There can at times be a tendency to think of poetry as being primarily concerned with the natural world and fine emotions, a precious art divorced from the realities of everyday life. However, as regular readers of this series know, poems can be and have been written about almost anything. Take buildings, for instance. Most of us spend the best part of the day in or around one or more of the things. The majority are fairly prosaic and their very ubiquity tends to blind us to their features and characteristics – and yet, there is a rich vein of building-inspired poetry out there.
Sometimes buildings impinge on our minds because we go looking for them “tourist-eyed”, as Australian poet Katherine Gallagher puts it in her poem Chartres. Of course, the famous French cathedral is a work of art in itself, but Gallagher skirts around the temptation to indulge in the ekphrastic; her poem does not describe Chartres cathedral itself, but evokes the sensation of approaching it in expectation. Finally, the building is transmogrified, an ark floating above its dull surroundings.
In A Supermarket in California, Allen Ginsberg is visited by a vision of another sort when poet Walt Whitman appears to him amid the food aisles, an anachronistic figure among shopping families. For Ginsberg, the supermarket serves as a marker of the decline in American society, from the heady optimism of Whitman’s era, to a dull commercialism of the alienated suburban consumer of the 1950s. With the origins of its packaged food obscured, the supermarket stands in contrast with the older poet’s world of “juicy autumnal fruit, ripe and red from the orchard”.
In Filling Station, Elizabeth Bishop visits an even more typically modern building, but to different ends. Although she recognises the grimy, oil-saturated reality of her surroundings, Bishop can also see the ordinary human grace that seeks to create beauty amid the dirt of the garage and that this represents the endurance of love as an intrinsic aspect of any act of human making.
Andrew Marvell’s Appleton House is about as far removed from a petrol station as you might imagine, but like Bishop, Marvell is interested in the building as a symbol of a kind of order in the chaos of Cromwellian England. Appleton House, for Marvell at least, represents a Protestant restraint as opposed to both its previous Catholic history and to the ongoing civil war – from which his employer at Nun Appleton, Lord Fairfax, had withdrawn. The building and its gardens represent a kind of oasis of contemplative peace and a model for what England might be. Nevertheless, Marvell came to be a great admirer of Cromwell, who perhaps did more to disturb the peace than any other English leader of the time.
Marvell’s contemporary Richard Lovelace ended up on the other side of that conflict. A passionate royalist, his emblematic building was not a fine country house but a prison, where he found himself twice. It was during his first period of incarceration that he wrote one of the finest and most enduring lyrics of the 17th century, To Althea, from Prison. In the much-quoted last verse, Lovelace denies the prison as building its material power to confine him. Stone walls may serve to house a gentleman, but, for Lovelace at least, they cannot confine him.
In The British Museum Reading Room, Louis MacNeice takes a somewhat jaundiced view of the intellectual workers of London in their mind-hive, engaging in more or less pointless activity to ward off worries about the impending war (the poem was written in July 1939). The British Museum acts as refuge for an elite, while outside the pigeons are “at their ease”: those who actually need refuge are excluded from the false sanctuary of the building.
Of all the public buildings in the world, Quaker meeting houses must surely be amongst the most modest. At one such building, Basil Bunting meditates on transience and the need for silence in At Briggflatts meetinghouse. Perhaps this is what buildings are ultimately for: to provide what their users require, for as long as they and their users endure. A bit like poetry, really.
So this month’s Poster poems challenge is to write a poem about a building or buildings. Home or prison, shelter or workplace, great cathedral or humble stone hut, the choice is yours. I’ve laid the foundations for you – time to get to work.
