Asked about writing architecture, and the architecture of writing, my first thought was not archi-poetry , but the underlying importance of reading. For there can be no writing without reading, and no reading without reading situations. Even granting evidence put forth by Stephen Hawking, and friends, that strange kinds of information just might escape a black hole precisely because they have strings attached, no literary cosmos ever scrawled forth of its own accord from a wordless vacuum. Or, as the photographer André Kertész, the critic Roland Barthes and the novelist Marcel Proust each demonstrated in their respective works On Reading , the act of reading ‘takes place’ not solely in individual minds and hearts, but in the shifting midst of complexly imperfect worlds within worlds; i.e. within those human and inhuman situations that – like us – are shaped (however partially and ironically) via social, discursive and symbolic encounters. ‘A Hunt for Optimism in the middle – or thereabouts’ (facing page) is one in a series of experimental poems resulting from transformative re-readings of textual works I’ve selected for their potential to open up questions of architectural poetics. Themselves worthy of multiple readings, these sources become renewable and renewing resources: new beginnings for an ongoing exploration of the poetry of architecture and the architecture of poetry. By selectively re-opening, condensing, transforming and complicating these exemplary sources – through a responsive process midway between reading and writing, finding and making – these poems reinterpret not simply the original words but the worlds those words had begun to originate, expose, explore and reform. And this is done not simply for my own amusement, but with the aim of inciting others to risk their own heuristically interpretive and emancipatory responses, thus perceiving the world anew through the art of reading archi-poetically. To the extent we succeed (together) in doing this, then the poem on the facing page is a poetic translation, a world-changing shortcut, ripping through the heart of Viktor Shklovsky’s A Hunt for Optimism . Throughout this experimental, meta-literary, multi-genre, hyper-textual mash-up montage of a novel, Shklovsky mingles provocative reflections on literature, poetry, art and architecture, with ironic satires of the related political, historical, and social situations that made him write both with and against them. Although the book opens and closes with profound musings on the architecture of human reality, I found what I needed in ‘The Middle of The Book or Thereabouts’. As I’ve attempted here on this page, for the sake of doing justice to underlying sources, A Hunt for Optimism presents many pages split into two columns, thereby juxtaposing excerpts from literary contexts and precedents the author’s own writing associatively builds on and reads into. In his early influential essay ‘Art is Technique’, Shklovsky outlined a strategy of Ostranenie , a device of formal estrangement (defamiliarisation, or ‘strange making’) meant to enkindle and empower more radical perception in readers of life and art. As he later clarified, this ‘formalist’ device was not a rejection of cultural content, meaning, and context, nor of emotive and symbolic imagery, but a necessary strategy of artful resistance: both to oppressive political ideologies (and censorship) and to our human tendency to fail to perceive what is actually happening in the world we live in. Although Shklovsky recanted and ultimately softened his formalist polemic, in the midst of A Hunt for Optimism he maintains: “We weren’t too wrong. Only to the extent that one needs to err in order to think”, and to see and to build “new forms of art so they can convey life”. f On Reading — a hunt for optimism
“The effort of the writer as of the painter succeeds only in partially raising for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance which leaves us indifferent before the universe.” – Marcel Proust, On Reading (1905)
“Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” – Viktor Shklovsky, Art as Technique (1914)
“A crooked road, a road in which the foot feels acutely the stones beneath it, a road that turns back on itself—this is the road of art” – Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (1925)
“We don’t know how to build buildings… Should we build small houses on legs, a separate room,
a studio for one person, so that he can be either with everyone else or completely alone? Or should we build huge buildings with elevators and maybe tram cars in the hallways… Our house floats… under the sky. That’s probably called ‘drifting’… There is a place in the mountains where the rivers join. They have brought with them so many stones that it looks like a construction site for a city with paved streets. …as a painter would teach another painter. He taught him how to break the planes, how to insert a plane into another, he taught him what was then called sdvig [shift, dislocation]. Mayakovsky transferred the culture of painting to poetry… Mayakovsky was familiar with ‘the revolt of things,’ the knowledge that things would betray us… I was very young then, a curly-haired boy with a few ideas, …and a temperament that could bend the boards of a podium. I was a sculptor then and could understand literature because I was coming from the craft of sculpture…
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‘In the meantime, the epic was born.’
…Every writer is asked to repent after several days or several years of appearance. ‘Be like everyone else and we’ll forgive you for writing.’
Shouldn’t we talk here, too, about the fact that the writer isn’t made of bronze? That he is afraid of the reader, believes in him, watches… We have been bizarre since the creation of the world. I am holding a small book in my hand.
…The dawn is breaking. The dawn is breaking persistently. The dawn is breaking in all the stories of this book…
We are walking. I think we are in the middle of the street. It’s wide. The sky is above us.
The Future was an important concept. A longing for another time –a time that is behind the mountains, where one can go.
The ellipsis–an omission–is the principal image. If you fill the space between the thing and what it is being compared to with explanations, the image becomes explicable and useless… The writer carries a live bird–his heart–in his hands… It’s much easier to talk through a hero. This is how it all begins… Everything in the past matters… And so your heart is hidden in the chest of another…
Dear stranger, I’m afraid of you when you read my book in a tram car.” – Viktor Shklovsky, A Hunt for Optimism (1929-31)
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