Poems for Architects

Poems, like architecture, are mosaic-patterned images…
They give you the entire picture in a glance;
but on a closer scrutiny, reveal to you, every single nuance.

I wrote the above lines on the cover of this interesting book, one I’ve had the pleasure to be gifted and read… Poems for Architects: An Anthology, by Jill Stoner.

Architecture being my passion and poetry being part of what I do to express myself, I found this book just apt and for me. The content definitely has poems, yes, but more so by different people from across the world. And classified under different sections like form, urbanism,etc- each section having a descriptive essay at the beginning and visuals interspersed with quotes. The book seeks asks as well as answers the question, ‘Why do architects need to know poetry?’

Sharing few of the poems:

1. A Walk Through Munich

*still life:
I walk through the city
apartment buildings,
government offices
built of marble,
sheathed in basalt,
which we tore out of cliffs
in Flossenburg, Mattausen, Lissa…
I look, I think:gasoline,
some hand grenades
a work detail,
and so, house after house,
street after street,
quarter after quarter,
one city after another,
like the ghetto in Warsaw;
as if this were a beautiful work of architecture:
above- the clear blue sky,
below- the burnt out walls.

(Tadeusz Borowski, translated by Tadeusz Pioro. This is a long poem of many sections, separately titled, of which ‘still life’ is one.)

2. DIAGRAMS

Downtown, an office tower is going up.
And from the mesa of unfinished top
Big cranes jut, spectral points of stiffened net:
Angle top-heavy artefacts, and yet
Diagrams from the sky, as if its air
could drop lines, snip them off, and leave them there.

On girders round them, Indians pad like cats,
with wrenches in their pockets and hard hats.

They wear their yellow boots like moccasins,
balanced where air ends and steel begins.
Sky men, and through the sole’s fresh, chewed and pliant,
they feel the studded bone-edge of the giant.
It grunts and sways through its whole metal length.
And giving to the air is a sign of strength.

(Thom Gunn)

More in the next post.