The best introduction to my work is this video of my reading at Thin Air, Winnipeg's annual International Writers Festival, on Sept. 24th 2017. I had the honour of reading three poems from Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems: "Snippets of Kairos for Enkidu Haircut", "Writing an Aid to Me" and "Agog".
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The collaborative chapbook Table for Four (JackPine Press, 2020) was launched Nov. 5th (2020) with a public reading and Q&A held via Zoom. The four co-poets who collectively devised and made the book are Steven Ross Smith, Jennifer Still, Colin Smith and Ted Landrum. Beginning from 16 lines of shared "Ur-text", we each contributed four poems - each poem a response to preceding poems passed (counter-clockwise) around a virtual table. Happily, we were also able to assemble around a series of physical tables, as the work commenced prior to the pandemic! Thanks to Sean McLachlan at Print Monger Press for help with printing coasters for the cover, and the entire team at JackPine Press for their generous support. A video recording of the Nov 5 launch event can be found here and see more on the process here. The launch opened and closed with a delightful animated video created by Jennifer Still. I had the pleasure of reading "Boom", "SonoBuoys" (a poetry-duet with Jennifer Still), and we all chimed in for a rendition of Steven Ross Smith's culminating poem, "Air", read as a collaborative quartet. The poem "Chairs" from Table for Four was read at an event hosted by Planet Earth Poetry (Sept 25, 2020). That reading begins with two poems made as the chapbook was being assembled - these are "Exquisite Corpse" (in memory of Michael Sorkin) and "The Great UnBerg" (a tribute to Greta Thunberg). My full reading for that event is provided here, and on Planet Earth Poetry's youtube channel. (Thanks to Daniel Scott for the invitation, and to Bruce Rice for sharing the stage.)
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On November 2, 2018, I read in Toronto along with Komi Olaf and Ingrid Ruthig, 2 new genre-jumping "archi-poetry" friends, at an event called Poetry & Architecture in Conversation, where we each read a few poems then discussed the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture, and more generally our motives and methods for mingling diverse arts. Elsa Lam, editor of Canadian Architect magazine generously joined us for Q&A. We launched several books at the event, including Ingrid Ruthig's award winning This Being, my own Midway Radicals and a new limited edition chapbook we made to celebrate the event, called Room to Room: Poetry & Architecture in Conversation, gathering sample archi-poems from each of us, together with individual statements on the rapport between poetry and architecture. At this event, I was happy to finally read "Human Universe" and specific "beams" from "Ark Fundations, Roving Renovations" that I'd not yet had the opportunity to share. Here is a 12 minute video of my portion of Poetry & Architecture in Conversation at Knife | Fork | Book, Nov 2, 2018:
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Oct 2, 2021 "Archi-Poetry & Invisible Theatre" was presented online as Act 3 of a series called "Theatres of Archimagination" hosted by my partner, Lisa Landrum. For this event I shared motives and examples of Archi-Poetry, including "––ifesto", "The Flood Poem" and "If a Bubble". This reading was followed by an exchange with award-winning theatre artist, Grant Guy. Full video here. More on the event here.
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Oct 25, 2021 I had the opportunity to share a series of Dada-esque ArchiPoems at X-Cues Café and Lounge, for an episode Grant Guy's Circus of Objects.
These poems celebrate Chance, Choice, Change and - most importantly, collaboration! Link here to a 20 min. video I made the following day, that incorporates some recordings from the event, into a longer story of how the poems were made.
These poems celebrate Chance, Choice, Change and - most importantly, collaboration! Link here to a 20 min. video I made the following day, that incorporates some recordings from the event, into a longer story of how the poems were made.
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Oct 1, 2021
This year marked the 45th Anniversary of Turnstone Press, a local publisher whose offices are located just a short walk from UbuLoca HQ, in the beautiful "ArtSpace" building in the heart of Winnipeg's Exchange District. Thanks to Sarah Ens, I had opportunity to read some poems in celebration of regional poetry. Here is a link to my video for Turnstone, which is just one an amazing series of paired readings, that give an excellent overview of the range of poetry happening in Canada. For this reading, I shared two recent poems, "Happening Poetry" (for Lyn Hejinian) and "VivRe happiLY" (for Francis Ponge).
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July 6, 2018
"Things Can
and Not be Said" is read over megaphone as four experimental-musicians 'sound' the place called Graffiti Gallery at "Intervals: Variations on Lines". This archi-poem was made by sampling text from an interview with whistle-blowers
Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg, and the architect turned
author-activist
Arundhati Roy. Musicians co-playing the place include Greg Hanec, Dustin
Wiebe, and Gage and Kerrigan Salnikowski. For best results, turn on the CC subtitles and listen close to"Things Can and Not be Said":
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April 28, 2018
"Ephemeral Monuments" are four (post-Trump) poems made in a recent workshop led by Steven Ross Smith, at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. Follow the link to a recording.
In a revised form, this series was performed as one segment of a collaborative performance event called "Nada Nawa Sanga: Space Place Sound" held at the Faculty of Architecture's C.A.S.T. building, Univ. of Manitoba,. A partial recording of that event can be found here.
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"Systematic Encounter in Plural Parts" is a series of 7 interrelated poems written in response to an exhibition of paintings called "Re-Configuring Abstraction." Follow the above link to see 6 of the poems and listen to a recording of all 7 poems with an explanation of the process. In Canadian Poetries, an account of the workshop which led to these "ekphrastic" poems mentions my contribution.
"University of Labyrinth" is a long collage poem written in response to an exhibition of collage works, called "What are You Scared Of?" The graphic poem "Art History (with Hiccups)" was written also partly in response to the exhibition, but also, more generally, in thinking about the origins of art and poetry. Follow the above link to see these 2 poems; and listen (here) to a recording including a 3rd related poem, called "What Are You Afraid Of," along with an explanation of the ekphrastic process.
"Tunnelling Through" was published in On Site review (issue #29, on Geology); and was recorded at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture as part of Winnipeg's Thin Air Literary Festival. This is a "list poem" musing on the roots of "cunning" - as a poetic, philosophical, and architectural act. Like many of my archi-poems, this one developed out of specific conversations with my awesome partner, Lisa, whose ground breaking research on 'architectural acts' is revolutionizing architectural history and theory.
"Inauguries" and "Tongue-Twister for Midway Radicals" were recorded at the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture in 2011. (One can skip my long preamble and go straight to the poems by dragging the slider to the 2:20 mark.) "Inauguries" was published along with two other "archi-poems" as part of an afterword, called 'Utter Qualia: Three Probe/Poems," for a book on architectural Quality, called Quality Out of Control: Standards for Measuring Architecture (Routledge 2010) p198-202.
"Language and Architecture: a Duologue" (one of my "archi-poems" from the book on architectural Quality) has been republished in the June 2014 issue of EDGE Condition (vol. 2), on "Presenting Architecture." For this issue, the editors asked five diverse artists to respond creatively to my poem. The poem is an "abcedary" gathering a list of performative acts shared by architecture and language. Again, this poem developed along side my partners research on architectural acts, one aim of which is to recover lost meanings in the word, the act, and the phenomenon of architecture. The entire issue of EDGE Condition is a free download, and my poem "Language and Architecture" appears on page 24 (p14 of PDF), with artist responses appearing on the following pages. It is a great honor to have the poem not only read, but interpreted creatively. I am very grateful to the editors for proposing the idea and to the artists, none of whom I knew, for their creative work!
Two experimental archi-poems poems have been published in/on Lemon Hound (an influential Can-Lit web-zine) as part of a New Winnipeg Poets Folio. Short-Cut through a City Cemetery is a double homage: to the founder of the Lemon Hound web-zine, Sina Queyras; and to the tradition of collage-poetry. Lit by Glass, is a vertical slice "taken" through a poem by Charles Simic, called Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk. That poem (and book of poems) is among the first-formative influences that led me to pursue archi-poetry, when I discovered it many years ago while browsing in the library as an architecture student (ca1989). These poems-made-from-poems are perhaps controversial, since I have merely edited, shortened and intensified, existing poems that were already quite powerful. I see them less as appropriations than as collaborative works, operating like literature as a whole through the layering of voices and responses. Also, in architecture it is quite common to renovate an existing building, especially if it is a good one worthy of keeping—and most of them are. Furthermore, one excellent way to study a work of architecture, is to cut it open, by taking and exposing what we call a representative cross-section. By slicing down the middle of a building, or a poem, what we get is both an abstraction of the original, and a sample that reveals the interstitial, inhabitable and structuring elements in a new and legible way. I describe this selective, subtractive process as midway between reading and writing, finding and making. In the case of found/erasure poetry, the result is always a new poem, but in my work, I try also to have the outcome be a discursive response to the source. My poem "Lit by Glass" is both similar to and different from Simic's poem "Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk." Obviously, 'Lit' and 'Glass' take on multiple, and I hope, magnifying meaning. Since I learn about poetry from this process, these works are intentionally made as auto-didactic poems. But this is not all, since through making them I am able to develop a voice that is not simply my own: ideally finding a more plural and universal voice, they say more than I alone ever could; at minimum, they give way to a hybrid or middle voice. The voice of a plural other which is neither mine alone, nor that of the source authors alone, it resembles that voice which arises when any reader reads the writing of another; an inter-subjectively layered, and possibly dissonant voice. If you read the poem aloud, it becomes as much your poem as my poem.
"Arch of Enjoyment" (for and against Henri Lefebvre) is one of a growing collection of longish (found/erasure) archi-poems taking prose essays for their source, beginning, or archê. This one is based on an essay called "Architecture" in Henri Lefebvre's posthumous book Architecture of Enjoyment. This poem has been published both online and in print by the American Society for Aesthetics. I was asked by the editors to provide an accompanying explanation of my archi-poetry process, but readers can skip over this and go straight to the poem. I have several found-erasure poems that, like this one, convert a prose source into a poem. In each case the new poem is meant to explore more openly, intensely, and often more ambiguously (and complexly) the same or similar topics raised in the source essay. The basic premise motivating this project is that poetry is able to say much more than prose, especially on certain questions that cannot be answered easily, and on topics and themes that are fundamentally immeasurable. That poetry can be more probative, impactful, moving, and illuminating than prose, is of course not necessarily true in every case, but I find the hypothesis productive. Like my Ubu Loca archive, which relies on prose sources, the ongoing archi-poetry project is a mode of research—the findings of which are for the reader to discover.
Two related archi-poems have appeared in the journal CV2 [Contemporary Verse 2: The Canadian Journal of Poetry and Critical Writing]: "Thank You Gertrude" in v37, n2 (Fall 2014) p54-56; and "Thank You Gertrude, Again" in v38, n3 (Winter 2016) p33-35. Thanks also to the editors for including me in one of Canada's longest running journals dedicated to poetry.
#archi-poetry #archipoetry #architectureandpoetry #architecturalquality #literaryarchitecture
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