Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Poetics Across North America

Poetics Statement: Soft Architecture: A Manifesto

Lisa Robertson | 361 It began at three o’clock one October afternoon. What was I to understand of it? Its intent is mordent. It’s weak and it wants beauty. It was here that I first observed this question of withheld arcadia. It leans on the transparent balustrade. It is a continuous astonishment. It arrives at nothing but the rolling year. It always means everything. For instance, to do, to be, to suffer, to bark, to like, to crumble, to sit: in each verb I’ve entertained ambition. poetics statement Soft Architecture: A Manifesto The worn cotton sheets of our little beds had the blurred texture of silk crêpe and when we lay against them in the evening we’d rub, rhythmically, one foot against the soothing folds of fabric, waiting for sleep. That way we slowly wore through the thinning cloth. Our feet would get tangled in the fretted gap. We walked through the soft arcade. We became an architect. The knitted cap on the wrinkled head of the mewling kid is the first boundary. At the other tip the bootie dribbles. There are curious histories of shrouds. That is not all. Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft. Of course it’s all myth. Beginning at grand rooms ranked in small stone Natufian couples commingled in kisses, the Perspex galleries of pendant Babylonian dollies, the long halls of Egyptian cats that are sirens or dynasties, we amble towards the disappearance of godliness into cloth. Europe’s lusty godlets start bending. Carved cloth connotes the wild swirls of the Christly 362 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century sexual parts. Sprigged calico greets the renaissance of Venus. Prudery flows animate, clinging, vivid—we think it absorbs virility from naked Antiquity herself. Strolling from Byzantium we observe her teasing retreat. The mischievous and the sexy gods get dressed as patrons and courtesans and popes, crinolined in Fragonard’s stiff satins, diminished to tiny petticoated players in painted enamel frolics. Finally invisible they loll in the latent conventions of canvas, or in the draperies and objets of the rooms themselves, such as the Frick’s crushed mohair swags, the personified tapestry walls, the little petit-point chairs personified, the chamberpot, the silken floor personified. We arrive at our last long century. We note that the holy modernism of the white room is draped and lined in its newness by labile counter-structures of moving silk, fur, leather, onyx, velvet. The modernist inventors of the moot science of psychoanalysis raise its cold visage from the deep upholsteries and ruched cushions of the speaking invalid’s couch. A contemporary describes the late Maria Callas’s vibrato as “a worn velvet that has lost the evenness of its texture.” As for us, we wear avant-thrift. We sit in spider-like chairs. But Soft Architecture expires invisibly as the mass rhetorics of structural permanence transmit: Who can say when the astonishing complicities of the woven decay into rote? The bare ruin of Bauhaus and the long autopsy of concepts serve as emblems of Soft Architecture’s demise. Yet our city is persistently soft. We see it like a raw encampment at the edge of the rocks, a camp for a navy vying to return to a place that has disappeared. So the camp is a permanent transience, the buildings or shelters like tents—tents of steel, chipboard, stucco, glass, cement, paper and various claddings— tents rising and falling in the glittering rhythm which is null rhythm, which is the flux of modern careers. At the centre of the tent encampment, the density of the temporary in a tantrum of action; on peripheries over silent grass of playing fields the fuzzy mauveness of seed-fringe hovering. Our favourite on-ramp Lisa Robertson | 363 curving sveltely round to the cement bridge, left side overhung with a small-leafed tree that sprays the roof of our car with its particular vibrato shade. Curved velveteen of asphalt as we merge with the bridge-traffic, the inlet, the filmic afternoon. The city is a fluorescence of surface. Under the pavement, pavement. Hoaxes, failures, porches, archaeological strata spread out on a continuous thin plane; softness and speed, echoes, spores, tropes, fonts; not identity but incident and the accumulation of air miles; unmarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment, indexical euphorias, the unraveling of laughter; a brief history of escalators; memory...