Poems for Architects: An Anthology

by Jill Stoner (Editor)

"This lively book pops the question of how an architect might live with poems. The response is fresh, stimulating and likely to provoke a new engagement with the Muse." - Donlyn Lyndon Eva Li Professor of Architecture University of California at Berkeley

Genres: Poetry, Architecture

175 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2001

Reviews

[Rob Baker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I am not an architect, I dabble in the writing and reading of poetry and found Stoner’s musings on how the two arts might be seen to complement each other, if sometimes a little pedantic or a bit of a stretch, more often interesting and thought-provoking.

In her final essay, Stoner writes, “My premise is that the study of closed forms in the art of poetry can help us understand the potential for the art of modern architecture to rewrite itself…Inquiry into the architectural analogues for each of these (poetic) devices leads us to ever more metaphysical questions, like “How can architecture rhyme?”

With ideas like this in mind, Stoner includes designs created by an illustrator that overlay selected poems, showing how their rhyme schemes, repetition, line length, etc., might be converted into building structures or urban plans.

The poems Stoner selects to illustrate her ideas Include some old friends (“One Art”, “The Waking”, “Mending Wall”, even an A. A. Milne poem) and also many that I was unfamiliar with but am glad to have encountered.

I got this book as an inter-library loan; by the time I was able to read it, I had limited time left so had to get through it quicker than I might have liked. I don’t think I always do justice to poems or essays when I read a whole bunch of them in a short period of time. I would recommend lingering over it more than I was able to.