MITPressLog

Poetry for Architects

The Writing Architecture Series from MIT Press and the Anyone Corporation has given architects a chance to voice off in formats not commonly associated with architecture. The series is full of literary criticism, philosophy, art history, personal essays. John Hejduk's poetry collection Such Places as Memory is a compilation of his reflections and autobiographical musings on memories and places. Roger Connah, author of How Architecture Got Its Hump offers his "anti-epic" poem in Welcome to the Hotel Architecture, excerpted like this:

READ THE T-SHIRTS
      STAY ALIVE
The Waiter's T-shirt exhorted
Whilst Da Vinci's Measure of Man became
Man's measure and flipped this century
Into a romance with dimension
It could ill afford.

The advice came free with the shirt:
Advice Architecture could afford to take
As Frank began cutting up the menu into twelve equal parts
Reconstructing once more
Architecture's own attractive errors.

Deconstruction, forget it! Harry said,
We have always been more than a trend, haven't we Frank?

Still it was obvious if you happened to look around
And the blindness had not stuck that
There was no Time in any real sense left.
The auditorium doors had opened
Architecture was showing at the Hotel Cinema, Aurora.
There was panic all around.

Everyone was given laser spex.
(Look at a light. You won't believe your eyes--
But never look directly at the Sun!)
Sad, Frank said
What is? Harry asked
Architecture!

Black Mountain Poets

The sun sets unevenly and the people
go to bed

The night has a thousand eyes.
The clouds are low, overhead.

Every night it is a little bit
more difficult, a little

harder. My mind
to me a mangle is.

-Robert Creeley

This poem comes from Robert Creeley. He was one of the many poets that taught, worked and studied at the Black Mountain College in the mid 20th century. The poets that affiliated themselves with the school included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, John Wieners, Paul Blackburn and dozens of others. The list of faculty, students and residents that these poets lived and worked with is an astonishing compilation of the who's who of the period's postmodern avant-garde and includes composer John Cage, Choreographer Merce Cunningham, painter Joseph Albers and architect Buckminster Fuller. This genius brigade caused an impressive flow of ideas that has gone on to influence an immeasurable portion of the contemporary/avant-garde art and culture of the past 50 years.

Robert Creeley discusses the College's work and ideas in Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art, edited by Vincent Katz. Mary Emma Harris gives a more historical account in The Arts at Black Mountain College.

Words at a Glance

Did you know that before Vito Acconci became a pioneering performance and video artist he wrote poetry?  It's true.  And we have a new book to prove it.  Acconci even studied poetry at the Iowa Writer's Workshop.  Until now, his poems, if they were published at all, appeared in the late 1960s in obscure magazines and broadsheets with limited circulation and are long out of print.  So, in honor of National Poetry Month, here's one of Acconci's early poems.  Decades ahead of his time, his experimental writing is still provocative and edgy today. 

READ THIS WORD THEN READ THIS WORD READ THIS WORD NEXT READ THIS WORD
NOW SEE ONE WORD SEE ONE WORD NEXT SEE ONE WORD NOW AND THEN SEE ONE
WORD AGAIN LOOK AT THREE WORDS HERE LOOK AT THREE WORDS NOW LOOK AT
THREE WORDS NOW TOO TAKE IN FICE WORDS AGAIN TAKE IN FIVE WORDS SO TAKE
IN FIVE WORDS DO IT NOW SEE THESE WORDS AT A GLANCE SEE THESE WORDS AT
THIS GLANCE AT THIS GLANCE HOLD THIS LINE IN VIEW HOLD THIS LINE IN
ANOTHER VIEW AND IN A THIRD VIEW SPOT SEVEN LINES AT ONCE THEN TWICE
THEN THRICE THEN A FOURTH TIME A FIFTH A SIXTH A SEVENTH AN EIGHTH

From Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci in MIT Press' Writing Art Series which also recently published Cuts: Texts 1959-2004 featuring poetry and writing by Carl Andre