Inspired by this article i posted to the news.
I invite people to share the poetry that has inspired them to design, or to generally discuss what if any links they see between architecture and poetry.
Specifically as it relates to what Glancey seems to suggest is a lack of "poetic vision" in contemporary architecture.
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
the way to it?)
Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women
in plots of love.
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.
Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
gone into the stones of the building.)
On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
and each name standing for a face written across
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
ease of life.
Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
the building just the same as the master-men who
rule the building.
Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
empties its men and women who go away and eat
and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
money. The sign speaks till midnight.
Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
and has a soul.
ok -- this has has the potential of devolving into bad-poetry-drivel pretty quickly.
BUT, as both poetry and architecture (as well as music) have a specific and (when good) particularized relationship between structure, form, and content -- I find many similarities.
no poems to post here, but some favs that fit this bill:
Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Michael Palmer, William Carlos Williams (particularly Paterson), Galway Kinnell and others like that...
I think the relationship between poetry and music is true, but the arquitectural experience is diferent , very diferent at those ones
What is the relationship between Phisics, Economy, and Poker because both at the back have a mathematical structure? IMO nothing ( except poker and economy possibly, but not because both share mathematical or stocastics concepts)
Is a topic romantic to make links between Poetry and Architecture (even Music) that devolving into bad metafor drivel pretty quickly without real content
Schiller said, architecture is frozen Music
(but music is not melt architecture, said other one)
LB Alberti spoken about "musicality" but in methaforical sense,
Within the context of Glancey's piece i think the issue that interests me is twofold.
1. What does it mean a poetic vision? What is the relationship between poetry and architecture? It does seem as if key in this question are ideas of rhythm, flow and affect (some of which has already been mentioned). But what about the idea of vision? This implies grand thoughts, a sense of dreaming and also critique.
2. Does contemporary architecture really lack a poetic vision? If so when has architecture had one? What does a poetic vision mean? Is such architecture related in opposition to provocative, media centric, form driven architecture? Would a contemporary architecture that such a "poetic vision" be more or less meaningful than current architecture? Or just more beautiful? Not necessarily in terms of form etc.
Is there even a relationship that can or should be constructed?
My own favourite, on the subjects of scale/subjective-objective world-views/masculine-feminine/climate change...
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipped and armed for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.
The wild deer wandering here and there
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misused breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men.
He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.
The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider's enmity.
He who torments the chafer's sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.
The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.
He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar's dog and widow's cat,
Feed them, and thou wilt grow fat.
The gnat that sings his summer's song
Poison gets from Slander's tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of Envy's foot.
The poison of the honey-bee
Is the artist's jealousy.
The prince's robes and beggar's rags
Are toadstools on the miser's bags.
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The babe is more than swaddling bands,
Throughout all these human lands;
Tools were made and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;
This is caught by females bright
And returned to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.
The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes Revenge! in realms of death.
The beggar's rags fluttering in air
Does to rags the heavens tear.
The soldier armed with sword and gun
Palsied strikes the summer's sun.
The poor man's farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric's shore.
One mite wrung from the labourer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands,
Or if protected from on high
Does that whole nation sell and buy.
He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mocked in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.
He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.
The questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour's iron brace.
When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall Envy bow.
A riddle or the cricket's cry
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.
The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation's fate.
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding sheet.
The winner's shout, the loser's curse,
Dance before dead England's hearse.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
'Auguries of Innocence' by William Blake
and this one from John Donne:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
"I didn't have an academically approved theory to back up my sentiments, yet I felt that what I had to say was in the spirit of architects, of all eras, with poetry in their souls and with the spirits, too, of poets like Hardy, Betjeman and Larkin, among many others, who have truly seen poetry in architecture"
i'd say one sees poetry inspiteof architecture.
for my part, i did not care much for hejduk's poems. but i was really intruiged by his cartoons and architectural work which i don't claim to understand yet (barely spent any time with them). its easy to call something poetic and not understand what that particular poetic is.
and its a bit disingenuous to posit "poetic architecture" as a hinge between architecture and poetry or, the other way around, a poetry on some architecture as being this hinge. however one wishes to defines 'poetic' (i find it typically means allusive and/or lyrical...of course if etymologically, it is embroiled in the very act of creation) it is not synonymous with 'poetry'.
how does our reading and thinking of what is physical structurally inform what is textually structured? one obvious example i can think of is mallarmé in his un coup de dés
come to think of it, on a very fundamental level, the inscription of language on stone, then paper, then screen (this latter is a result of language -computer code language- as much as it is a staging of language) informs the medium as much as it informs the mediating ie language.
the thing with hejduk is that his poetry was closely related to his architecture -
"Writing about Hejduk's poems in 1980, Eisenman observed, "Walter Benjamin has said that Baudelaire's writings on Paris were often more real than the experience of Paris itself. Both drawing and writing contain a compaction of themes which in their conceptual density deny reduction and exfoliation for a reality of another kind: together they reveal an essence of architecture itself.""
(that's from the description of "Such Places as Memory", a book of hejduk's poems).
"Hejduk's poems are not so much pure poetry as they are linguistic structures generated from and attached to his architectural practice..."
Steven.
Interesting point. Which of the two did you discuss in school? Poemic?
Glancey definetely seems to be interested in how it relates to making.
I think.
And noct, your comment about physical form informing textual structure is actually the opposite of the way i was approaching. I guess i was thinking text informing structure/form some how. Or maybe more like Structure/form referencing or drawing on text or at least the structure or style of the text?
Does that make any sense?
i guess, separate from what he says, what glancey DOES makes me describe his as a critique of the poemic aspects of architecture. he uses a poem as an example.
the poetic aspects of architecture, as part of architecture curriculum in the late 80s/early 90s, had to do with the making of architecture and how the process of making was embodied/communicated in the result - how the architecture/artifact exhibited its making and how that could remain part of the experience of the architecture. it almost never, in my memory, had anything to do with a poem.
Steven,
Based on your explanation i would say (with toungue slightly in cheek) and you seem to be suggestign that what Glancey was saying,
is that there is perhaps to much in contemporary architecture that is poemic but not poetic?
Also, I loved "un coup de dés" by Mallarme. I had never read it before. Reminded me alot of various Concrete and Surrealist poets/poetry i have read
"Hejduk's poems are not so much pure poetry as they are linguistic structures generated from and attached to his architectural practice..."
what is "pure poetry"? thats idiotic. poetry is in its linguistic structure. what, does the author of that quote think people spontaneously ejaculate "pure poetry"? poetry is the skidmark of language, language reordered around its own messy traces. poetry is the paella of language, the re-creative garbage of language.whoever claims poetry, any poetry, is this wisp of intangible virginal ethereality is wanking to nonsense.
aside from that little point, i do recall hejduk's poetry being bland and unsurprising. unlike those stranger-than-architectures of his.
perhaps i'll give the poems another try sometime.
namhernderson;
in my opinion, the 'article' was quite wishywashy.
I understand Aldo van Eyck's dad was a poet. Where this becomes apparent in A.'s writing is in his conceptual sophistication; the way he addresses layers of meaning. I was reading bits of his 'The Child, the City and the Artist' whilst at the Venice Biennale a few weeks ago and what struck me was how sophisticated his thinking was in marked contrast to the 'one liner' concepts behind most of the, albeit glossily absorbing, installations at the arsenale which, for all their surface enjoyment, demonstrated only the most tiresomely mechanistic grasp of human psychology; a theme that surely deserved better understanding given Aaron Betsky's theme...
As for van Eyck, I particularly enjoyed his piece 'There is a garden in her face' which is a bit long to post here. I can always Email it to anyone interested.
As for the general points, my take is that poetry shares with architecture, as it does with music and painting, extensions to the realm of meaning rather than distortion thereof or "language reordered around its own messy traces" as noctilucent says.
A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
II
If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If all the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon,
and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.
III
After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
IV
A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truths.
B. It is April as I write. The wind
Is blowing after days of constant rain.
All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.
V
The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
although not a poet, i have been reading Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais, and i am getting a fascinating insight about the "rightness" of my direction...
i really like how stanza II sounds ... that particular part would be also really nice sung over a tape loop of the same...echoing and breathy. would be even nicer sung a bit wistful and a bit whimsical and a bit nonsensically because its a tad bit too didactic (which is the case with the rest of the poem...which is ok if not sung, its quite nicely balanced didacticism)
[architecture as interface comes with the architecture of schizophrenic interfacing...]
[buildings constantly move, doors can be windows, windows can be doors, stairs to Pilate are climbed annually on knees, walls may soon all talk, floors will mostly remain flat, ceilings with sprinklers are virtual skies that harbor emergency rain, roofs probably more than anything manifest architecture's shape, lights, camera, Africa, machines to create architecture with, furniture and painting as one, utilities that never fail (sic), plants, of course, grass gets high, sidewalk, siderun, sidecrawl, sidesit, sideroll-over, driveway complete with Jeep, garage sale as museum,..]
and through the fanlight
flies the fanmail
like a pigeon
with a fantail
Architects who write poems about architecture tend to be very bad and usually not recognized by the larger community of poets. There's a reason for this. I include Hejduk in that equation—he's the closest that architecture has ever had to a resident poet. But I personally find his poems somewhat amateurish.
On the other hand, poets who occasionally write poems about architecture can be very good. Zbigniew Herbert is fantastic, Vijay Sashedri is really good, Robert Haas has written a few things about architecture, Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Szymborska, Eugenio Montale, others.
I've always liked Donald Barthelme's writing, which strikes me as prose-poetic. I wasn't surprised when I found out that his father was an architect.
this was suggested to me by michael rotondi last year.
Ode To Tomatoes by Pablo Neruda
The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.
Oct 22, 08 12:25 pm ·
·
farwest1, who are these architects, besides Hejduk, that write poems about architecture that constitute your evaluation?
they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler
I record - I don't know for whom - the history of the siege
I am supposed to be exact but I don't know when the invasion began
two hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn
everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time
all we have left is the place the attachment to the place
we still rule over the ruins of temples spectres of gardens and houses
if we lose the ruins nothing will be left
I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks
monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
wednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire the enemy has imprisoned our messengers
we don't know where they are held that is the place of torture
thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected
the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender
friday: the beginning of the plague saturday: our invincible defender
N.N. committed suicide sunday: no more water we drove back
an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance
all of this is monotonous I know it can't move anyone
I avoid any commentary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts
only they it seems are appreciated in foreign markets
yet with a certain pride I would like to inform the world
that thanks to the war we have raised a new species of children
our children don’t like fairy tales they play at killing
awake and asleep they dream of soup of bread and bones
just like dogs and cats
in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the city
along the frontier of our uncertain freedom.
I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights
I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks
truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself
the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns
nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination
Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the Transfiguration
who can count them
the colours of their banners change like the forest on the horizon
from delicate bird's yellow in spring through green through red to winter's black
and so in the evening released from facts I can think
about distant ancient matters for example our
friends beyond the sea I know they sincerely sympathize
they send us flour lard sacks of comfort and good advice
they don’t even know their fathers betrayed us
our former allies at the time of the second Apocalypse
their sons are blameless they deserve our gratitude therefore we are grateful
they have not experienced a siege as long as eternity
those struck by misfortune are always alone
the defenders of the Dalai Lama the Kurds the Afghan mountaineers
now as I write these words the advocates of conciliation
have won the upper hand over the party of inflexibles
a normal hesitation of moods fate still hangs in the balance
cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders is smaller
yet the defence continues it will continue to the end
and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City
we look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death
worst of all - the face of betrayal
and only our dreams have not been humiliated
Um, students of Hejduk, people who I went to school with, Enric Miralles, others.
This, by the way, is a personal impression from someone who reads a lot of poetry. Not some definitive statement on the worthiness of architects who write poetry.
farwest, i thend to agree with you on your point, my thing with Hejduk is that the writing is inseparable from the work and vice-versa. that is primarily my reason for listing him.
Oct 22, 08 12:47 pm ·
·
I asked several years ago if there were any other architects who have read The Changing Light at Sandover. farwest1, have you read it? There's a very different architecture to it. Very virtual realm.
Yeah, it's beautiful. James Merrill is, to my mind, one of the most effortless poets who ever lived. I don't necessarily appreciate everything he's done—he's a bit too cute and clever for me—but the guy had an amazing natural gift for language, metaphor, juxtaposition and reference.
Oct 22, 08 1:26 pm ·
·
lame duct
Read it straight through 25 years ago.
The exploding quartz pyramid supplied the most currency.
"Mister Mysterious Pyramid"
Overall, it inspired all kind of things in my subsequent creative endeavors. [which I find as I re-read now]
Even became an Akhnaton and Nefertiti buff.
Do I still know the names of their daughters?
Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten, Neferneferure, Setepenre
"Don't touch my Tuts!"
Looking back, it was then
almost
like reading an online forum thread
now.
My favorite better-known poets are Zbigniew Herbert (quoted above), Rilke, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Czeslaw Milosz.
I guess the commonality between them all is that they somehow link the political with the metaphysical landscapes of their own cultures. Which, I suppose, is what architecture is about (at least if you buy what Zumthor talks about in Thinking Architecture.)
revolutionary letters (dedicated to bob dylan) by diane diprima
4
Left to themselves people
grow their hair.
Left to themselves they
take off their shoes.
Left to themselves they make love
sleep easily
share blankets, dope & children
they are not lazy or afraid
they plant seeds, they smile, they
speak to one another. The word
coming into its own: touch of love
on the brain, the ear.
now then, how is it that this thread has escaped the ire of the 'architecture is a practical art' crowd'?
is a poem practical language?
are poems safely enough tucked away in their corner that they can be written off / indulged in?
if there is an equivalence between architecture and a poem, is there an equivalence between daily language and, uh, architecture as a practical art? etc etc etc. . .
when i read a part of the poem by diane diprima, first thing that engaged my attention was how a rigid structure was disjointed to suggest growth, which subsequently reminded me of the facade of asplund's villa snellman. then i find another parellel analogy between her poem and asplund's philosophy of romantic naturalism. paradox is the game we have to play in modern cities, and as the anticipations of migration and population growth grow, bipolarity splits our psyche, and i wonder if our minds can function like physiological homeostasis without mutating into schizophrenia. as much as we feel the need of new socio-economic order or perhaps of the return to agrarian nature, for the time being, it is becoming more eminent for urban inhabitants to maintain social mobility and not to suffer from the symptoms of 'negative individualism' (r. castel). the question then becomes philosophical stand in regards to what sort of society or community we want to create within enclaves. hence, education and psychogeographies formed from our exposure to various environments become important issues we have to deal with to continue with progress without falling back to what primal chaos, i cannot imagine. in this mindset, it seems necessary to maintain certain orders, even to desire to return to the classical order as we nudge against beauty which has been eaten up by monsters in our current cultural landscapes, and it is not too often we sense the beauty of poetry in architecture in generic cities. yet, when i first saw the twisted tower of de young museum, i exclaimed 'it is beautiful'. in other times, i have sensed sublime beauty in modest architectural expressions without much anticipations.
mr. henderson, i thought, when i read the article, reminded me of architecture like an oasis as one of my professors told me once in grad. school. otherwise, there are all kinds of poetries in our everyday architecture, about which i would like to hear a different take from noctilucent, about evocative qualities of phenomenology of familiar spaces. ~~
from David Shapiro's intor to "Such Places as Memory" by John Hejduk
"Poetry and architecture are not just contingent analogues for Hejduk. They are both building arts. They are ontologically the same art, as he has proposed a drawing strong as a building and visa versa. Poetry is not confession, an ejaculatory mode of expressionism. Nor is it dominated, in a Roman Jakobson's sense, by the axes of reference or resort to public, political command. Poetry and architecture are both replete arts of repetition and persistence, and no one know better than Hejduk the haunting uses of parallelism in all it devious asymmetries, first pointed out in Hebraic poetry by one Bishop Lowth. The sculptural sense of an authoritative test is built up by Hejduk....Hejduk builds up poems of a geometrical fury. Such a poetry does not depend on the ornament of rhyme or conventional meter, but it does depend on the fundamental cosmology of geometric repetition with drastic differences. Furthermore, such poetry does not need to sacrifice any of the so-called "axes of the aesthetic". One still has here a poetry of truth-telling detail and sensuous palpability. The poetry is maximal and severe, and the poems build up in sequence to the final variable structure: the book."
The Angel dropped
and knelt
to ask a pardon
for its announcement
anticipating the
coming entombment
The stone vault door
exploded into
putrid passage
Italian was softly spoken
The cloth was loomed
in iris
Waxed Banisters
pinioned the entry
Impregnation was complete
Joseph wept
Asesinado por el cielo.
Entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe
y las formas que buscan el cristal,
dejaré crecer mis cabellos.
Con el arbol de muñones que no canta
y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo.
Con los animalitos de cabeza rota
y el agua harapienta de los pies secos.
Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo
y mariposa ahogada en el tintero.
Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día.
¡Asesinado por el cielo!
- Federico García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York
Home from a Walk
Assassinated by the sky,
between the forms that are moving towards the serpent
and the forms that are moving towards the crystal
I'll let my hair down
With the tree of amputated limbs that does not sing
and the boy with the white face of an egg
With all the tiny animals who have broken heads,
and the ragged water that walks on its dry feet.
With all the things that have a deaf and dumb fatigue,
and the butterfly drowned in the inkpot
Stumbling over my face that changes every day,
assassinated by the sky.
- Federico García Lorca, Poet in New Tork (tr. Robery Bly)
thats andalucian lorca on new york right at the beginning of the great depression era (serpent= hudson river i'm guessin ... crystal= skyscraper) and thats a poem inspite of architecture. that epic "assasinated by the sky" vertical line strikes down like a giddy bout of vertigo. unfortunately, in the english translation the cutting 'ka' sound replete in the spanish poem that renders its into more of a violently punctuated reading is not to be found in the english translation above. i think this contrasts very well with the pretty and pastoral picture of the fourfold painted by heidegger, the fourfold turned against itself. this is something i also find in celan ... where, in a more extreme manifestation of the disconrdant fourfold, the observing subject finds itself beyond signification (at least beyond the norms of signification)...subjectivity undone by its surrounding.
in my mind, the harmonic fourfould has always invited bloodshed. just as much as a country at peace invites a possibility of war (if one acknowledges a state of 'peace' ...one acknowledges, implicitly, a state of 'war'.)
Annunciation - by John Hejduk...immaculate conception and the deaths of christ.
"home from a walk" - in english, can not read spanish, has that ontological effect to the extent as noc says - "subjectivity undone by its surrounding."
Hejduk is said to be a ontological world builder. This approach to architecture as to poetry as to paper architecture and as to theoretical architecture seems much more a worthwhile endeavor than any other approach to the praxis of architecture.
To take it one step further, if one could construct the worlds in which "subjectivity (is) undone by its surrounding", if this could be an architecture of reality or paper, then we would have a realm (field) in which architecture could operate objectively.
how to do this? suggestions?
Oct 24, 08 8:10 am ·
·
8 December: Immaculate Conception which occurred circa 18 years before
25 March: Annunciation/Incarnation
2 July: Visitation
25 December: Nativity
It is the Annunciation, as reported by Luke 1:26-38, where a series of events are clearly described.
1. (26) The angel Gabriel is sent by God to Nazareth. The presence of an angel already constitutes a miraculous event, a theophany.
2. (27) The angel is sent to a betrothed virgin named Mary. Here Scripture clearly states that Mary is a virgin and that she is promised in marriage to Joseph.
3. (28) In greeting, Gabriel exalts Mary; "the Lord is with thee" reiterates the theophany, thus Mary's being "full of grace" and "Blessed among women" is Divinely sanctioned.
4. (29) Mary is troubled by such a greeting, signifying her overall innocence in this situation.
5. (30) Gabriel assures Mary of her safety within the theophany taking place.
6. (31) Gabriel 'announces' to Mary that she will conceive and subsequently give birth to a boy, Jesus.
7. (32-33) Gabriel Highly exalts the nature of Mary's announced offspring, indeed to the point of infinity.
8. (34) Mary exclaims confusion at the announcement, while she herself proclaims her virginity.
9. (35) Gabriel tells Mary the Holy Spirit will come upon her, the Most High will overshadow her, and the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Gabriel essentially announces the soon forthcoming of the Trinity, a complete theophany.
10. (36) Gabriel then announces the Precursor, John the Baptist.
11. (37) "for nothing shall be impossible with God."
12. (38) Mary's ultimate reply, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word," is extremely important on two counts. First, it is at the moment of Mary's complicity that the Incarnation (the Word becoming flesh) occurs. (Note Gabriel efficiently departs as soon as his task is complete.) Second, without Mary's complicity, the Incarnation would have been the result of a rape, not at all unlike the sexual relationship between Mars (a divinity) and Rhea Silvia (a Vestal Virgin), another reported theophany which progenerated Rome.
After the Annunciation/Incarnation comes the Visitation, where John the Baptist, when he for the first time is in the presence of the Incarnation, takes a noticeable pre-natal leap.
As someone interested in both poetry and architecture, I get really frustrated that the only reference to poetry for many architects is John Hejduk.
And when he's talked about, it's not as a poet would discuss poetry, but in the high-fluff of poststructuralist theory—"ontological world builder, etc." Any metaphorical or poetic weight is literally sucked out of his work and stomped on.
metaphorical is not all that interesting in poetry...
T.S., especially in the book "Prufrock and other observations" is a "ontological world builder" of Henri Bergson's philosophy. sure there are many references and metaphors.
Poetry and Architecture?
Inspired by this article i posted to the news.
I invite people to share the poetry that has inspired them to design, or to generally discuss what if any links they see between architecture and poetry.
Specifically as it relates to what Glancey seems to suggest is a lack of "poetic vision" in contemporary architecture.
SKYSCRAPER
Carl Sandburg
BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and
has a soul.
Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into
it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are
poured out again back to the streets, prairies and
valleys.
It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and
out all day that give the building a soul of dreams
and thoughts and memories.
(Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care
for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman
the way to it?)
Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and
parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and
sewage out.
Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words,
and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men
grappling plans of business and questions of women
in plots of love.
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.
Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the
mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an
architect voted.
Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust,
and the press of time running into centuries, play
on the building inside and out and use it.
Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid
in graves where the wind whistles a wild song
without words
And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes
and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor.
Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging
at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another
man while drunk.
(One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the
end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has
gone into the stones of the building.)
On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names
and each name standing for a face written across
with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving
ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's
ease of life.
Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls
tell nothing from room to room.
Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from
corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers,
and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all
ends of the earth.
Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of
the building just the same as the master-men who
rule the building.
Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor
empties its men and women who go away and eat
and come back to work.
Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and
all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on
them.
One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed
elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers
work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water
and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit,
and machine grime of the day.
Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling
miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for
money. The sign speaks till midnight.
Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence
holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor
and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip
pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money
is stacked in them.
A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights
of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of
red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span
of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of
crosses and clusters over the sleeping city.
By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars
and has a soul.
Square
Street, make to yourself you Square
get wider, that we are great
put only walls, don't put roof
we want to do a bonfire,which the stars looks at us
Square don't do street to yourself, wait a moment
don't do street to yourself
PD sorry, excuse me my english, in spanish is:
Plaza
Calle, hazte Plaza
ensánchate que somos muchos
pon sólo paredes, no pongas techo
queremos hacer una hoguera, que nos miren las estrellas
Plaza no te hagas calle, espera un momento
no te hagas calle.
ok -- this has has the potential of devolving into bad-poetry-drivel pretty quickly.
BUT, as both poetry and architecture (as well as music) have a specific and (when good) particularized relationship between structure, form, and content -- I find many similarities.
no poems to post here, but some favs that fit this bill:
Robert Creeley, William Bronk, Michael Palmer, William Carlos Williams (particularly Paterson), Galway Kinnell and others like that...
I think the relationship between poetry and music is true, but the arquitectural experience is diferent , very diferent at those ones
What is the relationship between Phisics, Economy, and Poker because both at the back have a mathematical structure? IMO nothing ( except poker and economy possibly, but not because both share mathematical or stocastics concepts)
Is a topic romantic to make links between Poetry and Architecture (even Music) that devolving into bad metafor drivel pretty quickly without real content
Schiller said, architecture is frozen Music
(but music is not melt architecture, said other one)
LB Alberti spoken about "musicality" but in methaforical sense,
"writing about music is like dancing about architecture" said Elvis Costello
John Hejduk, Anyone?
Within the context of Glancey's piece i think the issue that interests me is twofold.
1. What does it mean a poetic vision? What is the relationship between poetry and architecture? It does seem as if key in this question are ideas of rhythm, flow and affect (some of which has already been mentioned). But what about the idea of vision? This implies grand thoughts, a sense of dreaming and also critique.
2. Does contemporary architecture really lack a poetic vision? If so when has architecture had one? What does a poetic vision mean? Is such architecture related in opposition to provocative, media centric, form driven architecture? Would a contemporary architecture that such a "poetic vision" be more or less meaningful than current architecture? Or just more beautiful? Not necessarily in terms of form etc.
Is there even a relationship that can or should be constructed?
I think it was Goethe who said architecture is frozen music... anyone is absolutely sure?
Well, is music defrosted architecture?
My own favourite, on the subjects of scale/subjective-objective world-views/masculine-feminine/climate change...
To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.
A dove-house filled with doves and pigeons
Shudders hell through all its regions.
A dog starved at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misused upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fibre from the brain does tear.
A skylark wounded in the wing,
A cherubim does cease to sing.
The game-cock clipped and armed for fight
Does the rising sun affright.
Every wolf's and lion's howl
Raises from hell a human soul.
The wild deer wandering here and there
Keeps the human soul from care.
The lamb misused breeds public strife,
And yet forgives the butcher's knife.
The bat that flits at close of eve
Has left the brain that won't believe.
The owl that calls upon the night
Speaks the unbeliever's fright.
He who shall hurt the little wren
Shall never be beloved by men.
He who the ox to wrath has moved
Shall never be by woman loved.
The wanton boy that kills the fly
Shall feel the spider's enmity.
He who torments the chafer's sprite
Weaves a bower in endless night.
The caterpillar on the leaf
Repeats to thee thy mother's grief.
Kill not the moth nor butterfly,
For the Last Judgment draweth nigh.
He who shall train the horse to war
Shall never pass the polar bar.
The beggar's dog and widow's cat,
Feed them, and thou wilt grow fat.
The gnat that sings his summer's song
Poison gets from Slander's tongue.
The poison of the snake and newt
Is the sweat of Envy's foot.
The poison of the honey-bee
Is the artist's jealousy.
The prince's robes and beggar's rags
Are toadstools on the miser's bags.
A truth that's told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
It is right it should be so:
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
The babe is more than swaddling bands,
Throughout all these human lands;
Tools were made and born were hands,
Every farmer understands.
Every tear from every eye
Becomes a babe in eternity;
This is caught by females bright
And returned to its own delight.
The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar
Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.
The babe that weeps the rod beneath
Writes Revenge! in realms of death.
The beggar's rags fluttering in air
Does to rags the heavens tear.
The soldier armed with sword and gun
Palsied strikes the summer's sun.
The poor man's farthing is worth more
Than all the gold on Afric's shore.
One mite wrung from the labourer's hands
Shall buy and sell the miser's lands,
Or if protected from on high
Does that whole nation sell and buy.
He who mocks the infant's faith
Shall be mocked in age and death.
He who shall teach the child to doubt
The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.
He who respects the infant's faith
Triumphs over hell and death.
The child's toys and the old man's reasons
Are the fruits of the two seasons.
The questioner who sits so sly
Shall never know how to reply.
He who replies to words of doubt
Doth put the light of knowledge out.
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar's laurel crown.
Nought can deform the human race
Like to the armour's iron brace.
When gold and gems adorn the plough
To peaceful arts shall Envy bow.
A riddle or the cricket's cry
Is to doubt a fit reply.
The emmet's inch and eagle's mile
Make lame philosophy to smile.
He who doubts from what he sees
Will ne'er believe, do what you please.
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
To be in a passion you good may do,
But no good if a passion is in you.
The whore and gambler, by the state
Licensed, build that nation's fate.
The harlot's cry from street to street
Shall weave old England's winding sheet.
The winner's shout, the loser's curse,
Dance before dead England's hearse.
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.
Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.
We are led to believe a lie
When we see not through the eye
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.
God appears, and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in night,
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.
'Auguries of Innocence' by William Blake
and this one from John Donne:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
no indie-kid prizes for obscurity ;-p
from the article:
"I didn't have an academically approved theory to back up my sentiments, yet I felt that what I had to say was in the spirit of architects, of all eras, with poetry in their souls and with the spirits, too, of poets like Hardy, Betjeman and Larkin, among many others, who have truly seen poetry in architecture"
i'd say one sees poetry inspiteof architecture.
for my part, i did not care much for hejduk's poems. but i was really intruiged by his cartoons and architectural work which i don't claim to understand yet (barely spent any time with them). its easy to call something poetic and not understand what that particular poetic is.
and its a bit disingenuous to posit "poetic architecture" as a hinge between architecture and poetry or, the other way around, a poetry on some architecture as being this hinge. however one wishes to defines 'poetic' (i find it typically means allusive and/or lyrical...of course if etymologically, it is embroiled in the very act of creation) it is not synonymous with 'poetry'.
how does our reading and thinking of what is physical structurally inform what is textually structured? one obvious example i can think of is mallarmé in his un coup de dés
come to think of it, on a very fundamental level, the inscription of language on stone, then paper, then screen (this latter is a result of language -computer code language- as much as it is a staging of language) informs the medium as much as it informs the mediating ie language.
we're talking about a different kind of 'poetic' than we talked about in architecture school, right? maybe there should be a distinction made:
poemic = related to poems?
poetic = related to making?
[first posted this in the news item, but this seems like the right place.]
the thing with hejduk is that his poetry was closely related to his architecture -
"Writing about Hejduk's poems in 1980, Eisenman observed, "Walter Benjamin has said that Baudelaire's writings on Paris were often more real than the experience of Paris itself. Both drawing and writing contain a compaction of themes which in their conceptual density deny reduction and exfoliation for a reality of another kind: together they reveal an essence of architecture itself.""
(that's from the description of "Such Places as Memory", a book of hejduk's poems).
"Hejduk's poems are not so much pure poetry as they are linguistic structures generated from and attached to his architectural practice..."
Steven.
Interesting point. Which of the two did you discuss in school? Poemic?
Glancey definetely seems to be interested in how it relates to making.
I think.
And noct, your comment about physical form informing textual structure is actually the opposite of the way i was approaching. I guess i was thinking text informing structure/form some how. Or maybe more like Structure/form referencing or drawing on text or at least the structure or style of the text?
Does that make any sense?
i guess, separate from what he says, what glancey DOES makes me describe his as a critique of the poemic aspects of architecture. he uses a poem as an example.
the poetic aspects of architecture, as part of architecture curriculum in the late 80s/early 90s, had to do with the making of architecture and how the process of making was embodied/communicated in the result - how the architecture/artifact exhibited its making and how that could remain part of the experience of the architecture. it almost never, in my memory, had anything to do with a poem.
Steven,
Based on your explanation i would say (with toungue slightly in cheek) and you seem to be suggestign that what Glancey was saying,
is that there is perhaps to much in contemporary architecture that is poemic but not poetic?
Also, I loved "un coup de dés" by Mallarme. I had never read it before. Reminded me alot of various Concrete and Surrealist poets/poetry i have read
what is "pure poetry"? thats idiotic. poetry is in its linguistic structure. what, does the author of that quote think people spontaneously ejaculate "pure poetry"? poetry is the skidmark of language, language reordered around its own messy traces. poetry is the paella of language, the re-creative garbage of language.whoever claims poetry, any poetry, is this wisp of intangible virginal ethereality is wanking to nonsense.
aside from that little point, i do recall hejduk's poetry being bland and unsurprising. unlike those stranger-than-architectures of his.
perhaps i'll give the poems another try sometime.
namhernderson;
in my opinion, the 'article' was quite wishywashy.
Noct,
Very much so I agree. It seemed like he had some interesting daydream and decided to run with it.
But it did inspire in me the desire to explore the idea(s) more. To try and pin what he meant down along with it's implications.
I understand Aldo van Eyck's dad was a poet. Where this becomes apparent in A.'s writing is in his conceptual sophistication; the way he addresses layers of meaning. I was reading bits of his 'The Child, the City and the Artist' whilst at the Venice Biennale a few weeks ago and what struck me was how sophisticated his thinking was in marked contrast to the 'one liner' concepts behind most of the, albeit glossily absorbing, installations at the arsenale which, for all their surface enjoyment, demonstrated only the most tiresomely mechanistic grasp of human psychology; a theme that surely deserved better understanding given Aaron Betsky's theme...
As for van Eyck, I particularly enjoyed his piece 'There is a garden in her face' which is a bit long to post here. I can always Email it to anyone interested.
As for the general points, my take is that poetry shares with architecture, as it does with music and painting, extensions to the realm of meaning rather than distortion thereof or "language reordered around its own messy traces" as noctilucent says.
Connoisseur of Chaos
A. A violent order is a disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)
II
If all the green of spring was blue, and it is;
If all the flowers of South Africa were bright
On the tables of Connecticut, and they are;
If Englishmen lived without tea in Ceylon,
and they do;
And if it all went on in an orderly way,
And it does; a law of inherent opposites,
Of essential unity, is as pleasant as port,
As pleasant as the brush-strokes of a bough,
An upper, particular bough in, say, Marchand.
III
After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops' books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so . And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.
IV
A. Well, an old order is a violent one.
This proves nothing. Just one more truth, one more
Element in the immense disorder of truths.
B. It is April as I write. The wind
Is blowing after days of constant rain.
All this, of course, will come to summer soon.
But suppose the disorder of truths should ever come
To an order, most Plantagenet, most fixed. . . .
A great disorder is an order. Now, A
And B are not like statuary, posed
For a vista in the Louvre. They are things chalked
On the sidewalk so that the pensive man may see.
V
The pensive man . . . He sees the eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.
Wallace Stevens
e.e. Cummings
John Cage
Hejduk
although not a poet, i have been reading Bakhtin's analysis of Rabelais, and i am getting a fascinating insight about the "rightness" of my direction...
jhooper,
i really like how stanza II sounds ... that particular part would be also really nice sung over a tape loop of the same...echoing and breathy. would be even nicer sung a bit wistful and a bit whimsical and a bit nonsensically because its a tad bit too didactic (which is the case with the rest of the poem...which is ok if not sung, its quite nicely balanced didacticism)
a bit nonsensically
it is TS Elliot and Four Quartets for me.
there was something about his "still point of the turning world" that made me want to make it... well, try.
http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/
test (poem?) by whomevers
1999.04.17 07:44
[architecture as interface comes with the architecture of schizophrenic interfacing...]
[buildings constantly move, doors can be windows, windows can be doors, stairs to Pilate are climbed annually on knees, walls may soon all talk, floors will mostly remain flat, ceilings with sprinklers are virtual skies that harbor emergency rain, roofs probably more than anything manifest architecture's shape, lights, camera, Africa, machines to create architecture with, furniture and painting as one, utilities that never fail (sic), plants, of course, grass gets high, sidewalk, siderun, sidecrawl, sidesit, sideroll-over, driveway complete with Jeep, garage sale as museum,..]
and through the fanlight
flies the fanmail
like a pigeon
with a fantail
Architects who write poems about architecture tend to be very bad and usually not recognized by the larger community of poets. There's a reason for this. I include Hejduk in that equation—he's the closest that architecture has ever had to a resident poet. But I personally find his poems somewhat amateurish.
On the other hand, poets who occasionally write poems about architecture can be very good. Zbigniew Herbert is fantastic, Vijay Sashedri is really good, Robert Haas has written a few things about architecture, Adam Zagajewski and Wislawa Szymborska, Eugenio Montale, others.
I've always liked Donald Barthelme's writing, which strikes me as prose-poetic. I wasn't surprised when I found out that his father was an architect.
this was suggested to me by michael rotondi last year.
Ode To Tomatoes by Pablo Neruda
The street
filled with tomatoes,
midday,
summer,
light is
halved
like
a
tomato,
its juice
runs
through the streets.
In December,
unabated,
the tomato
invades
the kitchen,
it enters at lunchtime,
takes
its ease
on countertops,
among glasses,
butter dishes,
blue saltcellars.
It sheds
its own light,
benign majesty.
Unfortunately, we must
murder it:
the knife
sinks
into living flesh,
red
viscera
a cool
sun,
profound,
inexhaustible,
populates the salads
of Chile,
happily, it is wed
to the clear onion,
and to celebrate the union
we
pour
oil,
essential
child of the olive,
onto its halved hemispheres,
pepper
adds
its fragrance,
salt, its magnetism;
it is the wedding
of the day,
parsley
hoists
its flag,
potatoes
bubble vigorously,
the aroma
of the roast
knocks
at the door,
it's time!
come on!
and, on
the table, at the midpoint
of summer,
the tomato,
star of earth, recurrent
and fertile
star,
displays
its convolutions,
its canals,
its remarkable amplitude
and abundance,
no pit,
no husk,
no leaves or thorns,
the tomato offers
its gift
of fiery color
and cool completeness.
farwest1, who are these architects, besides Hejduk, that write poems about architecture that constitute your evaluation?
A tremendous poem by Zbigniew Herbert:
Report from the Besieged City
Too old to carry arms and fight like the others -
they graciously gave me the inferior role of chronicler
I record - I don't know for whom - the history of the siege
I am supposed to be exact but I don't know when the invasion began
two hundred years ago in December in September perhaps yesterday at dawn
everyone here suffers from a loss of the sense of time
all we have left is the place the attachment to the place
we still rule over the ruins of temples spectres of gardens and houses
if we lose the ruins nothing will be left
I write as I can in the rhythm of interminable weeks
monday: empty storehouses a rat became the unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor murdered by unknown assailants
wednesday: negotiations for a cease-fire the enemy has imprisoned our messengers
we don't know where they are held that is the place of torture
thursday: after a stormy meeting a majority of voices rejected
the motion of the spice merchants for unconditional surrender
friday: the beginning of the plague saturday: our invincible defender
N.N. committed suicide sunday: no more water we drove back
an attack at the eastern gate called the Gate of the Alliance
all of this is monotonous I know it can't move anyone
I avoid any commentary I keep a tight hold on my emotions I write about the facts
only they it seems are appreciated in foreign markets
yet with a certain pride I would like to inform the world
that thanks to the war we have raised a new species of children
our children don’t like fairy tales they play at killing
awake and asleep they dream of soup of bread and bones
just like dogs and cats
in the evening I like to wander near the outposts of the city
along the frontier of our uncertain freedom.
I look at the swarms of soldiers below their lights
I listen to the noise of drums barbarian shrieks
truly it is inconceivable the City is still defending itself
the siege has lasted a long time the enemies must take turns
nothing unites them except the desire for our extermination
Goths the Tartars Swedes troops of the Emperor regiments of the Transfiguration
who can count them
the colours of their banners change like the forest on the horizon
from delicate bird's yellow in spring through green through red to winter's black
and so in the evening released from facts I can think
about distant ancient matters for example our
friends beyond the sea I know they sincerely sympathize
they send us flour lard sacks of comfort and good advice
they don’t even know their fathers betrayed us
our former allies at the time of the second Apocalypse
their sons are blameless they deserve our gratitude therefore we are grateful
they have not experienced a siege as long as eternity
those struck by misfortune are always alone
the defenders of the Dalai Lama the Kurds the Afghan mountaineers
now as I write these words the advocates of conciliation
have won the upper hand over the party of inflexibles
a normal hesitation of moods fate still hangs in the balance
cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders is smaller
yet the defence continues it will continue to the end
and if the City falls but a single man escapes
he will carry the City within himself on the roads of exile
he will be the City
we look in the face of hunger the face of fire face of death
worst of all - the face of betrayal
and only our dreams have not been humiliated
Zbigniew Herbert
Um, students of Hejduk, people who I went to school with, Enric Miralles, others.
This, by the way, is a personal impression from someone who reads a lot of poetry. Not some definitive statement on the worthiness of architects who write poetry.
farwest, i thend to agree with you on your point, my thing with Hejduk is that the writing is inseparable from the work and vice-versa. that is primarily my reason for listing him.
I asked several years ago if there were any other architects who have read The Changing Light at Sandover. farwest1, have you read it? There's a very different architecture to it. Very virtual realm.
Yeah, it's beautiful. James Merrill is, to my mind, one of the most effortless poets who ever lived. I don't necessarily appreciate everything he's done—he's a bit too cute and clever for me—but the guy had an amazing natural gift for language, metaphor, juxtaposition and reference.
lame duct
Read it straight through 25 years ago.
The exploding quartz pyramid supplied the most currency.
"Mister Mysterious Pyramid"
Overall, it inspired all kind of things in my subsequent creative endeavors. [which I find as I re-read now]
Even became an Akhnaton and Nefertiti buff.
Do I still know the names of their daughters?
Meritaten, Meketaten, Ankhesenpaaten, Neferneferuaten, Neferneferure, Setepenre
"Don't touch my Tuts!"
Looking back, it was then
almost
like reading an online forum thread
now.
My favorite better-known poets are Zbigniew Herbert (quoted above), Rilke, WH Auden, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Czeslaw Milosz.
I guess the commonality between them all is that they somehow link the political with the metaphysical landscapes of their own cultures. Which, I suppose, is what architecture is about (at least if you buy what Zumthor talks about in Thinking Architecture.)
revolutionary letters (dedicated to bob dylan) by diane diprima
4
Left to themselves people
grow their hair.
Left to themselves they
take off their shoes.
Left to themselves they make love
sleep easily
share blankets, dope & children
they are not lazy or afraid
they plant seeds, they smile, they
speak to one another. The word
coming into its own: touch of love
on the brain, the ear.
now then, how is it that this thread has escaped the ire of the 'architecture is a practical art' crowd'?
is a poem practical language?
are poems safely enough tucked away in their corner that they can be written off / indulged in?
if there is an equivalence between architecture and a poem, is there an equivalence between daily language and, uh, architecture as a practical art? etc etc etc. . .
why are all these architects interested in poems?
and thumbs up to WCW and Paterson
No ideas but in things
Poems and architecture are radically, radically different things.
You can write a poem about a building. But it would be difficult to make a building about a poem.
A building can kill someone, but a poem cannot.
A building has a material reality. A poem, not necessarily (they can be read or spoken, for instance.)
I don't know if I buy that WCW line about no ideas but in things. Can't there be ideas in ideas, for instance?
when i read a part of the poem by diane diprima, first thing that engaged my attention was how a rigid structure was disjointed to suggest growth, which subsequently reminded me of the facade of asplund's villa snellman. then i find another parellel analogy between her poem and asplund's philosophy of romantic naturalism. paradox is the game we have to play in modern cities, and as the anticipations of migration and population growth grow, bipolarity splits our psyche, and i wonder if our minds can function like physiological homeostasis without mutating into schizophrenia. as much as we feel the need of new socio-economic order or perhaps of the return to agrarian nature, for the time being, it is becoming more eminent for urban inhabitants to maintain social mobility and not to suffer from the symptoms of 'negative individualism' (r. castel). the question then becomes philosophical stand in regards to what sort of society or community we want to create within enclaves. hence, education and psychogeographies formed from our exposure to various environments become important issues we have to deal with to continue with progress without falling back to what primal chaos, i cannot imagine. in this mindset, it seems necessary to maintain certain orders, even to desire to return to the classical order as we nudge against beauty which has been eaten up by monsters in our current cultural landscapes, and it is not too often we sense the beauty of poetry in architecture in generic cities. yet, when i first saw the twisted tower of de young museum, i exclaimed 'it is beautiful'. in other times, i have sensed sublime beauty in modest architectural expressions without much anticipations.
Egoist,
A long but nice passage.
You last few sentences get to what i believe is the core of what Glancey was suggesting....
A POEM IS A MIRROR WALKING DOWN A STRANGE STREET
mr. henderson, i thought, when i read the article, reminded me of architecture like an oasis as one of my professors told me once in grad. school. otherwise, there are all kinds of poetries in our everyday architecture, about which i would like to hear a different take from noctilucent, about evocative qualities of phenomenology of familiar spaces. ~~
from David Shapiro's intor to "Such Places as Memory" by John Hejduk
"Poetry and architecture are not just contingent analogues for Hejduk. They are both building arts. They are ontologically the same art, as he has proposed a drawing strong as a building and visa versa. Poetry is not confession, an ejaculatory mode of expressionism. Nor is it dominated, in a Roman Jakobson's sense, by the axes of reference or resort to public, political command. Poetry and architecture are both replete arts of repetition and persistence, and no one know better than Hejduk the haunting uses of parallelism in all it devious asymmetries, first pointed out in Hebraic poetry by one Bishop Lowth. The sculptural sense of an authoritative test is built up by Hejduk....Hejduk builds up poems of a geometrical fury. Such a poetry does not depend on the ornament of rhyme or conventional meter, but it does depend on the fundamental cosmology of geometric repetition with drastic differences. Furthermore, such poetry does not need to sacrifice any of the so-called "axes of the aesthetic". One still has here a poetry of truth-telling detail and sensuous palpability. The poetry is maximal and severe, and the poems build up in sequence to the final variable structure: the book."
Annunciation
The Angel dropped
and knelt
to ask a pardon
for its announcement
anticipating the
coming entombment
The stone vault door
exploded into
putrid passage
Italian was softly spoken
The cloth was loomed
in iris
Waxed Banisters
pinioned the entry
Impregnation was complete
Joseph wept
?
icky
Asesinado por el cielo.
Entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe
y las formas que buscan el cristal,
dejaré crecer mis cabellos.
Con el arbol de muñones que no canta
y el niño con el blanco rostro de huevo.
Con los animalitos de cabeza rota
y el agua harapienta de los pies secos.
Con todo lo que tiene cansancio sordomudo
y mariposa ahogada en el tintero.
Tropezando con mi rostro distinto de cada día.
¡Asesinado por el cielo!
- Federico García Lorca, Poeta en Nueva York
Home from a Walk
Assassinated by the sky,
between the forms that are moving towards the serpent
and the forms that are moving towards the crystal
I'll let my hair down
With the tree of amputated limbs that does not sing
and the boy with the white face of an egg
With all the tiny animals who have broken heads,
and the ragged water that walks on its dry feet.
With all the things that have a deaf and dumb fatigue,
and the butterfly drowned in the inkpot
Stumbling over my face that changes every day,
assassinated by the sky.
- Federico García Lorca, Poet in New Tork (tr. Robery Bly)
thats andalucian lorca on new york right at the beginning of the great depression era (serpent= hudson river i'm guessin ... crystal= skyscraper) and thats a poem inspite of architecture. that epic "assasinated by the sky" vertical line strikes down like a giddy bout of vertigo. unfortunately, in the english translation the cutting 'ka' sound replete in the spanish poem that renders its into more of a violently punctuated reading is not to be found in the english translation above. i think this contrasts very well with the pretty and pastoral picture of the fourfold painted by heidegger, the fourfold turned against itself. this is something i also find in celan ... where, in a more extreme manifestation of the disconrdant fourfold, the observing subject finds itself beyond signification (at least beyond the norms of signification)...subjectivity undone by its surrounding.
in my mind, the harmonic fourfould has always invited bloodshed. just as much as a country at peace invites a possibility of war (if one acknowledges a state of 'peace' ...one acknowledges, implicitly, a state of 'war'.)
Annunciation - by John Hejduk...immaculate conception and the deaths of christ.
"home from a walk" - in english, can not read spanish, has that ontological effect to the extent as noc says - "subjectivity undone by its surrounding."
Hejduk is said to be a ontological world builder. This approach to architecture as to poetry as to paper architecture and as to theoretical architecture seems much more a worthwhile endeavor than any other approach to the praxis of architecture.
To take it one step further, if one could construct the worlds in which "subjectivity (is) undone by its surrounding", if this could be an architecture of reality or paper, then we would have a realm (field) in which architecture could operate objectively.
how to do this? suggestions?
8 December: Immaculate Conception
which occurred circa 18 years before
25 March: Annunciation/Incarnation
2 July: Visitation
25 December: Nativity
It is the Annunciation, as reported by Luke 1:26-38, where a series of events are clearly described.
1. (26) The angel Gabriel is sent by God to Nazareth. The presence of an angel already constitutes a miraculous event, a theophany.
2. (27) The angel is sent to a betrothed virgin named Mary. Here Scripture clearly states that Mary is a virgin and that she is promised in marriage to Joseph.
3. (28) In greeting, Gabriel exalts Mary; "the Lord is with thee" reiterates the theophany, thus Mary's being "full of grace" and "Blessed among women" is Divinely sanctioned.
4. (29) Mary is troubled by such a greeting, signifying her overall innocence in this situation.
5. (30) Gabriel assures Mary of her safety within the theophany taking place.
6. (31) Gabriel 'announces' to Mary that she will conceive and subsequently give birth to a boy, Jesus.
7. (32-33) Gabriel Highly exalts the nature of Mary's announced offspring, indeed to the point of infinity.
8. (34) Mary exclaims confusion at the announcement, while she herself proclaims her virginity.
9. (35) Gabriel tells Mary the Holy Spirit will come upon her, the Most High will overshadow her, and the Holy One to be born will be called the Son of God. Gabriel essentially announces the soon forthcoming of the Trinity, a complete theophany.
10. (36) Gabriel then announces the Precursor, John the Baptist.
11. (37) "for nothing shall be impossible with God."
12. (38) Mary's ultimate reply, "Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word," is extremely important on two counts. First, it is at the moment of Mary's complicity that the Incarnation (the Word becoming flesh) occurs. (Note Gabriel efficiently departs as soon as his task is complete.) Second, without Mary's complicity, the Incarnation would have been the result of a rape, not at all unlike the sexual relationship between Mars (a divinity) and Rhea Silvia (a Vestal Virgin), another reported theophany which progenerated Rome.
After the Annunciation/Incarnation comes the Visitation, where John the Baptist, when he for the first time is in the presence of the Incarnation, takes a noticeable pre-natal leap.
As someone interested in both poetry and architecture, I get really frustrated that the only reference to poetry for many architects is John Hejduk.
And when he's talked about, it's not as a poet would discuss poetry, but in the high-fluff of poststructuralist theory—"ontological world builder, etc." Any metaphorical or poetic weight is literally sucked out of his work and stomped on.
metaphorical is not all that interesting in poetry...
T.S., especially in the book "Prufrock and other observations" is a "ontological world builder" of Henri Bergson's philosophy. sure there are many references and metaphors.
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