The Space of Poetry

Gallery Talk: April 30, 2014, 5:00PM Free and open to the public. The Boston Architectural College is pleased to host The Space of Poetry, a public exhibition featuring the work of educator, writer, and illustrator Cara Armstrong. The exhibition allows us to delve into the space of poetry by bringing it together with architecture history, theory and design, encouraging viewers to look critically at poetic construction and promoting a more evocative understanding of architecture and writing. By considering poetry as a built environment, Cara reveals spaces, meanings, and relationships in poems that may not be immediately evident to a reader. She draws out connections between images, sounds, and lines. She plays with the cadence and mathematical organization of poetry and draws to make new readings and alignments evident. First, to understand the components (story, structure, music, imagination) of a poem, Cara looks at poet Gregory Orr's Four Temperaments and the Forms of Poetry. Using the lens of architecture and art, she visually considers story, structure, music, and imagination as building blocks. Then, through architectural analysis techniques such as solid/void analysis and diagramming, she translates individual poems into a set of spatial relationships that becomes art in its own right. This allows the work of poets such as John Donne, Jean Valentine, and Jane Mead to converse across time and brings to light similarities in form, structure, and meaning. Cara draws attention to the silences/pauses in the poems, the places between the voiced lines, which call our minds to the implicit and explicit patterns in and between stanzas. Her insightful drawings and notations blur the boundaries of architecture, poetry, and art to find a transdisciplinary discourse that examines how form, space, and order can be generative and convey meaning, while creating zones of indeterminacy and focus, of repetition and release. The drawings create discontinuities and capture turns of mood and phrase. By holding the words under ink and wash, she gives us a new way of reading.