Poetic Architecture

Kent Johnson
Photography by Geoffrey Gatza BlazeVOX [books] Kenmore, NY

Poetic Architecture by Kent Johnson Copyright 2008 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza Photography by Geoffrey Gatza First Edition ISBN: 1-934289-32-9 ISBN 13: 978-1-934289-32-7 Library of Congress Control Number : 2008920495

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Versions of the following quizzes, before their web publication at VeRT and North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics [my thanks to Andrew Felsinger and Steve McCaffery, respectively], were shared on the British Poets listserv, which explains the reason for the two unexpected e-mails I include as Interregnums herein.

For Andrs Ajens, Romn Antopolsky, Leticia El Halli Obeid, and Guillermo Daghero

Poets! Fold up your yurts and move on!

--Frank OHara

If you could be a building, what kind of building would you be?

--Jack Spicer, from questionnaire for the Poetry as Magic Workshop

Poetic

Architecture

W arm- up Question

[It is not necessary to answer this one, only to think about it (in the sense of setting the mood), before tackling the Quizzes below.]
Is poetry ever distinct from architecture? Can it exist, in the most material sense, without it? Think of writing practices, their technologies, and enclosures: pens, paper, computers, printing presses, ateliers, summer retreat cabins, salons, conferences, academic offices, classrooms, publisher buildings, the reading space, and so on. Again: Is poetry ever separate from architecture? One might protest: "But architecture is a form of poetry, really," which, if true, would not cancel the possibility that there is an "always/already" indivisible macro-historical conflation of practices. What do you think?

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Quiz #1

1) Can a conceptual poem have a blueprint? 2) Does a door connect the "inside" and "outside"? 3) What kind of door should it be: swinging or sliding? 4) Is there plumbing and where does it go?

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Quiz #2

1) Is a dactyl a brick or a gargoyle? Justify. 2) What is the relationship of engineering to conceptual poetic architecture? Is the architect-poet responsible for designing a structure that can actually be built? If so, why? 3) Can concepts of architectural acoustics (reflection, diffusion, diffraction of waves) be applied to conceptual poetry? Specifically, is the turn toward spatial rigor in concert hall structures by acoustical architects like Leo Baranek, Harold Marshall, and Michael Barron (the isolation of orthogonal parameters so as to fine-tune sound reflection and reverberation via the control of initial time-delay gaps) an argument of sorts for further (and urgent) investigations into rigorous prosodic structure, without which poetry is fated to continue its downward spiral into incomprehensible sonic and semantic muddle? Investigation, that is, not in the banal sense of traditional Western forms, but in the sense of Oulipean mathematical rigor, or the fractally complex prosodies of advanced rap (which make avant-garde formalists, of whatever shade, seem like clog dancers)... 4) Are words in a conceptual poem a) rooms b) furniture c) walls d) vestibules e) windows f) corridors g) other? Explain.

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Quiz #3

1) In conceptual poetry, what is an arch? Explain and draw a model. 2) Take Mies van der Rohes somewhat forgotten Farnsworth house or Le Corbusiers Villa Savoye as analogy: Can the body of a conceptual poem be hollowed out in every direction: from above and below, from within and without, so that a cross section at any point will show inner and outer space penetrating each other inextricably? Think hard, keeping in mind that form in poetry has a long and unconscious history as a category "apart," despite sporadic "seminal" announcements to the contrary. 3) Is it possible, in a move of boldest conceptual elan, to build a conceptual poem over a waterfall? Confirm or deny; then, if the former, say what you would title such a poem. (Remembering that Wright's most famous building is a physically flawed structure, and that the roaring of the water forced the inhabitants to abandon the house.) 4) Is the incipient turn of new poetries to architectural/spatial theory symptomatic, in any way, of the generalized crisis of the current poetic avant-garde? Insert a compass as metaphor (or metonym, if you desire) in your answer.

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Quiz #4

1) Take Michael Riffaterre's book Semiotics of Poetry, where he argues that the poetic involves a dialectic between mimesis or representation, on the one hand (which creates what Riffaterre calls "meaning"), and significance, on the other. The "architecture game" of poetry, then, would seem to involve deciphering a "significance" that is always deferred by the parabolic indirections of transforming "meaningful" observation into architectonic structure. Does this suggest that a poem --the kind that is written on a two-dimensional page--is really a kind of deceptive faciatta through whose apertures an interior "content" is fleetingly and deceptively glimpsed against what is, in the most material sense, a swarming particle space? Answer yes or no via a parable in the style of Plato. 2) If a metaphor is a balcony, is the view it affords measurable in terms of a paraboloidal function (for example: x2/a2+y2/b2 = 2cz [where a, b, and c are constants]), or is that just gibberish? Justify. 3) What is a Conceptual Poet? Is she an Architect? Think hard. 4) Can a security alarm system be built into a conceptual poem? Name it.

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Quiz #5

1) Is the cultural "space that forms the writing, even as the writing (of experimental Authors, that is) attempts to probe its dimensions," the space of a certain Flatland? Refer to Bachelard and the Japanese folktale about the mice and the elephant. 2) Can architectural acoustic theory (reflection, diffusion, refraction, decay of sound, and the artifices of its absorption) serve as an heuristic tool for imaging the institutional interpolations (not obvious ones like the Academy, but those at more inaudible frequencies) inhabiting the cultural structures of "avant-garde" poetry? If Yes, build a cardboard model of such a tool. If No, try to build one anyway. 3) The following question is two questions, really, so points are double (triple if the two answers are seamlessly melded into one): a) What is a "flutter echo"? Provide one example from the current English Poet Laureate and another from one of Jack Spicer's "translations" of Federico Garcia Lorca. b) Was Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau a visionary and mystical poetic text or a meaningless shrine to garbage, insanely imploding into an ever-more claustrophobic postmodern space? Justify, being careful to note the possible irony in the question. 4) What is more relevant to avant-garde poetry's possible co-extensiveness with architecture: The Brooklyn Bridge or the ruins of a University after a riot? Explain.

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Quiz #6

1) Is it possible that the recent desire amongst innovative writers to build analogical skywalks into a discipline of power and social utility such as architecture may be impelled from below by a hidden structure of ideological tensions and undergirdings that parasitizes and eats from within, thus shaping, as it consumes, the very social space of "avant-garde" aesthetic practice? Answer yes or no, and then rewrite this question into a syntax that is less onerous. 2) As partly evidenced by the November, 2000 Language/Poetry/Performance Conference in New Delhi, contemporary innovative poets have become influenced by recent architectural theory's critique of "Total Design, a concept that has two meanings: a) the "implosive, in which design takes over all interior space (Sullivan, Wright, Taut, the Vienna Secession, etc.) and b) the "explosive, where architecture is destined and authorized to move outward beyond discrete structure to encompass all scales (the Harvard School of Design via Gropius, the English Designs and Industries Association, etc.). The former resists (in petit-bourgeois/aristocratic fashion) industrialization and its culture; the latter (in futuristic/avant fashion) seeks to become its very spirit. The former is most famously embodied by the Weimar School of the Arts and Crafts, under the leadership of van der Velde; the latter by the Bauhaus, under the late inspiration of Gropius. Now, one could see the "implosive school" as analogous with the circumscribed ontology of mainstream, workshop verse, including recent conservative expressions of formalism: the ArchitectPoet is the Hero of Interior Design. But one can also see, as Mark Wigley, head of Princeton's School of Architecture points out, that the "explosive school" is founded on an "...explosion of the designer. Not only are objects designed, mass-produced, and disseminated; the designer himself or herself is designed as a product, to be manufactured and distributed. The Bauhaus produced designers and exported them around the world. The vast glass walls of the Dessau building which, in Gropius's words 'dematerialize' the line between inside and outside, suggest this immanent launching outward of both students and their designs. Even the teaching within the studio was a product. Gropius said that he only felt free to resign in 1928 because the success of the Bauhaus was finally established through the appointments of its graduates to teaching posts in foreign countries and through the adoption of its curriculum internationally." Write an answer of at least 300 words drawing parallels between the Bauhaus as described by Wigley and Language poetry, with particular attention to the latter's accelerating absorption by the academic institution. Be rigorous in your answer and avoid servile timidity. 3) Is the Anglo-American Modernist long poem "explosive" or "implosive" in its architectures? Or is its largesse, rather, impelled by a dialectical tension between these two poles? If the latter, what does it mean that such a "synthesis" has resulted in the canonical ossification of the genre? And is this ossification analogous to the sacralization of those classical ruins to which millions of tourists

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every year make pilgrimage? Use The Cantos, The Wasteland, Patterson, Briggflatts, Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlen, and The Anathemata as examples in your answer. This is a very complicated question, so don't leap to the obvious (i.e. Of course the Modernist long poem is explosive!) You should think so hard that your very head catches fire. 4) "The architects who talk about chaos, absence, fragmentation, and indeterminacy usually work hard to assure that you know that a design is theirs by using signature shapes and colors. Arguments about the impossibility of 'the total image' are employed in fact to produce precisely such an image-- a signed image that fosters brand loyalty. Clearly, the dream of the total work of art did not fade in modernism's wake. On the contrary, all of the issues raised by architects and theorists of recent generations that seem, at first, to signal the end of the idea of the total work of art turn out to be, on closer look, red herrings that thinly disguise the traditional totalizing ambitions of the architect." Relate this quote (5 extra points if you can identify its source) to Michael Palmer, Susan Howe, Jorie Graham, Charles Bernstein, and J.H. Prynne. After doing so, briefly discuss the meaning of the Signature and its role as limen within Poetry's (with extra emphasis on the post-avant) institutional architecture.

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