Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

An urban fox is keener than most on the right kind of built environment. So when the Arts Council included “Poetry and Architecture’ as one of its six Architecture Week talks on the links with other arts disciplines, Urban Fox trotted hungrily over to Somerset House. It was a wonderful summer evening, and poets Denise Riley and lain Sinclair were due to meet in discussion with Jonathan Glancey, the Guardian’s architecture correspondent, and David Marks, co-creator of the BA London Eye. Like Winnie the Pooh, the discussion appeared to be living under the name of something rather tangential: in this case, “High Windows: Poetry and Architecture.” And the Poetry Society’s Christina Patterson, in the chair, had the Christopher Robin role of concentrating potentially fluffy minds.

On what, though? The other five “Architecture and the Arts” talks were all being publicised as focussing on specific, and rather functional, relationships: between architects who built theatres, for example, and the actors and directors, the dancers, choreographers, and opera singers, who used them. But the pre-talk “Poetry and Architecture” blurb had nothing in it to hint at what thesis might link Larkin’s wonderful middle-aged lament for lost sexual Edens with, say, Libeskind’s latest tour de force or the London Eye. So off to Somerset House to find out.

First, though, we had to fight our way in through the shut gates of this great public building, past the paparazzi packing the pavement outside (Charles was apparently due to squire Camilla to an official do for the first time - and it was all taking place next door to our lecture theatre). Once inside the gates, there was a tantalizing glimpse of London’s finest piazza - tonight, though, strictly off limits to us as we pushed our way up a narrow staircase crowded with crisply starched waiters all concentrating on keeping the champagne on ice, ready for the royal coupling next door.

Once we could settle, Jonathan Glancey got us down to business, with a bravura slide-illustrated tour of London’s highways and byways. His thesis was elegantly supported not just by his photos, which seized with great charm on the city’s hidden felicities, but by copious quotes from a wide range of poems. And it ran as follows: first, poetry and architecture do the came things - they take their admittedly different raw materials, and build something equally and comparably artistic with them; and second, they also build in ways and forms that closely parallel each other. So, for Glancey, there is high poetry in a Palladian mansion, a massively brooding Hawksmoor church or a sinuous piece of Corbusier concrete. And for every Gothic, Baroque or Art Nouveau building, a similarly constructed poem; for every perfectly balanced Parthenon, a similarly balanced sonnet. Finally, for the highest example of poetic insight married to architectural artistry, he turned to High Windows and Larkin’s transforming last stanza:

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

It went down well with an audience charmed by Glancey’s enthusiasm for both poetry and architecture, and his great eye for telling social and architectural detail. But Denise Riley, who spoke next, was outraged. Riley, who teaches at the University of East Anglia, has been publishing poetry (often sparked off by the gritty realities of living in London) and prose since 1977. Reality Street published her Selected Poems in 2000, when she also brought out The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity and Irony. Riley sternly rejected Glancey’s easy parallelism between architecture and poetry.

A poet and an architect, she said, were not simply fellow builders who happened to be using different raw materials. ‘We are built by language. We do not use words like blocks.” Strike one. To call a building (or anything else material) “poetic” was “a catastrophic misunderstanding of poetry”. It was, according to Riley, the mark of a speaker “who feels he’s looking at something that is in some way sublime, but can’t (or is too lazy to) describe more precisely how it is sublime”. Strike two. She was keen to have more poems about the city, but they could only be understood and judged as poems. Architectural criteria had no light to shed on a poem’s construction, intent or effects. And that was because poems occupied territory inaccessible to architecture. They dealt in irony, were anarchic, messy, uncontrollable, un-spinnable. Strike three.

As Riley’s bricks came hurtling through his High Windows thesis, Jonathan Glancey and Christina Patterson started to look thoughtful. And lain Sinclair was no better news. Rare book dealer, parks gardener, writer, in his poetry and prose he has been, for one admirer, “the archivist of London’s marginal, unfashionable and self doomed”. His poetry collections are bleakly titled: Lud Heat; Suicide Bridge; Flesh Eggs and Scalp Metal. Lately, it is prose works like Lights Out in the Territory that have brought readers his raw and hurting vision of a city and its people. And for Sinclair, Riley was spot on to reject any overtures from the builders. Architecture, more problem than solution, was for Sinclair “an obstacle to poetry”. It was “a receptacle for history, the point where poetry and memory meet”. And Sinclair tracks memory down often sombre paths. He appeared to see Glancey’s optimism as not only wrong, but dangerous. Architects, he darkly implied, were not on the same side as poets and the people and experiences they wrote about.

This rather brutal, double-barrelled assault on Glancey’s light-hearted attempt to give the evening some sense of direction appeared to have gone un-noticed by David Marks, co-creator of the London Eye, and final speaker. Marks struggled to explain why the Eye did so clearly delight many people. He seemed to have nothing to add to the profound disagreements that had emerged about whether the creative processes and achievements that lay at the heart of both poetry and architecture shared anything at all. Nor did the voices from the floor.

So, we left - past the paparazzi, the prince, and the official guests all still enjoying our public spaces and denying Urban Fox his rightful pickings. And we left still hungry for some more profound exploration of the artistic roots of “Poetry and Architecture”. Surely the brusque dismissal of Glancey wasn’t all that poets could say about the art that is at the heart of great architecture? After all, in his introduction to the Architecture Week programme, the Guardian’s Tom Dyckhoff had written about how neither architecture, nor for that matter, music or literature, “really matter’. But, he went on, “that’s not their point. They’re not here to pay the bills, solve world peace and make your life more efficient. They’re here to give your life oomph. That’s what architecture should do.”

And poetry, presumably. On occasion, as Glancey had already pointed out, poetry is inspired by the work of an architect. It is indeed the thought of high windows in Larkin’s last stanza that turns this from an ordinary to an extraordinary poem. Denise Riley had read us her own fine poem, Letters From Palmer, earlier in the evening. This time, it is the painter Samuel Palmer who is struggling to understand how another art, the art of writing, works. How can he render his painters experience and ambition, and his life’s, in words as well as paint? As he grapples with the problem, Palmer jots down a note: “Exactness the common honesty of art”. Fair enough. But a little earlier in her Palmer poem Riley quotes Palmer describing the consolation experienced by the reader of great literature: “You lay the book down as tenderly as if you had handled something alive”. And surely that’s it. That’s where all artistic disciplines do meet. Creating that sense of tenderness, of having been in the presence of something alive, is where painter and architect and poet all reach out for the sublime. David Marks may not be able to explain how he has done it, but in the London Eye he has helped create something “sun-comprehending” that Larkin would surely join so many of us in recognizing and applauding.