Poetry and Space

One of the treasures I found on a recent visit to San Francisco’s famed art/architecture/design bookstore mecca, William Stout, is Jill Stoner’s Poems for Architects. The book was new to me, which isn’t surprising given it was published by the in house publishing division, William Stout Publishers.*

Stoner is an architect who also studied poetry, and this slim volume is exquisite conceived. Divided into sections (with headings such as “Poems at Home”, “City Poems”, “The Jar & The Field”), Stoner has written thoughtful introductions to each poetry grouping. An unexpected visual touch: Stoner’s own sketches are included on slightly transparent vellum, a delicate bridging between the architectonic and the poetic. Having seen so many attempts over the years to get poetry to cohabit with other art forms—most of which have left me feeling deeply unsatisfied—I found this undertaking to be one of the most successful cominglings. Stoner brings her careful selection of poetry and her architectural sensibility into a taut and mutually respectful relationship with each other.

Here is a sampling of her approach:

Why should architects read poems, and how might they be useful? According to Vitruvius, delight itself is useful, but poems do more than delight. They draw us into the tiny spaces within the letters and between the words; they make rooms of stanzas and roofs of rhyme. The forty-eight poems in this collection invite us in, to make use of them in any way we choose…

In recent decades many an architectural excess has been committed in the name of poetry, but not on account of the reading of poems. Now we have become disenfranchised of the spaces that are supposed to belong to us; the possess us with alarming authority, and imprison us in symbolic forms that have lost their meaning. These forms are not mute; instead they speak in tongues that we cannot understand. The strange spaces inside poems can, paradoxically, make more familiar the spaces of the daily life; so architects, by visiting these spaces, can become more tuned to the walls we still build, and within which we pass these present days.

This following poem by Auden, included in the book, is half of a pairing. Coming tomorrow: Up There.

Down There

(for Irving Weiss)

A cellar underneath the house, though not lived in,
Reminds our warm and windowed quarters upstairs that
Caves water-scooped from limestone were our first dwellings.
A providential shelter when the Great Cold came,
Which woke our feel for somewhere fixed to come back to,
A hole of occupation made to smell human.

Self-walled, we sleep aloft, but still, at safe anchor,
Ride there on caves; lamplit we dine at street level:
But, deep in Mother Earth, beneath her key-cold cloak,
Where light and heat can never spoil what sun ripened,
In barrels, bottles, jars, we mew her kind commons,
Wine, beer, conserves and pickles, good at all seasons.

Encrust with years of clamming grime, the lair, maybe,
Of creepy-crawlies or a ghost, its flagstoned vault
Is not for girls: sometimes, to test their male courage,
A father sends the younger boys to fetch something
For Mother from down there; ashamed to whimper, hearts pounding,
They dare the dank steps, re-emerge with proud faces.

The rooms we talk and work in always looked injured
When the trunks are being packed, and when without warning,
We drive up in the dark, unlock and switch lights on,
They seem put out: a cellar never takes umbrage;
It takes us as we are, explorers, homebodies,
Who seldom visit others when we don’t need them.

–W. H. Auden

*About William Stout Publishers (from their website):

William Stout Publishers began producing books on architecture and design in 1995. The first books published were reissues of important source documents that had fallen out of print, such as William Morrish’s “Civilizing Terrains.” and “Schindler” by David Gebhard. Subsequently, William Stout began publishing a series of monographs documenting the work of West Coast Architects. In recent years we have been working with the Environmental Design Archives at University of California- Berkeley, North Carolina State University, Rice University and California College of Arts.

Small Animals

My friend LP continues to feed my poetry habit. She posted the following poem by Larissa Szporluk on her site over the weekend. I immediately went scurrying through the web for more information about S’s work.

So following the poem posted below is an excerpt from an interview with the poet from Perihelion. The sensibilities expressed here overflow effortlessly and fittingly into other creative pursuits, like music and visual art. I love the interviewer’s statement that each of Szporluk’s poems feels like a small animal, something I absolutely know the feeling of in the visual realm. I also understand that sense of aliveness in the process of making, and how that changes at various stages in the life of a work.

Thank you LP. Keep leading me.

Cuckoo

I nudge the eggs
of not my make,
watch them drop
without a thought—
dead who? dead who?
Who cares? They’re
not my make. I’m
cuckoo-true, a blood
and thunder freedom
monger—free what?
free who? Free you,
my boy, from mama
bird and birdie wife
and future brood.
You’re free to crack,
to stink, to cook.
You’re better off off
the hook, and off
the clock of my off-war
where time is space
and space is time
and both are wound
to wind up mine—
without a wall, what
can hang? Without
the sky, why not fall?
It’s all all off, but
I’m in tune. Death
is math. Rest assured
the nest left you.

–Larissa Szporluk

From Perihelion:

Q: Your poetry is often described as work that is very active, very full. I often feel like each poem is a small wild animal. How do you feel when you read your own work? How much does the readers’ perception concern you?

Szporluk: I’m completely uneven as a reader of my own work. I revise endlessly. It’s kind of sickening, goes beyond what is actually constructive. I suppose that might be why the work seems “active”–because it’s always being acted on. I can’t leave it alone. I’m too aware of all the possibilities. I know with conviction how much better every poem could be. The reader’s perception concerns me a lot, but I try to postpone that concern until the end, near-end, of the process. I have an imaginary reader who is very demanding. He/she will not tolerate any fluff. I hope the small wild animals you feel are hairless because if there’s anything I can’t stand it’s decoration. And yet I do it all the time.

Q: I’ve heard various people claim that there is no Auden or Eliot to look up to and follow these days. But people are writing poetry. Each year more people enroll in Creative Writing programs and submit work to literary magazines, so something must be driving them and encouraging them. As a poet and a professor of Creative Writing, what do you think of the state of poetry in this age?

Szporluk: I think it’s fine to be Audenless. Why should we have another one? We should have something of our own, and we shouldn’t worry about its name or nature. What I love about the state of poetry in this age is how passionate the students are–they become completely involved in the process of writing and I think they realize that they can apply that same intensity to the rest of their lives. One graduate student confessed that she wasn’t happy when she wasn’t writing, that everything else seemed dull. (Which is what my husband says about surfing.) For me, it’s a sign that people are connecting to the creative process, which is bigger than ourselves, and infinitely more wonderful. I’m very positive about poetry today. I think it has become a force.

Q: What kind of relationship do you have with your own poetry? We all have different roles we live which compile part of the self. One’s work can feel drastically different when held in his/her own hand privately than when it’s on the way to the publisher. Do you feel that with your work? Does your work meet different needs within you as a person, as a professor, as a publishing writer?

Szporluk: I think I answered part of that question above, but I’ll reiterate a bit. My work now has become inseparable from myself as a whole, inseparable from teaching, from parenting. It’s the publishing part that I worry about; it’s the one part I can’t reconcile. I’m not sure anybody can. When I’m writing a poem, it’s as alive as I am. So alive in fact that I feel an urge to send it out immediately, a very stupid urge I’ve learned. A vast sea lies between my desk and the desks of editors. They look at my spasmodic arrangements and frown. I’ve had to discipline myself. Now I only (usually) send out work that has calmed down. Once it’s published, it becomes dead to me–a good dead I think. It has crossed the sea. I no longer speak to it. I’m definitely the kind of writer who prefers the process to the finished product.