poetic architecture by kent johnson with photography by geoffrey gatza book preview

7/31/2019 Poetic Architecture by Kent Johnson With Photography by Geoffrey Gatza Book Preview

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Poetic Architecture by Kent JohnsonCopyright © 2008

Published by BlazeVOX [books]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publisher’s written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews.

Printed in the United States of America

Book design by Geoffrey GatzaPhotography by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition

ISBN: 1-934289-32-9 ISBN 13: 978-1-934289-32-7 Library of Congress Control Number : 2008920495

BlazeVOX [books] 14 Tremaine AveKenmore, NY 14217

[email protected]

BlazeVOX [ books ]

blazevox.org

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Versions of the following quizzes, before their web publication at VeRT and NorAmerican Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics [my thanks to Andrew Felsinger

and Steve McCaffery, respectively], were shared on the British Poets listserv, whexplains the reason for the two unexpected e-mails I include as “Interregnums” herein.



For Andrés Ajens, Román Antopolsky, Leticia El Halli Obeid,and Guillermo Daghero



Poets! Fold up your yurts and move on!

--Frank O’Hara

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

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



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[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, publibuildings, the reading space, and so on. Again: Is poetry ever separate from architecture? Onemight 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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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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1) Is a dactyl a brick or a gargoyle? Justify.2) What is the relationship of engineering to conceptual poetic architecture? Is the architect-poeresponsible for designing a structure that can actually be built? If so, why?

3) Can concepts of architectural acoustics (reflection, diffusion, diffraction of waves) be appliedconceptual poetry? Specifically, is the turn toward spatial rigor in concert hall structures byacoustical 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 intoincomprehensible 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 fractallycomplex prosodies of advanced rap (which make avant-garde formalists, of whatever shade, seelike 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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1) In conceptual poetry, what is an arch? Explain and draw a model.2) Take Mies van der Rohe’s somewhat forgotten Farnsworth house or Le Corbusier’s Villa Savas analogy: Can the body of a conceptual poem be hollowed out in every direction: from above 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 along and unconscious history as a category "apart," despite sporadic "seminal" announcements tthe contrary.

3) Is it possible, in a move of boldest conceptual elan, to build a conceptual poem over a waterfaConfirm 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, othe 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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1) Take Michael Riffaterre's bookSemiotics of Poetry , where he argues that the poetic involves adialectic between mimesis or representation, on the one hand (which creates what Riffaterre call"meaning"), and significance, on the other. The "architecture game" of poetry, then, would seeminvolve 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 throughwhose apertures an interior "content" is fleetingly and deceptively glimpsed against what is, in tmost 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 functio(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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1) Is the cultural "space that forms the writing, even as the writing (of experimental Authors, thais) 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 theartifices 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 thecultural structures of "avant-garde" poetry? If Yes, build a cardboard model of such a tool. If Notry to build one anyway.

3) The following question is two questions, really, so points are double (triple if the two answersseamlessly 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 GarciaLorca. b) Was Kurt Schwitters's Merzbau a visionary and mystical poetic text or a meaninglessshrine to garbage, insanely imploding into an ever-more claustrophobic postmodern space? Justibeing careful to note the possible irony in the question.

4) What is more relevant to avant-garde poetry's possible co-extensiveness with architecture: ThBrooklyn Bridge or the ruins of a University after a riot? Explain.



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1) Is it possible that the recent desire amongst innovative writers to build analogical skywalks ina discipline of power and social utility such as architecture may be impelled from below by ahidden 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 yor 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 NeDelhi, contemporary innovative poets have become influenced by recent architectural theory'scritique of "Total Design,” a concept that has two meanings: a) the "implosive,” in which designtakes 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 discretestructure to encompass all scales (the Harvard School of Design via Gropius, the English Designand 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 veryspirit. The former is most famously embodied by the Weimar School of the Arts and Crafts, undthe 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 ArchiPoet is the Hero of Interior Design. But one can also see, as Mark Wigley, head of Princeton'sSchool of Architecture points out, that the "explosive school" is founded on an "...explosion of tdesigner. Not only are objects designed, mass-produced, and disseminated; the designer himself

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 thisimmanent launching outward of both students and their designs. Even the teaching within thestudio was a product. Gropius said that he only felt free to resign in 1928 because the success ofBauhaus 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 ofat 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 institutionBe rigorous in your answer and avoid servile timidity.

3) Is the Anglo-American Modernist long poem "explosive" or "implosive" in its architectures? is its largesse, rather, impelled by a dialectical tension between these two poles? If the latter, whdoes it mean that such a "synthesis" has resulted in the canonical ossification of the genre? And this ossification analogous to the sacralization of those classical ruins to which millions of touris



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every year make pilgrimage? UseThe Cantos, The Wasteland, Patterson, Briggflatts, Cornish Heroic Song for Valda Trevlen,and The Anathemata as examples in your answer. This is a verycomplicated 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 worhard 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 preciselysuch an image-- a signed image that fosters brand loyalty. Clearly, the dream of the total work ofart 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 oturn out to be, on closer look, red herrings that thinly disguise the traditional totalizing ambitionof the architect." Relate this quote (5 extra points if you can identify its source) to Michael PalmSusan Howe, Jorie Graham, Charles Bernstein, and J.H. Prynne. After doing so, briefly discussthe meaning of the Signature and its role as limen within Poetry's (with extra emphasis on the“post-avant”) institutional architecture.

poetic architecture by kent johnson with photography by geoffrey gatza book preview

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