Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems is a provocative foray into experimental poetry. Exploring fertile gaps and overlaps between the architecture of poetry and poetry of architecture, this work of serious play is sparked by a double inquiry. Shaped by rules found, broken or bent along the way to archi-poetry, many of the poems are also transformative responses, remediating off-cuts and jump-cuts, radically renovating exemplary sources (archai): Homer and Aristotle; Berrigan, Hejinian and Silliman; Bök, Bowering, Olson and Creeley; Musil, Barthes and Lefebvre; Shklovsky, Ruskin and Poe. Harmonizing with and against this global carnival of "midway radical" wisdom, the layered voice of the poems does not belong to a single poet, genre or discipline, but resonates in the polylogue of an open chorus.
About the Author: Ted Landrum is a poet, critic, teacher, and artist, with extensive architectural and teaching experience in the US and Canada. He began writing what he calls "archi-poetry while studying architecture in Indiana. He then sustained the poetry habit while practicing architecture in New York City, where he was influenced by the jazz, the theatre, and the vitality of that great tumultuous city. Having lived in nearly a dozen cities, spiraling from Chicago to Montreal, Ottawa to Vermont, Ted now lives in Winnipeg, where he teaches architecture at the University of Manitoba, and continues to juggle artistic, professional and intellectual pursuits. His poetry and criticism have been published in a wide variety of venues: On Site Review, Brooklyn Rail, Lemon Hound, CV2, The American Society for Aesthetics, The Winnipeg Review, Edge Condition, and in a quirky academic book called Quality Out of Control. Between distractions, he is building an archive of archi-poetic research at www.ubuloca.com.
