A Short Meditation:
How is a City Like a Poem?
A Poem Like a City?
A poem has lines. A city has streets.
A neighborhood is like a stanza. It is a gathering.
A house is like a word: it contains worlds.
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In the 15th and 16th centuries the Incas aligned their cities to their view of the world and the movement of the heavenly bodies. Machu Pichu is divided into four segments: left and right, upper and lower. The left was the feminine where, for instance, food was grown. The right was masculine where business was transacted. The upper represented the upper world and the lower represented the lower world. (In Inca cosmology there are three worlds: upper, middle, and lower. We live in the middle world.) The demarcation between the upper and the lower worlds also separated the nobles from the commoners.
In those days theater around world produced epics, tales of kings. Poetry was the stories of the gods. The forms were proscribed.
Which changed first? Our poetry or our cities?
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You come around a bend in the road and you see a park or a church or a mural on the side of a freeway overpass. It is so unexpected. A poem surprises the reader in the same way.
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… the metaphoric faculty is essential to the way we occupy the world; metaphors work so well in language precisely because they are part of our innate conceptual equipment. Only metaphor can offer us the clues by which we negotiate with our physical environment. It is the business of architecture, and to some extent the other arts also, to captivate and nourish that faculty.
… the site opened by the catastrophe of September 11 … terrorists cruelly but unwittingly reaffirmed the metaphoric power of a building.
Joseph Rykwert
The Seduction of Place:
The History and Future of the City
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An architect is concerned with stress. A poet is concerned with stress. Where is the energy? Where is the focus? How does one handle the energy in the building or the poem? How does one keep it from falling down?
In poetry stress may be visible in the content of the poem, the placement of the images, in the poet’s voice or body movements, in the syllables of the words themselves.
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architect: from the Greek. Arkhi meaning chief. Tekton meaning builder.
poet: one who makes.
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Architectural rhythm: the pattern created by windows, by a row of columns, by a series of arches.
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A poet places lines on the white space of a page. An architect creates space with walls. There is more space than lines of poetry or walls.
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A poem and a city are never the same on the second visit.
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Architecture, then, is like written history and literature – a record of the people who produced it – and it can be “read” in much the same way. Architecture is a nonverbal form of communication, a mute record of the culture that produced it.
Leland M Roth
Understanding Architucture:
Its Elements, History, and Meaning
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Equally applicable to buildings and poetry:
Form is never more than a function of culture – Allen Gilbert
Form is never more than a function of content – Robert Creeley
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Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” How are we shaped by the shape of our poetry?
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Projective Building
A building is energy transferred from where the architect got it (she will have several causations), by way of the building itself, all the way over to, the viewer. Okay. Then the building itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy discharge. So: how is the architect to accomplish the same energy, how is she, what is the process by which an architect gets in, at all points, energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled her in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to the building alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the viewer, because he is a third term, will take away?
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Is a book like a house then? With its chapters for rooms?