<i>Modern American Poetry and the Architectural Imagination</i> by Jo Gill

We are living in a time of short attention spans and limited memories with publishers often releasing little books that, while stimulating, often display cultural and critical amnesia by neglecting to adequately acknowledge previous groundbreaking work. Gill reminds readers of what scholarship is in her thorough examination of modern poetry’s architectural affinities. The book houses a vast community of creative and academic work while focusing on close readings of poems that sparkle with new insights.Chapters on Hart Crane, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Frank O’Hara provide a thorough synthesis of this revealing part of modern American poetry. In doing so, she demonstrates sound knowledge of main architectural contributors such as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Daniel Libeskind. Gill’s scholarship expertly weaves in previous academic developments in this area of study.The Introduction on “The Harmony of Forms” clearly foregrounds how the book “traces the relationship between the two disciplines and asks, first, how poets have learned how to think and to see, or to imagine, architecturally, and then how architects have assimilated the practice and vision of poetry in contemplating their own work” (3). Modern American architecture is thoroughly encompassed in Chapter One with a vernacular consisting of imported and indigenous forms, evolving through materials such as iron, steel, concrete, and glass electrically illuminated in the early modern period. Twentieth-century international style developed concurrently with “the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in New York” (36) and ongoing transatlantic exchanges, as well as pan-American ones. Gill is consistently attentive to the cultural work of architectural materials and buildings that can anchor and dislocate people.Chapter Two shows readers that Hart Crane’s poetry of New York architecture, primarily in The Bridge and White Buildings, “encompasses the solid (earth, granite, wood, iron, steel) and the ineffable (light, air, shadow, sound), thereby establishing a vital foundation for the work that was to follow” (77). In Chapter Three, Carl Sandburg’s Chicago “poetry establishes an important early concern with the materiality of architecture and with the labor and social conditions that brought it into being” (5).For the audience of this journal, our main interest is Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, although readers will also be rewarded by Gill’s integration of architectural poetics from Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Many readers of Bishop will want to read Chapter Four on “Wallace Stevens: Ideas of Order.” Gill differs from previous scholars by showing that Stevens “holds [. . .] in productive tension” a natural organicism that is also consciously historical and “carefully built” (117). He is seen “arriving at some of the same conclusions as [. . .] contemporaries” such as architect Louis Kahn, who writes “that ‘knowledge is nothing until it comes to a kind of sense of order, a sense of the harmony of systems’” (118). While Kahn’s 1961 “Law and Rule” essay resembles Baudelaire’s poetic theory of correspondences from a century before, a difference is that Kahn, and Stevens as the author of Harmonium, manage to address “questions of history, language, and meaning” (118) at the same time.Gill traces Stevens’s fascination with architecture back to a visit to the Chicago’s World Fair when he was 14, and his early move to New York City in 1900. Stevens is famously known for “‘roaming about town’ as he put it in a 1909 letter” no matter where he lived (119). Gill offers a wide range of analyses from the claustrophobia of “A Window in the Slums” (1900) to the open apertures of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1949) and “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (1954). Along the way, Stevens lived mostly in Hartford where he often visited the innovatively modern Wadsworth Atheneum that hosted art exhibits by Gertrude Stein and Piet Mondrian in the Avery Memorial Building with its “freedom from ornament” and “insistence on clear-cut lines” (122). Gill demonstrates Stevens’s early modern harmonious vision through lesser-known poems such as “Six Significant Landscapes” with its lamp-posts, domes, and towers pierced by “‘What one star can carve, / Shining though the grape leaves’” (125). I can’t help but notice French Symbolist inflections from Baudelaire and Rimbaud extending through Stevens’s modernism all the way to David Bowie’s “Eight Line Poem” from 1971: “but the key to the city / is in the sun that pins / the branches to the sky” (Hunky Dory).One of Stevens’s main contributions to architectural poetics is his long poem of the Great Depression, Owl’s Clover, which is set in various public parks. Gill is adept at showing how he provides social critiques of park architecture in the first two sections, “The Old Woman and the Statue” and “Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue.” However, section three, entitled “The Greenest Continent,” with its “heaven of Europe [. . .] empty, like Schloss / Abandoned because of taxes [. . .]” is said to demonstrate the “collapse of Europe [. . .] in the figure of the ruined castles of Germany” (135). This is the case but it’s a very small part of this section that addresses Africa as “The Greenest Continent” being colonized by Europeans, most notably Mussolini. Gill also omits section four, “A Duck for Dinner,” which is about transplanting European culinary customs into picnics in American parks. While thorough coverage of Stevens’s long poem is not necessary here, this analysis is slightly misrepresentative of the poem, and arguably a missed opportunity to further discuss Atlantic crossings within developing American architectural poetics. Gill does include the final section, “Sombre Figuration,” as a fine “reconciliation between the rational and the imaginative” (135). She states that this “solid” and “fluid” (136) dialectical harmony “anticipates Bishop’s ‘Song for the Rainy Season,’ and Lowell’s ‘Water,’” which is a great point nicely developed in the next chapter. However, I find the word “anticipates” too intentional here and elsewhere in the book. Perhaps I’m being too picky, but it would be more accurate to suggest that Stevens was a precursor to Bishop and Lowell in this regard.Intricate readings of “The Common Life” from Parts of a World (1942) and “The Motive for Metaphor” from Transport to Summer (1947) contend with “the apparently alienating qualities of the urban built environment” (138) as mechanical, and lead to detailed discussion of 1949’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and “larger questions of materiality and imagination” (142). Ultimately, Gill concludes: “His is an architectural and poetic vision that exteriorizes, that looks outwards and away” (143). Age and physical decay have a way of doing that.My favorite part of this chapter, in addition to the early paths of young Stevens, is Gill’s discussion of “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” While the poem is not explicitly about architecture, it strongly evokes the experience of awakening in a house at dawn. It “opens at the threshold between outside and in,” and “the fluidity or transparency of the two dimensions” are awesome (146). This sublime liminality is what makes Stevens and Bishop so powerful in building poetic environments that welcome organic nature. “As [Frank Lloyd] Wright observes: ‘We have no longer an outside as outside. We have no longer an outside and an inside as two separate things. They are of each other.’ In the ‘new architecture,’ he continues, ‘like poetry, this sense of architecture is the sound of the ‘within’ (The Natural House 44)” (Gill 147). Wright, Stevens, and Bishop do with architecture and nature what Wordsworth did with nature in “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey [. . .]” (note that this building is not discussed in the 1798 poem) where “a sweet inland murmur” is his heart’s registration of “mountain-springs” (Wordsworth 131).As Gill demonstrates in Chapter Five on “The Strangeness of Scale,” Bishop’s Parisian poetry in “Paris 7 A.M.” and “Sleeping on the Ceiling” builds additional texture by integrating history and architecture into inhabited structures where readers feel the past become the present while stimulating imagination beyond the life teeming inside and out. As Gill puts it: “The effect is to evoke the tension between interiority and the pull of public space and between built and natural environments” (154). The Parisian poems lead to “The Monument,” which is “like Stevens’s ‘Owl’s Clover’ and any number of other poems about monuments or statuary, an exploration of aesthetic and political power, of history and its representation in plastic form” (155). Moreover, Gill attends to the poem’s playful dynamics of proportion and scale to reveal “architecture’s power, or of the designs it might have on us” (158). “The Monument” is questionably built of various materials and located arbitrarily, “‘Are we in Asia Minor, / or in Mongolia?’” (18), so that the reader’s perspective is loosened up and vision set in flux. The poem also indicates Bishop’s transition from Paris to New York, the latter of which Gill features next with innovative attention to the “Three Poems” draft and Bishop’s perspectivism “in nearness, and farness, and the sweet-spot that marks the convergence of both in the mind’s eye” (163). This reminds me of Paul Cezanne’s multiple renderings of the same scene that play with perception until Mont Saint-Victoire is best converged in “the mind’s eye.” Similarly, Monet paints multiple Water Lilies, and van Gogh in the late nineteenth-century painted at least 30 Haystacks to show the effects of snow and sun “in order to succeed in rendering what I seek” (The Met Fifth Avenue).Bishop’s “Love Lies Sleeping” opens the aperture further to create mystery in “strangeness of scale,” as the effects of great buildings are described by architect Daniel Libeskind in 2004’s Breaking Ground (167). While Bishop’s 1930s New York poetry is a precursor to twenty-first-century architectural thinking, it also aligns with the contemporaneous thoughts of Le Corbusier in La Ville Radieuse [The Radiant City] (1935):“The Man-Moth” likewise reaches out of the dark skyscrapers for the moon.In Bishop’s Brazil of the 1950s, Gill observes in “Arrival at Santos” that “[t]he built environment is but a manifestation of the culture and community of those who reside in it” (172). “Squatter’s Children” dream of mansions from the vantage point of a soggy room in a “specklike house” to “serve as metaphors for relative wealth and deprivation” (173). Bishop was fortunate to write in a studio built beside a waterfall for her by Lota de Macedo Soares, who was immersed in the architectural movements of the day, and personally and professionally acquainted with key figures [that] included Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle-Marx [who designed Rio’s Flamengo Park with her]. She was credited as an invaluable adviser to the Museum of Modern Art’s influential ‘Latin American Architecture Since 1945’ exhibition and catalogue, curated by Hitchcock with the ‘intention of bringing Brazil and the United States together through cultural exchanges.’ (Hugo Segawa, Architecture in Brazil: 1900–1990 qtd. in Gill, 174)Macedo Soares’s Samambaia home where they lived was designed by Sergio Bernardes, who was “described in The Architectural Review’s ‘Report on Brazil’ of 1954, as one of the ‘leaders of the profession’” (175). The mountaintop house near Petropolis was also featured in a 1960 issue of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui along with Niemeyer’s “acclaimed Brasília Palace Hotel” (175). Also coming out in 1960 was Bishop’s “Song for the Rainy Season,” which “pays homage to the house and its special architecture, [with its] [. . .] unique and distinctively modern design in bringing together the inside and the outside, the human and the animal, the domestic and the elemental” (176). In analyzing the original New Yorker version instead of the better-known poem from 1965’s Questions of Travel, Gill picks up on a “perturbing” aspect within the poem’s house with its “unwelcome intrusions”:Too indulgent, perhaps,To silver fish, mouse,To bookworms,Big moths,And the mildew’sIgnorant maps.Gill innovatively discusses this porous rendering of the house, which features more domestic vulnerability than the 1965 revision that celebrates love with an “open house / to the white dew / and the milk-white sunrise / kind to the eyes, / to membership / of silver fish, mouse, / bookworms, / big moths; with a wall / for the mildew’s / ignorant map” (Bishop 82); this version of the poem houses an idyllic embodiment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s fluid organicism—until the drought dries up the adjacent waterfall. Gill goes on to suggest that Robert Lowell’s “Water” borrows from “Song for the Rainy Season” the notion that rock is potentially deadly without water. Similarly, Bishop notes troubling antipathies in the newly built Brasilia with its “overblown dimensions” in her essay “A New Capital, Aldous Huxley, and Some Indians” (qtd. in Gill 179). Gill concludes that “[a]rchitecture has informed and sustained Bishop’s poetry; it has caught her imagination and exposed some uncomfortable social and ethical realities” (184).Chapter Six on Frank O’Hara’s “Light and Space” brings fresh postmodernity to the discussion and “recaptures some of the galvanizing energy that we saw in Crane or Sandburg – open-eyed, open-minded enthusiasm that had been tested in Stevens and eroded in Bishop” (190). In depicting innovative constructions in Ann Arbor’s University of Michigan campus, and New York (the Museum of Modern Art where O’Hara worked, the United Nations complex, and the Seagram Building), “O’Hara learns to read and to love an architecture that seemed in these early days so alien and discomfiting” (194), “to leave us with something closer to the bedrock of experience” (196) “in engaging with those designs” (222) with “the thrill of the new” (250).Since we are investigating form and space in the structural harnessing of light, this subject seems limitless. Still, Gill’s concluding chapter carefully observes the limitations at stake to “argue that although many of these architects find in poetry a fruitful analogy of their work, what we also see is that poetry often operates as a limit case for architecture” (225). Poetry is used by architects to open vistas of possibility—“like a new knowledge of reality” as Stevens writes in “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” to “know the place for the first time,” as Venturi quotes Eliot’s “Little Gidding” in Architecture as Signs and Systems with Scott-Brown in 2004. They also use “Tradition and the Individual Talent” to “emphasize image – image over process or form – in asserting that architecture depends on its perception and creation on past experience and emotional association” (242). Jo Gill brings these constructions to life.

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