Material #43 - "How everything happens”
Language as a “bracelet of beads” in May Swenson's poems
I have previously touched on parallels between language and building e.g. see the very end of this post. Texts and buildings are wholes (within wider wholes) that are constructed from constituent parts.
In poems such as May Swenson’s “How Everything Happens (Based on a Study of the Wave)” the parallels become even more apparent, as the text of the poem itself forms a clear shape. A shape albeit, as Michael Spooner puts it in his analysis of this poem, is restricted somewhat by the materiality of print at the time when Swenson was writing, in the late 1960s. Check out the poem on page 176 here.
Spooner writes:
“Poetry for Swenson is an access to the world of the senses, and providing this access ‘is done with words; with their combination—sometimes with their unstringing’ (Iconographs 87). I love the word ‘unstringing.’ Language becomes a bracelet of beads, and the poet is allowed to snip the string.”
And he quotes further from Swenson’s Iconographs, which is the collection in which “How Everything Happens” appeared:
“To have material and mold evolve together and become a symbiotic whole. To cause an instant object-to-eye encounter with each poem even before it is read word-after-word. To have simultaneity as well as sequence. To make an existence in space, as well as in time, for the poem. These have been, I suppose, the impulses behind the typed shapes and frames invented for this collection. . . .
I have not meant the poems to depend upon, or depend from, their shapes or their frames; these were thought of only after the whole language structure and behavior was complete in each instance. What the poems say or show, their way of doing it with language, is the main thing…”
The symbiosis between “material” and “mold” plays out in so many contexts.
It is present in building processes: no structure would exist without its materials, yet what we see and experience first (sometimes at the expense of noticing the materials at all) is the structure as a whole.
It also plays out in organizations - or any grouping of people. Here the art is to create an effective symbiosis between the “mold” - the structure, governance and processes that hold an organization together (heavily or lightly), and the people - brimming with individual meaning and potential - from which it is made.
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Through 2024, It’s Material is sharing one use of the word “material” each week, on Tuesdays (sometimes Wednesdays!)
For another exploration on language and building (as well as the need to revitalize the symbiosis between construction and design) check out Franca Trubiano’s “Building Theories: Architecture as the Art of Building”
So interesting:)