JL Williams: Architecture, dreams, metaphor & poetry.

Architectural psyches and poetry

0:00Hello. For professional Swiss mind reader and keen amateur builder Carl Jung, architecture was not a metaphor but a means of understanding the human psyche. His dream of a multi-story house helped shape his concept of the collective unconscious, while the homes he designed gave physical form to his propositions about the relationship between conscious and unconscious life. For Jung, the mysteries of the psyche could not be understood through words and dreams on their own, but required architectural space to embody, illustrate and explain them. For us normals, building castles in the air is as far as we can hope to get. Not so for this week's Heirs for Architecture podcast guest, poet and creative projects

0:32manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, JL Williams, or Jennifer to those who know her. Jennifer published Strange Architectures this year, her fifth collection of poems with Shearsman books, and in which she presents visions of architectures dreamed and written, taking us the audience over thresholds and interspaces of her, and perhaps our own, inner worlds. Be a good sport and support the Heirs for Architecture podcast via the Patreon or buy me a Ko-fi links in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Jennifer and the book online.

1:05Heirs for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space.

Background and early influences

1:10Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted today to be talking to JL Williams, poet, otherwise known as Jennifer. Jennifer, thank you for joining me. It was delightful to be contacted by you about your book, Strange Architectures, which was published by Shearsman book. As I say, it's a fascinating collection of poems, and you're going to read some for us, which I'm really delighted about. But before we get to such fruits, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself?

1:43I'd be delighted to, and I would love to start by saying thank you so much, Ambrose, for having me here. I'm a big fan of your podcast, so I feel a bit starry-eyed. You're actually getting to speak with you in person.

1:58I first started writing poetry when I was probably in about third grade, I think. I grew up in America, in northern New Jersey, and someone handed me a book of Shel Silverstein's poems, and something inside me went, wow, that's my thing.

2:21So I wrote poetry and plays all through school, and performed poems, and got to read a poem at my high school graduation. And I think it was a big part of my

2:39way of thinking about the world and communicating with other people. And I ended up going to Wellesley College to study English literature. I did a,

2:52as you can there, I did a kind of focus on English literature with a minor in studio art. And then shortly thereafter came to work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I was working on my friend's play that she brought, and fell in love with Scotland, to my surprise, and kind of moved over here shortly thereafter. So I moved here in 2001, and I've been here ever since. So I've lived in Scotland now longer than I lived in America, as you can tell by my strong Scottish accent. And

3:29that is interesting, because there's something funny about one's identity, I think, when you grew up in one place, but you've been living in buildings in another place for most of your life, for more of your life. I did the Master's in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, and that was really helpful for, I think, building a community of writers that were working toward publication.

4:05Yeah, putting a commercial head on something, which is quite an interesting thing to think about. Yeah, I think I had done a lot of, I'd been doing kind of a lot of open mics, and I ran a crazy performance art cabaret. So I had a lot of friends in Edinburgh who were creative and performative in various ways. But that leap into being a published poet felt, I mean, I wasn't a performance poet, per se. I would always have described my poems as page poems, but I really enjoyed sharing them out

4:39loud with people. But yeah, the M.L.E.T. was helpful, I think, in thinking about how to put a book together, and what that meant. And after that, I won an award to go spend three weeks on the Aeolian Islands, thinking about Ovid. And so my first collection of poems is a kind of version of many of Ovid's metamorphoses, stories of change, but told in the form of these contemporary poems inspired by volcanoes,

5:12and the sea, and this wonderful environment of those islands. And now I have just, this year, as you mentioned, published my fifth book, which is called Strange Architectures. Yeah, and we'll get Strange Architectures in a second, but like Northern New Jersey, Scotland, Mediterranean Sea, it's quite a nice journey. Do you still feel, I mean, you have an accent that doesn't sound very New Jersey to people who think they know what a New Jersey accent. You've kind of

5:44washed it through too many cultures now. But do you feel like there is still something there of that kind of space? I'm looking on my other screen here at a map of Northern New Jersey. It's incredibly urban in that American way, in that kind of mega city, megalopolis kind of way. Well, I grew up in a little town called West Milford, which was actually, I think it had sort of begun as a summer holiday town for wealthy New Yorkers, and was really beautiful. It was

6:17lakes and fields and mountains with wild blueberries growing on them, and

6:23I would take my dog for long walks in the field. I was always trying to get lost, but that was the one problem, is even though it was quite a rural place still on the edge of a lot of

6:35much bigger towns and cities, you couldn't really get lost. And I found that very frustrating. You know, you could be in a field or forest, but eventually you'd always end up at a road, and and that was the kind of place. But I did, I actually, because my third year of university, when I was at Wellesley, I actually did at the University of Bristol. And I think the the sense I had when I went to Bristol was just of age, of time, in a way that I loved and

7:11didn't feel, you know, I don't think any of the buildings I grew up in or near were even half as old as most of the buildings that were just round and about in the city of Bristol. And that sense of that kind of human developed time in Britain was interesting to me when I came over. I think, in part, the question you're asking maybe is something that comes up for me, not so much in everyday life now, but sometimes in writing people will say, well, are you an American writer? Are you

7:44a Scottish writer? It's the Henry James question. Yeah. The T.S. Eliot question. I was going to say, I did a class when I was doing my undergraduate and it was about Pound and Eliot and where they came from and where they ended up. And yeah, I still feel kind of stuck in that weird place. I always had the sense of like, if you, where you were born, if you kind of dropped a string from your belly down to the center of the earth and then you go somewhere else, that string is still sort of stuck where you

8:16started, but it gets pulled, you know, where you move to. But then over time, it's as if it starts to drift a little bit. So like, I think I'm somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic right now in terms of my alignment with the center of the earth. But yeah, I mean, when people ask me now things about America, it's very, you know, my understanding of America ended in, well, not, I'm not sure I ever understood it, but it, you know, my, my intimate knowledge of America ended in 2001. So that's a long time ago

8:48now. So much has changed. And when I go there, I feel like a visitor now, you know. But then again, I can't say I feel Scottish either, you know, I, and I think in terms of my poetry writing or

9:07the poetry that I feel closest to in terms of what,

9:14maybe what I hear in my head when I'm trying to write, I suspect that is still probably more of an American voice than a Scottish voice, just because it's, it's like something to do with the voice in my head, maybe. In terms of your influences, you've already mentioned Ovid and Ezra Pound. The fascist. Strange guy. Not Ovid. We don't know about Ovid. Ovid was guy, okay.

Reading poem five

9:39Ovid's fine, but Ezra Pound, odd guy. I guess probably it would be easiest to start with a poem and maybe talk about some influences from that. And you very kindly suggested some poems and then I sent my prompts and then you suggested some different poems and I just brung you with a... You've made a request. I've made a request to start with, which is the fifth poem in the collection on page 17, and I'd be delighted if you could read it. It would be my pleasure. Most of the poems in this collection have just a number as a title, which is unusual for me, but this one has a number and then a sort of subtitle in parentheses,

10:15so I'll read them both. Five. The German Professor's House. There is a gargantuan garage along the entire side of the house. The house itself is many-roomed, extensive. The German professor and his German wife both smoke rolling tobacco. His in a brown pouch, hers in a pink. Maids are cleaning various small rooms. I sit in a patio empty, but for a beachwood table on

10:58which rests an amber ashtray. Outside the garage turns into a health spa in which many people are bathing and being massaged. There is a problem between the husband and the wife, but it cannot be spoken. The garage has a plastic corrugated roof that allows a wan light to diffuse within the space.

11:35Fantastic. Thank you. I'm trying to use my best American pronunciation. I like that. Garage. Not garage.

Lockdown dreams and motherhood

11:46Who says garage anyway? Could we talk a little bit about this collection, Strange Architecture? Where does it come from? So, I got pregnant at the grand old age of 41, I think, in 2018, and had my baby.

12:13Maybe it would have been the beginning of 2019. I had my baby in December of 2019. Yeah, that's a long gestation if it was 2018. Yeah, if you say that's too long, it would have been 2019. My gosh.

12:292019. And so that was right just a couple months before COVID offered all its bounties unto us. So, I had her and that all went well. And we were living in a flat in Edinburgh. Kind of four room flat on one floor. And then, when she was about three months old, COVID happened. And it was not the maternity leave I had expected or dreamed of.

13:04And so that year was very strange. It was both full of the joys of having a baby and becoming a new mom and being with her dad. And this extreme, intense claustrophobia and isolation. And I was breastfeeding and waking up many times throughout each night. And full of, I'm sure, a very interesting cocktail of hormones. And started having the most intense dreams or remembering being aware of waking up from these extraordinarily intense dreams.

13:41And it felt as if they were all about exploring buildings.

13:52Different buildings. Some of them I recognized. Most of them I didn't. And it was so real. It was so real. It just felt wildly more real than my everyday life at that time. And my first instinct was just to note these dreams down because I think because of their intensity. And very soon, I started to think that these notes wanted to become poems.

14:29But they were very strange poems. Because they were coming very much from this dream space, which isn't, I'm, some poets, I know of some poets who do write from dreams, but that wasn't my regular kind of practice. I wasn't even, it wasn't like I was regularly keeping a dream diary or had done Jungian dream work or, you know, it was, it was kind of new experience for me.

14:58But that first year, I had many of these dreams and wrote many of them down. But even after the lockdowns ended and as time moved on, I continued to have these dreams and I continued to make them into poems. I continued to explore these new buildings and spaces and they did tail off a little bit, but so I think it did take really for four years maybe to end up with enough of these poems to fill a whole book.

15:31Maybe three or four years and then there was a process of editing them, but that is the book. They are poems made out of transcripts of dreams about buildings.

15:47It's really interesting. My wife also has had dreams about architecture during pregnancy and in early motherhood when the baby is young. In her case, very often gargantuan buildings that are decaying. Do you know if this is common? Are architectural dreams common to mothering infants? My mom, to my surprise, because I didn't know this when she found out about it, said she had had building dreams. I don't know if it was specifically in pregnancy or new motherhood.

16:19I'd have to check with her. I have heard, I actually think it was in one of the nice reviews of the book, the reviewer wrote. If in psychoanalysis, dream houses stand in for the self.

16:40That was Sandy Parmar who'd written that. So that made me think, again, I haven't been through a process of psychoanalysis, but I thought that was interesting that that is a recognizable symbol for self potentially. And I certainly think that that moment of pregnancy and early new motherhood has got to be one of the really dramatic moments of change in a, well, I would say both in a man and woman's life.

17:15I mean, I would want to ask that question to you. Like, did you have any at that time? You know, because men are going through a change as well. But I think there's something about the, and that was something I was going to mention to you. I've just been reading this amazing essay called Umbilical Phantoms by Siri Husvet, which I've been reading, in which she is talking about the placenta as a kind of much ignored and forgotten organ in Western medicine.

17:51It's not very much been researched. It's often not discussed, but it's, it's this extraordinary organ that grows within the womb to help cleanse, you know, cleanse and process and nourish the child. But it's actually made of the cells of both the mother and the child, which is really interesting. So it's like a, a, a, a properly shared organ between the two entities. Um, and then obviously also has the genetic material of, of the father in there.

18:26So she's almost talking about the, um, the way the mother at this time is holding multiple entities within the entirety of her body. Um, and I started, I was thinking of that in terms of architecture as well, right? Like the womb as the first room that, that everyone inhabits. And then it's got this placenta in there, which is like a shared, uh, um, this kind of shared transcendent structure between the, the different entities.

19:10Um, and, and, and how can we not, it's difficult for me to imagine that there isn't something extraordinary about the consciousness, the consciousness of these two entities being in this one shared space at that moment. I remember reading a long time ago about, about the possibility that the first image, the unborn child witnesses is in fact of the placenta and that visually it corresponds quite closely to that universal idea of the tree of life, which you see in all cultural origin stories as far as I know.

19:59And if, if you look at a photograph of a placenta laid out and a bit cleaned up, it's very obviously like a, either like a root system, like a rhizomatic system, but it's also like a tree. And I, I thought that that was a really fascinating possibility that we carry that imprint of that memory, which I think for architects, I think it's really, I think it's a really important kind of recognition, the kind of pre-knowledge of form that we have. I wanted to ask about this process of writing these poems. So you've talked already about the practice that happened in, through COVID, through lockdown, through, through the beginning of your new child's life and your new identity as a mother.

20:36Can I put this word to you, you know, stanza comes from the word room, which I thought was also rather lovely. But do you see an alignment between, in, in, between the way that you've constructed these poems and in a way, how you imagine a building comes into being? Something I think is so interesting about that question is that in my more usual way of writing, I think I would probably say yes.

21:09This one, I feel like had these very particular constraints or rules that I feel like makes it a little bit different, but I'll explain. So, though I would like to ask you about this, often when I'm writing a poem, and, and I wonder if this is the case for architects when they're dreaming up buildings, something will trigger an idea for the poem. A vision, a vision, a particular combination of words that makes a particular rhythmic sound that you want to play around with, or, yeah, so these kind of things might, might trigger the, the poem or, or an idea that you want to explore in, in poetry, and, and then you, you start playing around, writing some lines, and the poem comes from there.

22:08And, and, and, and, and I would say it's often quite exploratory that, that I write into space, and I'm trying to, there's some kind of inquiry being explored through the writing of the poem. So, again, I, I would wonder, you know, in, in architecture, when you, when you're making a building, or, I imagine there's different kinds of, of processes, the ones where you get told what you have to make, or, you know, there's a very particular brief, or, or the ones where you could be more exploratory, you can inquire.

22:52With, with, with these poems, because they came from the dreams, I felt this really strong need to try to respect the dream, I guess I would say. So there, this tension began to come, which was about the need to try to, you know, work from those early morning or middle of the night notes, which were fragmentary, but help me remember the dream, and, and keep some kind of authenticity, or, or exactitude about,

23:44the, the, the, the memory of the dream, the experience of the dream, the building in the dream, versus trying to write a good poem, because normally I can prioritize trying to write a good poem, you know, I'm, I'm thinking about how, where to break the lines, how the words sound, you know, if the image is, is curious and interesting. And, um, in this case, it was like, oh, but I, I really need to, I mean, even in that poem that I just read to you, like, um, you know, trying to kind of get across the, this garage being attached to the side of the house, like, I really wanted to, I could close my eyes, and I can still see that structure.

24:32So trying to be able to communicate the description of that particular building, but also have it sound interesting was a kind of tension. And, and so there were certain rules, like, um, I couldn't change the building to make the poem sound better. Um, and I couldn't, I really tried to resist writing any interpretation into the poem. So, um, I think that's probably good practice anyway, but I wasn't, I wasn't going to write in characters that weren't there. I wasn't going to try and explain the poems in any way. I was just going to try to share the experience of the poem.

25:16And the one thing I did do that I think was, and again, there was still, it felt like, um, I was fighting with myself sometimes, but I, I did realize in the editing process at some point that I had used certain words over and over because perhaps I'm not an architect. So I just kept writing things like the wooden floor, the wooden staircase. And that's what I was like, I can't have every poem just have wooden in it, or the wood, or, you know, it's really boring. Or, you know, it's like my default middle of the night word for, a lot of the poems have water in them in various ways.

25:58So I just, you know, just the pool, the pool, the pool, the pool, the pool. And I was like, this is very tedious. Like someone doesn't want to read the same, uh, words over and over. So I did do a kind of, you know, thesaurus type bit of research, or, you know, I was looking up like there, a lot of the poems have, um, things like, like you will know many, many words for these things that, um, I, I had to find help with like, like, um, like a foyer or a patio, like these kind of architectural terms, I suppose, that if you're not maybe working regularly in that area, you, you just have a kind of default word for that from where you grew up or things like that you've seen.

26:48But, um, yeah, so I felt like sometimes, is this breaking the rules to go and like, look this stuff up? I think it did. You know, then the poems went out, because I was like, oh, it just sounds, it's just going to sound really boring if, if it's very repetitive. I think it's really interesting, this idea, because of course, architecture is fundamentally quite a mundane practice. It's about technology and materials and gravity and making sure stuff doesn't fall down. And we call wood, wood, and we call hallways, hallways. Oh, no! I was sure you had all these beautiful words forever.

27:22Well, well, there are, and I think it's an interesting one, because one of the words that I think we'll get onto, well, we will get onto is this idea of thresholds, which I mentioned in my prompts to you, but one of the words that's thrown around now is this idea of liminal. But liminal just means threshold. And so there is this kind of neologism that comes into architectural discourse, particularly, but also the writing of architecture, which seeks out new words for the same thing. And I wonder about it, because in poetry, this is aesthetic, and it has its role to play, and as you say, it creates new imagery. But in architecture, it operates, I think, often enough as a gateway to limit access, actually.

28:06If you can talk about liminality rather than thresholds or edges, it's fundamentally the same point. But what you're doing is you're saying, if you don't understand the word liminality, this essay is not for you. And I find that, I've always found that a little bit, I think, there's something classist about it. Hmm. I was just gonna say, like, when I was trying to write this, and in thinking about it, even in thinking about talking to you, I was constantly struggling with this, almost like a kind of imposter syndrome, or like, I am not an architect, I've never properly studied architecture. Am I allowed to write these poems? Am I allowed to talk about architecture? And yet, I kept thinking, but it's one of those funny things where it feels like some people are

28:50really expert in a really expert in it and knowledgeable, know how to not only design buildings or build buildings, but know how to talk about them or think about them in a particular way. But then I kept thinking, but who in the world could say they are not an expert in inhabiting buildings, right? Like, buildings are one of these things, much more so than poetry, which probably a lot of people is not part of it.

29:20Every day life. Heathens. Sadly. I am heartbroken. But, you know, someone, maybe you know some rhymes when you're a kid, or, you know, they come in at weddings and funerals. But apart from that, probably many people can get through life without having too much interaction with poetry. But who's never walked through a doorway? Who's never laid down in bed and looked with great attention attention at their ceiling? You know, I mean, they are really part of like, everyday experience in such a kind of potent way. And I kept thinking, well, you know, people watch movies all the time, but it doesn't mean they know how to make a movie. But

30:07Yeah, it's a funny form, isn't it? Because it's both like wildly accessible and understood and used and inhabited. And yeah, feels a little bit like fancy and out of reach. I completely agree. It's the most strange thing. Architecture is almost not at all discussed in public spaces. The number of television programs about architecture is vanishingly small. And where it does exist, it's almost always about the extraordinary. And that often aligns with extraordinarily expensive.

30:47So the ordinariness, the mundanity of building, as we experience it is almost never, never discussed. And actually, if you try and find literature on the everyday experiences of space, outside people like Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, which is the world's number one cure for insomnia, and Witold Rybinski wrote book Home, which tries to deal with this as well, but very, very rare. It's very rare. So from what you're saying, these poems almost operate in a way to invite readers, listeners, your audience to think about architecture. Were you consciously aware that there is this absence in the way that we talk and think about architecture? And therefore, without wishing to instrumentalize the writing of the poems, were you aware of a sense of kind of taking people on a journey into buildings, through space, through the materials of space and how we structure space?

31:43I mean, really, I think, no, because it felt to be so much the writing of them, in a way that was worryingly sort of selfish, was really about recording these experiences. I think it wasn't until it came into my head, because it took a long time for it to even dawn on me that it could be a book. They seemed so strange to me, you know, it didn't, hence the name, it didn't seem like the kind of thing anyone else could possibly be interested in.

32:20And actually, I had this professor, when I was doing the M-Lit, who said something to me, I think that was more like a memory poem about my grandmother or something, but he, you know, it was very painful at the time, said something like, no one else wants to read poems about your memories. And I was like, oh, and I, you know, with these poems, I was really worried about that, like, does anyone else, will it be meaningful in any way to anyone else to read these poems about my dreams?

32:52And, you know, and, you know, that was still very far away from even getting to the point of thinking about what it meant to write about architecture for someone who's not trained in architecture or architectural philosophy or aesthetics to be able to kind of talk about it or have the words to talk about it. But it's quite exciting to me now that I have started to share them with people, some of the ways people are responding to them, because people keep saying to me things like, when I read to them, I have read it in public now, read the poems to people a couple times, and people sort of close their eyes and they say, oh, I'm seeing, I'm seeing things, you know.

33:47And that's very exciting to me that the, it's like the buildings are coming, they're being built in other people's minds via the poems, and there's something really exciting about that, that is like, you know, why do we make art, why do we write poems, something about sharing something of my experience and trying to make it come alive in your head. And this idea that these constructions could be transferred in that way is super exciting to me.

34:25And also someone said to me, and this is unusual for her, she started dreaming and remembering her dreams after having read the poems, which again, something about maybe the attention to dreams had sparked something in her experience that activated dreaming or remembering dreams. And that was a really exciting sort of impact of the poems, but I mean, one of the things I did, which I feel like is naughty, and I stopped doing it almost immediately, was

35:01I had this idea, I had this idea, what if I gave these poems to like a class of architecture students and asked them to draw them, because I wanted to see if the poems were looked like what I had in my head, and I thought, how can I test that I need someone else to draw it and see if it looks like what was in the dream. I didn't have a class of architecture students to draw them to, so I put a few of them into, and I feel like this is, you know, AI is, I think is probably a very bad thing.

35:37So I do not encourage anyone to do this, that is sort of unethical, environmentally unfriendly in all sorts of ways. This is very naughty, but I put about three of the poems into Dolly, which is like an AI image generator.

35:53And they looked just like the dreams, which was like, almost made my stomach hurt, you know, it was sort of shocking. But I thought, on the one hand, amazing, like, the poems work, like the poems look like what I had in my head. But I also, I think it's like in Susan Sontag's On Photography or something, but she had said something about like, you know how a photograph can override a memory? Yeah, absolutely. You know, like if you have a photograph from childhood, and you suddenly can't remember that moment, but you remember the photograph of that moment.

36:28And it was like, almost immediately, when I saw the AI generated image, it was threatening the real image of the memory of the dream in my head. And I was like, Oh, my God, this is very bad. I should stop looking. And I think actually, it's a good example of why AI is so bad is because it can start to overwrite real experience in a very unpleasant sort of way.

Reading poem fifteen

36:54Let us read poem 15. 15.

37:00Running through verdigris forest along a road with others. Crossing rivers on collapsing railway bridges, leaping from bridge deck to bridge beam. Leaves dripping, everything dripping.

37:19Exhilarated and terrified, I make it to the city. A delicately curved trireme nestling in the harbour and on a hill, the council building. A castle with magnificent bubbles of glass floating from rooftop and turret. It's too late. It's too late to return. Someone is helping me find space on a socially distanced train.

37:51But I don't want to leave.

37:55Beautiful. Very Scottish. Do you think? It's got a guess.

Jungian architecture and spatial theory

38:02It's about a big soggy city. You've mentioned Jung already and I thought we could get to Jung and when we first, because this podcast has been quite a long time in the making actually. It's quite a back and forth which has been very pleasant. But I'm quite interested in the relationship of your, I guess, design thinking, but not in the standard Nigel Cross way of talking about design thinking, but in literally thinking about buildings which are designed. And obviously, Jung's. Do I say that right? Is it Jung?

38:33Like Jung, Jung, Jung. I was listening to some stuff about him recently and I feel like people were saying Jung. Jung. But definitely not Jung. Jung. Unfortunately, it's the one where we haven't, we haven't managed to bastardize that word. But anyway, Jung's thinking around architecture and there's this idea in his Bollingen Tower, which he constructed over the course of many years as a kind of manifestation of some of his ideas that he couldn't put into words that weren't sufficiently communicated through his usual practice.

39:11So I quite like this idea that you've started to approach architecture almost as a preparatory to making architecture. It comes back to what you were saying about students drawing your poems. I think this is a very good idea, by the way. I think you should offer this to any number of architecture schools. It's a bloody good idea. It's low-hanging fruit there if you want to get yourself a module. I think it's a wonderful idea. But I wanted to ask you this question as I put it into my notes to you. What do you make of that impulse, that Jungian impulse or Jung's impulse to externalize the psyche as a building?

39:46Where do you think that sits outside this lockdown, outside pregnancy? Because it is quite a common, I guess. Not a common, but it is certainly something that exists in literature. Do you have any thoughts about that? And does it speak to, I suppose, something to do with making sense of life more generally? Or are they, and again, this is a rather instrumentalizing thing, or are they purely aesthetic objects in that Kantian sense of a lack of purposiveness, a lack of utility?

40:17I mean, when I first was looking at his tower, part of me just kept thinking about privilege because, you know, how many of us can afford to buy a piece of land and have the resources to get a bunch of big blocks of stone sent over on a little boat and take time to put it into a tower or whatever your dream building is. So, I mean, he seems like a very interesting guy, but I was also kind of like,

40:51I'm in like a world where everyone, when they're born, gets like a little pot of money and a little pot of land, and at some point in your life, you're like, you get to build your dream building here now. Yeah, yeah. When you're ready, that's your place, and you're going to do that. And I was like, in the lives of most people I know, who are a lot of writers and artists and academics, there is not enough money or time or space to even like, you know, expand

41:25your kitchen, let alone build your dream house. And that feels like a deep unfairness to me. And I did, I was talking about this with my partner this morning, and I said, if you could build any house, your dream house, what would it be? And he said, oh, you know, it'd be like a square with a triangular roof and a little chimney. I was like, oh man, no, you are in the system. Like you are thinking like every, you know, not all houses have to be square. And then my little six-year-old came in, and we asked her, and she said, it would be a

41:56snowflake made of candy canes. And I was like, yes! And she was saying, even little kids would just draw the square with the triangle on top. And I was like, no, she would build a snowflake. Candy canes. Anyway, so there's that part of it. On the other hand, it was making me think of something about fixedness.

42:23And for me, there's something really important about poetry, which is that it's a particular kind of language where words, which are signs to meanings, don't have to point in the direction that they might normally be expected to point in. So if you're writing an essay or a legal document or, well, it used to be a news article, maybe

42:55not anymore, but in theory, you were using language in a way that was communicating something directly. You were trying to say something truthfully and directly. And maybe even if you're lying, you're still trying to communicate something, right? It might not be an honest thing, but you're communicating something directly. Poetry, I feel like, has these tools and mechanisms for operating in a way that is much less fixed.

43:28So that's why I think I love it. I think that's why a lot of people find it uncomfortable, because you can say that something is like something else or something is something else, that it is not. So a simple metaphor, for instance, a pen is a sword. A pen is not a sword. But if I say a pen is a sword, suddenly the space opens up between the pen and the sword.

44:05These two words that point at something usually in a particular way. And all of a sudden, they're pointing in all different directions. And there's all this exciting energy passing between them. We could call that a liminal space. A very energized threshold between meanings. And there's all sorts of possibility in that space.

44:33And I was getting at this. I was thinking about this this morning. I was getting at a poet I really love, who's called John Ashbery, an American poet, who's also an art critic, and uses words in this very kind of slippery sort of way. So words in the poems, sometimes I've thought of it almost like if you were listening to the radio, old talk radio, and kind of turning the dial slowly from one station to the next.

45:06And one line was slipping into another, and it had a kind of meaning in music, but actually didn't really make sense. It can work in that way. And I find it incredibly exciting, this way of using language to not mean what you think it's meant to mean. And I wondered about architecture or something about maybe the difference between the part

45:41of architecture which is related to how we as entities exist in the world. So maybe that's the aesthetic part of architecture, or the exploratory part of architecture, or the dreaming part of architecture, or the creative part of architecture, how that bit relates to the fixedness, the building of the tower, the making something have to stand up and not

46:19fall over. And, you know, part of me is so frustrated by the fact that so many buildings, especially everyday buildings, just look alike. You know, is it, is it practicality, or is it financial, or is it a controlling system? But on the other hand, if everybody could build their dream houses, like, what would all those

46:50houses look like, you know? Well, my gut feeling is that there would be quite a rapid movement towards common tastes and common languages. And that would be partly because humans are a collective beast. I've been thinking about this recently, about this peculiar binary that we have between individuality and the collective, and whether that's actually a false dichotomy, in that the individual is inherently part of a collective, and the collective is inherently made up of individuals.

47:22And it sounds rather trite to say it, but in a way, I think it's kind of important. I think you see this in vernacular architecture, folk architecture, even in non-traditional folk architecture, such as you get in informal settlements. And I've recorded podcasts about this with people like Kim Dovey, where you see incredible conformity, spatial conformity, aesthetic conformity, material conformity. And there's socioeconomic factors there. There's kind of tactical, practical things, like if you want to maintain the peace, give

47:53everybody the same plot of land, even in an informal system. So everybody gets six by six meters. So there are all sorts of reasons why, actually, I think that that diversity is a bit of a chimeric. I don't think it would necessarily happen, but I think where it would happen is around these fragments and details, which your book speaks to beautifully, these little tiny moments, like in that poem you read.

Reading poem thirty-five

48:18Let's read poem number 35. 35.

48:23A foreign city, a bar, a man saying he only sleeps with them once, so it doesn't count. In a meeting with work colleagues, the senior ones, are we home again? We're in a trim garden. There's a picket fence. They're all breaking the rules and laughing. One offers to buy another a car. She says, no.

48:52The sun. A lecture theatre, sign on a podium, Edinburgh College. Graduation programs still scattered on the seats. It's awesome. Huge and ancient, built of limestone. Greek. A film was showing, I leave the few people in plush navy seats among hundreds of seats, enter a hallway, then foyer in splendid future ancient style.

49:24Statues in Carrara, groupings of children, animals. A spiral chute with a slide bed of glass leads to reception desk, gift shop, cafe, little stalls tucked into the walls of a bustling market. The cafe is run by a Palestinian roasting legs of lamb. A poster on the wall shows a burning house on a mountaintop.

49:56Says, burn our homes, but we'll keep dancing. And in a lagoon below, men in robes sway by the light of the flames, in water up to their beards. I walk to titanic doors, step through and view an unending portico with floor-to-ceiling columns and statues leaning out as if to welcome passers-by.

50:31It's very lovely. There's a lot of architectural knowledge at play here. Did you have to sort of reverse engineer that knowledge in? You know, you speak of porticoes and columns and all sorts of bits and pieces. What was this intuited knowledge? I mean, I think this is one of those ones that, and again, it's part of why I was interested to read it when talking about the tower. It's because the dream knew all these things. The dream built that space.

51:03It gave me the experience of moving through that space. I am pretty sure I looked up at least a couple of those words, like portico. I don't think portico is in my everyday kind of building language. Probably not. Not for any kind of main reason, but probably because we'd call it a porch. Well, that's the thing. I feel like I had a lot of, like, porches, decks, and I was like, oh, man, it's a bit, you know. This is one of these examples where I was like, I got to look up some architecture words.

51:37Like, it needs to sound. It's making me think. A friend of mine the other day was talking about the word fescue. Do you know this word fescue? I've heard it, but I can't remember what it means. Type of grass. Fescue. You know, we were talking about grass. Yeah, like the particularity of description in poetry in that. Actually, I think I was talking about what Maria was saying in your podcast about trying to strip everything back to the most clear description,

52:12but being able to use the least amount of language or, you know, the most essential language. But then we were also saying, yeah, but then there's words like fescue, which are just too delicious. Not to use in poem with your, you could just say the grass, but goodness, you could also say the fescue. So, yeah, that's where, like, portico, there's some part of me which is like, oh, I don't want to be overly ornate, but goodness me, how can you not use the word portico?

52:42Rather than portico in a poem like that. It was an ornate, it was an ornate architecture, you know, so it was big, you know, trying to get the sense of this big map, the sign, you know, again, I think you said your wife had dreams of these big buildings, like a number of these dreams were about gargantuan spaces that were just, you know, again, like how many times can you use the word, I kept trying to think of ways to describe very high ceilings.

53:12But again, it becomes very like, how else can you describe, like, like capacious, like enormous, gargantuan, like big spaces, the way you can have in dreams these vertiginously big spaces, you know, more than six meter spaces. You don't have to worry about the length of the timber in the dream. I lived in Korea when I first got married with my wife, and we taught English. And the only word the children we taught used for the taste of something was delicious.

53:48And very quickly, it was the only word we had to describe the taste of anything. And it lasted for years, like, it took me a conscious effort to not describe things as, oh, no, that's delicious. It was either, it tastes disgusting, or it's delicious. And it's just like, it was so frustrating. I actually did end up looking in a thesaurus to remind myself of some of the other words we've got in English for delicious. Yeah, really frustrating. But no, it is lovely. And I think that there is something very beautiful about the variety of words that architecture has for these small things.

54:22So on the one hand, I do think that there's a politeness and a good manners to using the words that people understand. The patio or the hallway rather than atrium. Or foyer. Foyer is okay. I think it's a bit 1980s, but it works. But, like, people know what you're talking about when you say that. But when you say atrium, they're suddenly thinking about, you know, some guy in a toga walking around eating dormice. And it's not very fair, is it? It's not very good. But I do like to try and introduce new words as well. I don't know if I did. I might have picked it up. But I started, rather than talking about liminal, I talked about penumbral.

54:53And I thought, ooh, penumbra. The penumbra is that, you know, sometimes when you look at the moon and you get that white ring around it. That's the penumbra. So it's this kind of, what is that? Ooh, it's penumbral. So I wanted to introduce that into architectural discourse, but I haven't ever read it. Has anyone else picked up? No. I'll write you a penumbral building poem. I think that would be amazing if someone wrote me a poem.

Bodies, breath, and architecture

55:19You also do breathwork and yoga work. So you're kind of about bodies, which I think is very architectural too. Like the body is first architecture. And perhaps we've talked about this with regards babyhood. Could you speak to that idea a bit? Is architecture, in the way that you are imagining it, really a manifestation of the body? The first architecture, so to speak. You know, I trained as a yoga teacher last year. And one of the interesting moments was when my teacher started talking about pranayama.

55:50Or that's another word for the breathwork. This exercise is where you do different ways of breathing that have different effects. And that in the hierarchy of yogic practice, the pranayama is actually considered much more,

56:18it's like a much higher level practice than what I think most yoga practitioners in the West experience in a kind of everyday vinyasa flow class or something where you're doing some postures, you're moving the body around, you're stretching. It's actually, that is all like a warm-up to get to the breathwork, which is where you're starting to do something much more powerful, much more sort of serious.

56:55And when she started talking about this, my ears sort of pricked up. And one of the reasons to come back to, I feel like we're, now I want to call it penumbral rather than liminal, but is that the breath is literally a kind of threshold between our conscious and unconscious control systems. So the metabolic breath is when we breathe without thinking about it, right?

57:29So the entirety of your life, when you are alive, unless you are attached to a machine which is breathing for you, or unless you are consciously controlling your breath, this metabolic breathing will happen. You don't have to think about it. Your body will bring the breath in and out of the body without you having to worry about it, right? But it is one of the systems which you can also override and take control over. So you can also consciously control the breath.

58:00But because when we breathe, it has an impact on everything else happening in our body. This fact that it can happen on its own, or we can control it, means it's like a passageway into the unconscious. And that's why pranayama is considered to be so powerful. And there are all these extraordinary practices which you can learn about and learn and practice

58:31that have effects on the body, and you can feel them physically and mentally. And I think part of what we've been talking about, these forms like poetry, which have, or language, which can be both,

58:55it can be used in different ways, can be used in this more everyday, straightforward way or this more complicated, metaphorical way, and architecture, which can be these practical buildings that protect us from the weather and allow us to stay warm and eat dinner with our loved ones, to sleep without getting eaten by tigers.

59:27There's also can be...

59:36I'm thinking of, you know, some of these buildings, I talked to you about, like the, this blur building that was a building built on scaffolding, but kind of made of cloud. It was made of mist, so it was not your everyday functional sort of building. It was a kind of dream building or that wonderful building.

1:00:06I'm getting her name now. I'll just double check her own name.

1:00:13Oh yeah, Samantha Mink. So this woman who made a building called the Prime House in California, and it has like a... She talks about it as being inspired by fairy tales, but it has a waterfall at its center and all these pools, like all the pools in my dreams, and it has this almost like womb-like or this kind of pool you can swim into

1:00:43in the center of the building. It makes me think of like temples with a ritual bath in the center of it or something. I mean, I would just love to go and spend some time in that building. But it's not your everyday terraced house. And I think...

1:01:10Again, it comes back to you. Like, I get what you're saying about practicality and commonality of architecture and that maybe even if everyone could build their dream house, they'd end up building the square with the triangle on top. And maybe there's good reason for that. But I still wonder... Like, I want to bring you back to like something maybe... Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that is what people want and they just want to be like each other and I'm just weird.

1:01:41But sometimes I think people very early on are told they're not allowed to be creative, right? Like, I really think this. Like, I really think from very early on we are inducted into systems which say you need to think within this box and if you don't, you're out, right? You're not going to get good grades. You're not going to succeed. People aren't going to like you unless you do these things. I was at my six-year-old's P3

1:02:12meet the teacher the other day and she said, giggling in a slightly uncomfortable way, oh yeah, they still have a little bit of free time each day now to learn something they're actually interested in to do a bit of play. But by Christmas they won't be playing at all. And I was like, this is terrifying. Like, they are six years old. So, I've done... A lot of the time when I do work with people, I do a lot of workshops with people

1:02:43or, you know, writing workshops or now increasingly kind of more embodied yoga movement practice with creative writing involved. And I think something that comes up over and over and over again, even if, for instance, you give a lot of adults a bunch of crayons and bits of paper, it's like, wow, I haven't done this since I was a kid, right? Like, people have not played. They have not been given, like, really free space just to be, you know, like, I'm going to let you

1:03:14lie on your back and hold your feet and just roll around for 20 minutes and see how you feel. Like, most people would freak out, right? They don't get to do that in their everyday life. And I just wonder sometimes if, you know, if people really were allowed and encouraged and given the space and given the resource to be, to be, to start from their bodies,

1:03:46to let go of all the, the rush and the screens and the pressure and the money and the worry and to just be in your stomach instead of your head, you know, to be with your breath, to be in your heart and to start thinking from there and to start making from there if we might see other possibilities. You also sent me your 2014 collection, Locust and Marlin, also published by Shearsman

1:04:17and you suggested creation from that. Would you be able to read it? Yes. And I'll just say you've already talked about Poetics of Space and you're obviously a big fan, but I loved that book. I did love that book. And some of it really stayed with me and this book is sort of inspired by some of Bachelard's ideas of what kind of iconic symbols of what a home is, what is a bird's nest to a bird

1:04:50or a snail's shell to a snail. And I was really trying to think about the concept of home, constructions of home and trying to move home away from ownership and nationality and into something that was more about the body and the heart space. So, creation.

Reading creation

1:05:12One dreamer thought a shell was made by a creature turning somersaults, each turn a room for the home, the staircase spiraling upward by the force of a leg. I push against this wall an oyster spits and makes a shine I turn what do I make the clam unfrets his valves claims its flesh food a mouth-like home

1:05:44I hold a shell to my ear it sings Thank you. We talked about the liminal and the threshold and obviously in architecture I think to some degree that's all architecture is it's thresholds and the technology to facilitate thresholds you talked about keeping the tiger away that's a threshold the transference between public and private and super private that's another threshold between places we take our clothes off and sleep that's another threshold

1:06:14so we adore this this is really the heart of it or sort of architecture as a device for the movement between social and psychological states as I put my notes to you. Are your poems to some degree in this collection and in the one from Lucas de Marlin you just read and creation is there a sense of kind of inviting folk to encounter these thresholds through the articulation of language and I think there is a parallel here with architecture particularly

1:06:45architectural representation or drawing where we have devices to invite people into an imaginary world. Neil Spiller I think it was many years ago 25 probably years ago talking about architectural drawing the traditional architectural drawing by hand as being sort of preferential to computer drawings which are very realistic because and I think I've mentioned this on this podcast before his phrase was something along the lines of a hand drawing you know in pencil and ink on paper takes you to the threshold and lets the imagination

1:07:16go from there so it gives in a way it generously enables the viewer of the building their own interpretation their own values within them and I really love this idea and it is one of the reasons why like CGI fly-throughs as cool as they are and rendered visuals as remarkable as they are fundamentally leave one a little cold it's the sort of difference between you know a Hitchcock movie which is a sense of a film and a digital HD movie

1:07:46which is every pore on their face and one gives you more detail but somehow obscures along the way it doesn't tell us more truth strangely and I think that comes back to something you were saying earlier about with regards language and the brevity of your poems haiku-like in some respects what I like about poetry in general is that it uses no more words than is necessary to achieve the aesthetic and visual communication that it tries to and you add another word and the poem goes

1:08:16cadence goes the rhythm goes whatever it is but also the meaning goes and I think to a certain extent in architecture that's also true we've added a lot of shit and in so doing we've actually lost quite a lot of the meaning a friend of mine described contemporary buildings as fundamentally baroque not because they look baroque but because they are so complex that they kind of resist cognition they resist understanding but I was wondering about this are you inviting people over thresholds how do you deal with thresholds

1:08:47in these poems and you suggested poem 12 in this might talk to that it makes me desperately want to ask you you know like so is is a great building a building that just has the essential in it is a great building like there's this we were watching these YouTube videos of this guy I don't even know what his name is he like goes into the forest in the Ukraine and builds log cabins himself by hand

1:09:17he just chops up the wood and he knows how to do it right he digs into the soil and he puts the logs down and he makes a log cabin ugh it's so like ugh it's like we all used to be able to do that yeah I was thinking about have I made this up I feel like I have this wild west America kind of notion that communities like when someone got married like the community would kind of go and like raise the roof like they'd like

1:09:49build like they'd like build the house together and they'd have a big meal did I make that up is that a thing it's kind of like the Amish fantasy isn't it I love what you're talking about in terms of the you know yeah again this idea of the essential in a poem the essential in a building the more adjectives we add and this is true for architectural adjectives I suppose as well more adjectives we add the more specific we are but the more variables we introduce so Ambrose walks through a field

1:10:20is clarified by Ambrose walks slowly through the field of long deep green grass but each of those additional words are themselves interpretable so you create clarity but you create the possibility of plurality or diffusion or confusion and I think that like what poems do what your poems are doing it's quite precise but you you also like there's the what you're talking about in terms of allowing space

1:10:51for the reader it's this famous thing of like the vase like is there in the similar to what you just said in the poem is there a vase on the table or is there a blue vase with white figures on it filled with wild irises like as soon as you add those details you populate the reader's mind but you also take away their own freedom to put in the vase of their own

1:11:22imagination imagination so I feel like again it's an interesting tension like the more particularly you describe you potentially also take away some freedom from the experience of the person who will if you don't describe it most likely populate that space with their own version of the vase or the car or the grass

1:11:52so it's a decision to be made I don't know that one is always right I think in different situations each can be useful but again I was wondering like what is a flexible architecture like what is an architecture that allows its inhabitants space to be in it in different and original ways like that's a question I ask about poems

1:12:24you know like can this poem allow an individual to have their own experience within it and in terms of thresholds it was I first found out about your podcast because of Chris L. Smith who you interviewed who was doing a kind of some work at the Edinburgh Futures Institute which is

1:12:54where I have my day job as the creative projects manager and I met him and had wonderful conversations with him about architecture when I was putting this book together and he had told me about I'm going to forget the name of the architect now but this idea of like a door handle that's so beautiful it makes you want to reach out and touch it and open the door and then a corridor that is that's a

1:13:25window at the end of it and the lights coming in in such a way that it makes you want to enter the building so the architecture itself is so right in some way that it keeps inviting you into the space and again I found that to be a really delicious idea in terms of like how how can I write a poem how can I make a poem

1:13:56that is so where everything's right in such a way that it keeps inviting you over the thresholds of the poem which might be sometimes I wonder is the threshold the space in a poem is it the line breaks is it the space the spaces that you're creating that people have to keep passing through the space which is also the breath or is it I've done one collection where most of the poems were you

1:14:27know quite narrow poems with lots of line breaks but then there were a series of prose poems and the prose poems little paragraphs punctuate the other poems in various ways and I was like could you say those are little thresholds in that collection you know structural pauses or transition points within the individual poem or a collection of poems yeah things you have to pass through but you need to be invited

1:14:57in yet you need to want to walk through them don't

Reading poem twelve

1:15:01read poem number 12 it's a foyer poem 12 tonight I only enter the foyer I will not go further in beyond this concourse a wide space stretching the entire width of the house stepped up into and bigger itself than any house in which I've ever lived I will not go further in

1:15:32not past the foyer into the great hall marble and chandeliers not beyond onto the veranda dining and card tables not beyond to the nearly immeasurable gardens the myriad shapes and sizes of pools I will stay in the foyer starkly lit cap in hand

1:16:03until my message is delivered yeah like that I stand corrected foyer is a lovely word it is a lovely word I mean if I just kept saying porch it would foyer sounds French it sounds good no it's lovely want to ask one last question which again I kind of kind of standard question for this podcast which is really what does this do and it's the wrong question for a poet and it's wrong question for poetry perhaps

1:16:33I'm not a political person so I'm not asking a question here about what is the politics of this but I think there's something interesting in the way that you're writing these poems speaking these poems or reciting these poems and in the origins of them that it seems to me to be about in some way other possible futures other possible worlds again and there's a correspondence here with architectural representation the communication of other possible realms is there some idea here as a kind of collection

1:17:03does this collection point towards an idea about an alternate to the one that you found yourself in but also to the one that we find ourselves in six

Utopia lab and alternative futures

1:17:12seven years down the line so as I mentioned I work at the Edinburgh Futures Institute which itself is an interesting architecture it used to be the main hospital for Edinburgh the Royal Infirmary and almost collapsed in on itself some years ago it was no longer being used as a hospital and became this Ballardian building about to topple over with trees in it and water pools of water and the university bought it and spent

1:17:43a lot of money redoing it and now it's this building where people are thinking about the future and I put on exhibitions there I run creative projects and one of the projects I run is called Utopia Lab and it's a kind of space I try to create and invite people into using some of this embodied practice

1:18:14using meditation using poetry using creative methods but really trying to bring people into a space where they can think about the future travel in their imagination to the future and engage with the possibilities therein because there's never just one future there's always a multiplicity of

1:18:45futures and when I first started this project I was working with a man called Riel Miller this futurist who was working for UNESCO at the time and he had this wonderful idea about futures literacy and this kind of thought that we are given a lot of language to talk and think about history but we're not given much language to talk and think about the future other than maybe the very dystopian scenarios shown to us in sci-fi and film and media

1:19:16of which I heard some strange fact I don't know how this was got to but it sounded real likely that something like over 75% of all depictions of the future in TV and media is dystopian rather than just okay or utopian and that's quite a strong bias toward a dark apocalyptic future but nobody knows right like nobody knows the future is never determined and

1:19:47again it's always multiple but but even again I would I would say almost what I was talking about earlier that that we're I feel like our sort of a lot of our access to creativity and to the experience of being in the body and what we can learn from that is kind of beaten out of us also a lot of our again we're not given much access to being able to imagine into futures creatively

1:20:18and joyfully and consider what wonderful things could come and and there's there's a wonderful thinker called Ruth Levitas and she does a lot of work with this idea of the concept of utopia as method so being able to use this idea of utopia and thinking about positive futures to bring a kind of energy back to the present that then can be useful to generate

1:20:49real positive change in society in the now which is all we ever have real access to I'm saying all this in part because I think it does all relate to part of why I care so much about poetry and art and creativity and helping people feel empowered to express themselves is because I

1:21:19think I

1:21:23we should we should be playing you know we should be we should be playing with different possibilities and and and again like all those things I was saying about poetry and having these spaces between meanings that you can play with like it it I think it helps us get out of this

1:21:53stuck stuckness that we can be in in our individual lives in in our societies in our communities so I do feel like taking the time to feel feel what what gives us joy what inspires us to pay attention to our dreams to

1:22:24allow ourselves time to put our hands in clay or use tools or color or paint or whatever it is that turns you on and gives you that feeling those things really can help I think with the really hard stuff now I would normally say that's a great point to finish on but I think a great point to finish on would be you reading a poem if that's at all possible

Reading the final poem

1:22:54Jennifer

Reading the final poem

1:22:5552 we are on the edge of the city entering a building made of hinoki linked rooms in octagonal shapes with aisles and angawas and awnings we pass a man at a table showing many options stepping down or up we are inside and

1:23:24outside sometimes shadowed but often in light it may be the roofs are open air is coming in very clean and refreshing there is something pale gold lovingly washed that makes it seem new and old moving through interconnected space after space we are

1:23:55stunned at the size it might go on forever eventually one room opens to a yard of sand and beyond that long grass with white wind flowers waving at its edges some farming equipment a shed a barn the dimensions of the place are incalculable suburban houses surrounding

1:24:25this field or series of fields enclosed by a fence but we are in a different space all together and that seems to be the point of this place that feels like a real place but is not a real place joy pure joy and that seems to be the point of this place that

1:24:55feels like a real place but is not a real place which even as I walk with the grass and flowers brushing my fingers offers its liminality like water that tastes delicious but cannot quench thirst which when my home is threatened and the sky racked with storms I can return to even when awake

1:25:26many days later to feel again this joy that's a good point to finish on thank you very much Jennifer it's been amazing to hear you speak and to read some of your work thank you Ambrose blacksmiths with grimed and hairy chests environ the anvil each with his main sledge they are all out there is a great heat in the fire from the cinder strewed threshold I follow their movements the lithe shear of their waists

1:25:58plays even with their massive arms overhand the hammer's swing overhand so slow overhand so sure they do not hasten each man hits in his place Walt giving it all the Whitmans there from his 1892 poem Song of Myself Laird and Rumi at the same time thanks to Jennifer, poet, for speaking with me and for the actual real books please see the podcast description for links to the books and to the good poetess on her website at work and on social media and if you really want to

1:26:29to donation options and thanks for listening So Well samurai and In No No No No No No No No No No No No No

1:26:59No No