Poems, Out of Place

We have had some difficulty getting submissions in these first few weeks of our blog.  So now we would like to hear back from you.  We are accepting any poems about the place you call home and how it affects your daily routine, whether that be a design class, an office job, or anything.  It doesn't even have to be what would traditionally be considered poetry.  Perhaps if we get enough submissions, we can create our own notebook in the style of Chris Nieters'!

Tower of Babel

The notes take an interesting turn this week.  We can assume the "poem" on the first page was written around Christmas time.  A hand-drawn picture of the Edmonton Public Library (from 1931) is glued to the page and the poem surrounds it.

On the bottom of the second page, we have a poem entitled "Tower of Babel" written underneath notes on the history of architecture.  If we take into account the line breaks, the poem would appear as follows:

Tower of Babel

We chew on these specs, these latter-day

concepts of structure, from desks

more bored than our pencils, praying

to build a lasting mark, an eternal

summer that shall not fade when

the reality is the greatest monument

that the best of us could possibly muster

will stay erect less days than the Tower

of Babel.  It’s clear that my English

is already Greek and Hebrew to my fellow

drones when they speak of ventilation and

girders as mandated means to a clone-

worthy end that I see as brush strokes

on the skyline canvas in an art gallery

city.  How great the painting if the workers

suddenly spoke 100 different aboriginal tongues

and created an unliveable totem.  Edmonton

could breathe spontaneous art once again.

This week's call for poetry: Send us a poem inspired by one of the architectural time periods listed in the notes!

Not Good Lettering

Two pages for this week's post on which there appears to be three poems.

The call for submissions this week is Haiku inspired by the design notes on these pages.