Colin Criss

Think about the architecture of a building that you’ve visited, lived in, or seen. You can think about the facade of the building, or the roofline, or the landscaping, or another architectural element or elements. If you were trying to relay the architecture of that building via the architecture of a poem, how would you shape your language? The building’s architecture might manifest itself in the poem’s meter, line length, sentence length, grammatical mood, tone, psychology, etc… The important thing, here, is to focus almost-entirely on imitating the form of the building, at least initially. The poem can be about anything—so let’s say it will be about a fish. How does the architecture of this fishy poem (that is imitating the architecture of the building) change your understanding of the occasion of the poem?