The three poems and two images here presented are part of a much longer sequence which has recently been exhibited in the gallery of the Ryerson Polytechnic University’s School of Image Arts under the title ‘noir architecture’.
The impulse behind the project is a reflection of my peculiar gifting, as poet and photographer. I write poetic meditations upon photographs because it brings together two activities which have up until recently in my life been separate, thus groping toward some better sense of artistic integrity. The term I’ve coined for this brand new art form is ‘wordscape’. Now when people ask me how I justify myself in face of the great and (to me anyway) somewhat paralyzing world of work I can say: ‘I make wordscapes’.
Photos – even photos made deliberately as art – are today often still treated as factual matter. The joy of wordscaping is that it allows me to explore the imaginative underworld of some of my own photographs The ‘noir architecture’ sequence is about to be published in book form.
you turn a corner
(dead center of the night)
shock of the real
from the temporal, the fleeting
(our handprint on the earth)
to the now, the always
the rapt eternal now
the old stones sidle outward
to kiss the steps to kiss the shadowed wall
while beyond by electric light outlined
the tree trunks curve
in staccato concert
aspiring in the city air
to leaf entangled difference
pure defiant soul,
opposing to militant office
windows-the chlorophyll riot to the victory of
mathematics – organic necessity
