime accompany the revelation of a truth... / Coming back home in a mental state you can imagine, I felt simultaneously spurred on by emulation, an imperious need to sit down at my desk and finally write a worthy hymn to Electricity, but also, and such are the contradictions in nature, a need, no less important, for coolness, for silence and meditation in the night. / So much so that, switching off the lights, I went out on the balcony again. / .... In the end, I said to myself, because I was tired, I think that electricity has acted in a rather negative manner on poetry and art. We experience its influence in a general modification of taste. I mean to say that it has contributed in making us prefer clarity to the penumbra, perhaps pure colors to subdued ones, perhaps speed to casual manners, and perhaps a degree of cynicism to effusion. / All that has had a part, in all the arts, in shaping a certain type of rhetoric: one marked by a spark leaping between two opposite poles, separated by a hiatus in the expression. Only the elimination of the logical link allowing the spark to flash. / Poetry and electricity accumulating from that moment on, and remaining unknown until the lightning... / Such is the state of things that must be taken into account by architects, because there is no turning back... / At that point, I started to laugh... / It seems to me that we have indeed shown in everything that we've just said, although in our own way... the importance of electricity in dwellings... "

excerpts from Francis Ponge, 'Text on Electricity' [1954] (in Gavronsky, The Power of Language, 1979, p161-199.

Friday, July 10, 2020

Critical archi-poetry — Before the End of the World

critical archi-poetry found in the middle
of Ed Roberson's To See the Earth Before the End of the World:

“A dome is the support
                           of the bridge-in-all-directions,
              anywhere the weathervane
                                             seated on it points.

The arch of each foot
                           stands on half the dome     of human balance,
             the start point   of the arc made step     our walking is,
                                        a colonnade of landing,  uplift,  then falling
forward.

                            The course the great domes of this program take
                to bridge over mortality       they think
                                               is to shape time and history,

or their stomp of progress           …arcing up andfallingdown,
                         the great capitols
                 each atop the other’s emptied footprint.

Geometries have narrative,
                               story,    program the building poses
               in its fit to the senses,
                                            the spatial drama of its lines
as built idea…

                   … is upside down made begging
            bowl    for wandering oceans…

                                                              … upside down
                           the foot’s upturned arches cupped into a ship’s
            hold   carrying each step’s ground
                                        gained by trampling another’s   

                    …an edge the earth shouldn’t have
                                                     for falling off itself…”


—————————————

The insides
of a space, the human
in a volume,

something
internal like the room
of the Pantheon —

          …

as it is poled through time —
also pulls through Grand Central
          …

in slant hour
of light         stroke the floor.
The traveler…

—————————————

                      ...travel
is a transitional structure
its doors in different places.

… the exit to old Penn Station
long gone

                    A building travels
through time
                      … to the original


idea of a door
                        As an entrance to
the city     we could have picked up
our Virgil”




Critical archi-poetry excerpts from Ed Roberson's "Architectural Drawing", "Architectural Program" and "Travel Structure", found in the middle of To See the Earth Before he End of the World (2010) p75-78. Find more on the Chicago poet Ed Roberson and his thoughts on archi-poetry here, and here > where he notably proclaims "the audacity / to have survived. as the architectonic of a city."



Monday, May 11, 2020

the inexplicable - what really goes on

"There is a room of walls which come alive with images and words... You'll have to decipher what's going on, as it happens. Just like I did... on a journey to another dimension to save Words from their demise... This poem goes pretty far, and terrifies me, but it should be read for pleasure. A story, with characters, and illustrations, and qualities of humor and tenderness... the Survivors have with them an Anthology of poetry which is quoted from: only poems can deal in the inexplicable – what really goes on..."
— Alice Notley, "Preface" (excerpts), For the Ride (2020)

Monday, May 4, 2020

a small revolution can transform the world

"...poetry is not at the margin of ordinary language; it is inside ordinary language. Its inner action renews a language... [and] emotion... is the transformative energy... renovating the social, and language itself. The [poetic]... unit within semantics... is not necessarily visual, although it is vehemently sensual. This is a great part of the pleasure of reading... The time of the poem is the time of an invention... elemental, it stands outside chronology. Through the presence in the poem of the desiring body... a small revolution is proposed.  ...the poem... an altered world... can transform the world... When language changes, life changes."
 
— Lisa Robertson (excerpts), from "Introduction to the Translation Feature", on Émile Benveniste's unpublished notes on the poetic language of Baudelaire. (ARC Poetry Magazine, n80, Summer 2016)

Friday, May 1, 2020

meaning parades through our brains

"I’m drawn to this idea of language as a stage that we all show up to see. First of all, it’s exciting to think there are objects in the field of language, that there are actually things to see... Language uses our memory of objects and our desire for meaning to world-build. So, if I’m inside your metaphor, and I’ve arrived at this stage upon which I will see language, I’m giddy, because I think I’m looking at nothing. Nothing is happening in my eyes. Though, somewhere else (perhaps through some other kind of seeing) shapes emerge. Signals go off and meaning parades through our brains. How fantastic is that?"
— Renee Gladman (speaking of her then forthcoming book Calamaties (in Bomb, Nov 2013)

Friday, April 24, 2020

Space for those who never go there

"A man with a book goes to the light.
A library begins that way...
This one starts with a man who wants to read a book...

Inspired by a great teacher the fortunate young man
winks to the chapel as he passes...
He was there though he never opened its door...

Not daring to enter the Piazza, I
diverted to other streets
toward it but never allowing myself
to arrive...

Space for those who never go there,
those who must be near and don't enter
and those who go in."

— excerpts from "The Continual Renewal of Architecture Comes from Changing Concepts of Space", Louis Kahn (Perspecta, v.4, 1957).



Thursday, December 19, 2019

"Table for Four / Eccentric Crops" Collaborative Poetry Chapbook

Table for Four / Eccentric Crops is now available from JackPine press, in a limited edition of 75 hand-made chapbooks > https://jackpinepress.com/product/table-for-4/
 

 Exquisite Corpse is a well known surrealist game that is still worth playing. We dubbed ourselves "Eccentric Crops" in allusion to the long tradition of shared making, and our manner of growing the collaborative collage that poetry is.


periodic poetry table

book idea - inspired by color swatch books (too expensive)


more too expensive book ideas

duct tape moleskin



     



poetry is about a lot of things! and one thing poetry is about is friendship:
thank you Colin, Jenn & Steven.


 

 

 

 

 

some process, in case anyone is interested in how this collage poetry happened!




If you'd like to see/hear the launch event for Table for Four, then please do whatever it takes to view this facebook link - our only recourse! to that rare moment! of lived experience that "collaborative poetry" is! > https://www.facebook.com/chapbookjack/posts/2476326879335991

Saturday, November 16, 2019

when you open a book, the person pops out, and becomes you

Ray Bradbury on why we read.

“…you’re very curious, aren’t you, to find out how I fell in love with books. Now remember this, love is the center of your life. The things that you do should be things that you love, and things that you love should be things that you do. So that’s what you learn from books… You see, libraries is people. It’s not books. People are waiting in there, thousands of people, who wrote the books. So it’s much more personal than just a book. So when you open a book, the person pops out, and becomes you… So you find the author who can lead you through the dark. And Shakespeare started me there… and Emily Dickinson led the way for me, and Edgar Allen Poe said, ‘This way. Here’s the light’. So you go into the library, and discover yourself.”
—Ray Bradbury.

https://youtu.be/Pqp38_uS-eg
 
Posted for #StudioBilbio, a studio/seminar on the architecture of public libraries.

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built

“Imagine... a Yestermorrow architecture, imaginative enough and large enough to enclose everything in a single structure... that lures, calls, leads, and pulls you from one area to the next.
...Imagine... an art gallery enclosing a museum, enclosing a library, enclosing a university, enclosing a theater. Five concepts, five environments, five ways of seeing life. Each circling, each rounding the other.
...Why a theater at our architectural core? Well, isn't life one drama topping another? Isn't everything theater? 
...Try to imagine any human activity that does not finally shape itself into vivid metaphors spoken, acted, taught. 
...stepping through from circle to circle, what would we find?
...An architecture, in sum, it seems to me, as marvelous as those rounded self-encircling nautilus shells found along the shores of our seas. Easy to build? In the mind, yes. With glass, brick, stone, and mortar? Difficult. And expensive. 
...What a pomegranate experience. What an incredible womb... Will it be built between now and the century's end? ....can it be the most imaginative teaching hearth ever built to warm our minds? I say it can be done. I wish it to be so.”
– Ray Bradbury, excerpts from "Yestermorrow Place" [1988] 
in Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures, Capra Press 1991, p 77-80.

Sunday, January 6, 2019

Now is the Time to Take the Archi-Poetry Leap

Now is the time to take the Archi-Poetry Leap: 

“The language revising its own architectures is the cloud palace and drift of your desire.”
—Robert Duncan, Notebook 31 

[as cited by Steve McCaffery in “ParaPoetics and the Architectural Leap” in 'A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy' (Fordham 2008)]

2 choice McCaffery quotes, that I agree with (if that matters): 

1) “We must remain alert to architecture’s ominous expansion in the hyper-realism of the neoliberal dream, alert to the colonizing force in which architecture is mobilized by a compound telos of planning-for-profit.” p104.

2) “Why the leap into architecture? From ’stanza’ to the ‘prison-house of language’, architectural figures dominate within the very formulation of the linguistic. Architectural metaphors haunt writing to a degree sufficient to cause us to question a merely benign metaphoric presence. One of Heidegger’s lasting insights is into how both language and architecture ground us in the world. In architecture, as in language, human beings dwell (poetically or not) whether in open mobility or confinement. Derrida observes, ‘We appear to ourselves only through an experience of spacing which is already marked by architecture.’ Heidegger and Derrida alike suggest that prior to becoming social subjects, we are all architectural bodies [cf. Arakawa Gins]. We need, however, to add to Derrida’s grammatological conception of architecture as ‘a writing space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for events' the facts that architecture too is the materialized conception of dwelling and the dwelling is fundamentally a relation of ontology to spaces. Architecture in that enriched sense serves to return being to its problems by way of 'oikos' rather than 'poiesis'. And if Bachelard is correct when claiming that all inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home, then the link between reading and dwelling appears to be far from a strained analogy.” p105.

I have more work to do, on #archipoetry from the side of the poets...
Thank you Adam Katz and Garry Thomas Morse for the breadcrumb trail.

Link to source text here, or via your library > A Time for the Humanities  

Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Room To Room: Poetry & Architecture in Conversation (a limited edition chapbook)

Limited Edition Chapbook

Room To Room: Poetry & Architecture in Conversation




Three genre-jumping poets with a background in architecture have joined together to exchange poems and thoughts about the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture.

ARKITEXWERKS (2018) 4 1/2″w x 11″h, 100 numbered & signed copies of this limited-edition chapbook were printed with archival pigment inks on 28 lb. acid-free archival Mohawk Superfine Eggshell paper, wrapped in 100% rag vellum endpapers and a cover of Strathmore 300 watercolour paper, then hand-sewn with waxed linen thread.

available while supplies last for $10 via Plug In ICA (online or in-store)
or Knife | Fork | Book (in Toronto) 
or Ingrid Ruthig (who edited & made this wonderful little book)

Link here to Video of my portion of this Archi-Poetry event.
 
My contributions to this document, include 2 poems: "Reversible Destiny 2", an archi-poem homage to Madeline Gins made by sampling text from "Procedural Architecture" - the middle chapter of Architectural Body (U. Alabama Press, 2002) by Arakawa/Gins;
and, my manifesto (or "__ifesto") on Archi-Poetry - which I'm happy to share here:

archi-poetry makes room for poetry and architecture to meet

archi-poetry throws them together, an embrace - in question
 
archi-poems are heuristic word towers, hopeful but flammable
 
if architecture is for everyone and poetry is universal, then...
      archi-poetry is doubly open - a double opening?

archi-poetry is human, but liminal and infrasubjective
 
archi-poetry is imperfect, incomplete - we're in it together
 
i found archi-poetry on a bookstore mezzanine, reading
     Louis Sullivan - and you?
 
more than we know, poetry depends on the art of reading
 
archi-poetry is a collaboration always under construction
     and ever in need of repair
 
archi-poetry is a hammer and claw, rebuilding rebuilding
 
archi-poetry experiments with strange and familiar fragments
 
archi-poetry is a multi-story labyrinth with paper-thin wings
 
archi-poetry built into situations, situations calling for poetry
 
archi-poetry comes from within and without, a porous archive
 
i found archi-poetry browsing in the library, pacing left, right
     left of Gertrude Stein, right of John Cage
 
archi-poetry is hybrid inquiry, finding/making connections
     reading/writing openings, beginnings and rules, bending
     and breaking rules, responding to sources in question
 
archi-poetry is a cosmic synthesizer improvising across scales
 
music drama doubt desire, the foundations of archi-poetry
 
archi-poetry precedes us - we awake in its wake
 
i found archi-poetry in Aristotle and the ur-flaw of Lucretius
     in the Electricity, the Table and Door of Francis Ponge
 
archi-poetry happens between lines and line breaks, breaking
     exquisite collage of plans and sections, in the making
 
i found archi-poetry in Duchamp and the Theory of Sediment
 
archi-poetry is a festival of genre-jumping pandemonium
     rhythms of urgency and calm in multifarious crossings
 
archi-poetry raises questions, readers bringing more to the table
     layering, spilling-over concerns, making room for more
     in the architecture of poetry and poetry of architecture

                                          
— Ted Landrum, 2018