Quiz #3

1) In poetry, what is an arch? A shape that half-encloses space. Explain and draw a model. See "Un Coup de Des".
2) Take Le Corbusier's somewhat forgotten Savoie house as analogy: Can the body of a poem be hollowed out in every direction (snip)...? Only if it is composed of ambiguous words.
3) Is it possible, in a move of boldest conceptual elan, to build a poem over a waterfall? "Lycidas". Confirm or deny, then, if the former, say what you would title such a poem. "Perpetual Motion".
4) Is the incipient turn of new poetries to architectural/spatial theory symptomatic, in any way, of the generalized crisis of the current poetic avant-garde? Insert a compass as metaphor (or metonym, if you desire) in your answer. The wind from the sound of no hands clapping, perturbing the gargoyle-weathervane of the Muses which the Sufi fool takes for a compass pointing at Eternal Truth.

   Quiz #4

1) Take Michael Riffaterre's book Semiotics of Poetry, where he argues (as described by the American poet-bridge builder Henry Gould) that the poetic involves a dialectic between mimesis or representation, on the one hand (which creates what Riffaterre calls meaning), and significance, on the other. The architecture game of poetry, then, would seem to involve deciphering a significance that is always deferred by the parabolic indirections of transforming meaningful observation into architectonic
structure. Does this suggest that a poem --the kind that is written on a two-dimensional page-- is necessarily and merely a kind of deceptive *faciatta* through whose apertures an interior content is fleetingly and deceptively glimpsed against what is, in the most material sense, a swarming particle space? Answer yes or no via a parable in the style of Plato. There once was a boy who believed
in the promises of Poetry. He ran away from home & tried to make himself into a Poet. He failed & became a gun-runner, but he changed Poetry forever.
2) If a metaphor is a balcony, is the view it affords measurable in terms of a paraboloidal function (for example: x2/a2+y2/b2 = 2cz [where a, b, and c are constants]), or is that just gibberish? Justify. Its view is not a parabola but a hyperbola. If it had been a parabola, we would not still be arguing about it.
3) What is an Author? Is she an Architect? Think hard. The Author is a figment of the poem's imagination, as is proven by the existence of so many misconceptions about dead authors which are inspired by fanciful people reading their works. Where she builds, where she makes her nest, is in the Future.
4) Can a security alarm system be built into a poem? There's one in "The Waste Land". Name it. Ezra Pound.