Midway Radicals & Archi-poems

Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems is a provocative foray into experimental poetry. It explores the fertile gaps and overlaps between the architecture of poetry and the poetry of architecture. It is a work of serious play, which springs from the root of pleasures taken on the porous boundaries of sense and non-sense. Harmonizing with and against a global carnival of poetic wisdom, the section "Midway Radicals" is an erasure poetry "exhibit" that reconstructs work by Gertrude Stein, Viktor Shklovsky, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, George Bowering, Christian Bok, Ted Berrigan, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson and Cy Twombly. The multi-voice of the poems does not belong to a single poet, genre or discipline, but resonates in a moving chorus, striving to give voice to what remains universal in the interplay of traditions, while bringing the gist of synthesis into transformative contact with particularities of the human condition.

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.