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

     

Wednesday, August 29, 2018

Poetry & Architecture in Conversation, Toronto Nov 2, 2018



3 archi-poets joined for an evening of Poetry & Architecture at Knife|Fork|Book Toronto Nov 2, 2018

Ingrid Ruthig + Komi Olaf + Ted Landrum

Stay for a Q&A led by Elsa Lam, editor Canadian Architect.

12 min. video of my reading here

Knife | Fork | Book, at The Dark Side Studio
244 Augusta Ave, 2nd Floor, Kensington Market, 

Toronto 

Saturday, May 19, 2018

Keeping it up rather than Tearing it down

"Every time I heard or read about the destruction of a building I had known, or saw it burn on the local news, I felt like a piece of my flesh was being ripped away. 
         I've always turned the old corner with dread: What if, when I reach the apartment house where I grew up, there's nothing there? It wouldn't be surprising: so many of the buildings in these parts have been sealed up or torn down; streets that were busy and noisy and too narrow for the crowds twenty years ago are as open and empty as deserts today. But it hasn't happened, at least not yet; the building looks surprisingly good, a little Art Deco jewel in the midst of devastation. A heroic superintendent and organized tenants have held it together; and its present landlord appears to have some interest in keeping it up rather than tearing it down. I feel a sense of metaphysical relief...
     ...Life is rough in the South Bronx, but the people aren't giving up: modernity is alive and well."


—Marshall Berman "The Signs in the Street" [1984],
collected in Adventures in Marxism (Verso 1999) & Modernism in the Streets: A Life and Times in Essays (Verso 2017).
 

Considered among Berman's best essays, "Signs in the Street" was a reply to a review of All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity. As Michael Walter points out, "The last line in Marshall’s essay summarizes his new position: “Reading [Marx's] Capital won’t help us if we don’t also know how to read the signs in the streets.”


Read it here.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

All that is Solid Melts into Air - Berman's Howl

"Thus, in Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'...remarkable things are happening...urging us to experience modern life not as a hollow wasteland but as an epic and tragic battle of giants. This vision endows the modern environment and its makers with a demonic energy and a world-historical stature that probably exceed even what the Robert Moseses [Fausts and Trumps] of this world would claim for themselves. At the same time, the vision is meant to arouse us, the readers, to make ourselves equally great, to enlarge our desire and moral imagination to the point where we will dare to take on the giants. But we cannot do this until we recognize their desires and powers in ourselves... Hence Ginsberg develops structures and processes of poetic language...that recall and rival the skyscrapers, factories and expressways he hates. Ironically, although the poet portrays the expressway world as the death of brains and imagination, his poetic vision brings its underlying intelligence and imaginative force to life—indeed, brings it more fully to life than the builders were ever able to do on their own... They could not bear to look into the nihilistic abyss that [Faust's/Moses'/Trump's] steam shovels and pile drivers opened up." 
—Marshall Berman [Archi-Poet], All That is Solid Melts into Air (1982), p311.

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Poetry as Research: Fabricating Truth in Architecture, Feb 1-3 Atmos: Fabrications Symposium


                               

Presenting Archi-Poetry as Research, Feb 2, as part of the Atmosphere: Fabrications Symposium, 2018. Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba.

More on the symposium here 
Download the full book of Abstracts here
Order Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems here