In the fall of 1999, as an exercise, a group of Albuquerque poets including myself, Lisa Gill (project coordinator of “Herland,” a monthly women’s poetry gathering), Mitch Reyes (instigator of “Flaming Tongues”), together with University of New Mexico Professor of Architecture Mark Childs (author of Parking Spaces: A Design, Implementation, and Use Manual for Architects, Planners, and Engineers), and his students Arjuna Imfl, Craig Folsom, and P. Joseph Barrow have been meeting to plan a fantasy Poet’s Plaza. In mid-November, things got real: Harwood Center for the Arts in Albuquerque agreed to donate the land.

In the beginning the idea was to meet with the students & share ideas, so the students could get practice working with people and come up with some drawings. We would end the semester with a mock plaza made of hay bales and all go our separate ways.

The shift from a fun and educational project to pursuing the idea in earnest was subtle. We found ourselves increasingly speaking of the project as if it were real. Then the consensus grew that this was too fun, too good an idea to let go. Susan MacAlister of Harwood had been attending the meetings and was caught up in the excitement -- she brought the idea to the Harwood Board and they agreed to let a space in the back of their building become the world’s first Poet’s Plaza.

What will poets do there? I hear you wondering. First and foremost, we will fire up the bar-b-que and have po-parties, we will dance to poems, it will be a place to hang out and speak with the muse, a place to gather. Sometimes, quietly, we and you will sit in the shade of poems as lovely as trees.

Gary Mex Glazner

Here is my interview with Professor Childs and his students on the genesis of the project:

Glazner: How did you think of the idea of a Poet’s Plaza?

Childs: A few things came together to nudge me in this direction -- I am primarily interested in “civic places” and had come to the, now obvious to me, conclusion that to make plazas etc. be great places they need people/organizations/ social practices that want to use them. You can’t often just make a plaza and have people come. Form follows people. Also I am interested in social practices that have the potential to transform the culture. I believe the way one changes the economy is to change people’s values and then they will spend their time & money on their new values. Poetry, I believe, has a slow, indirect power like the dripping of water on stone -- it takes a time. Finally, I am interested in the “civic sector” -- that is, non-governmental organizations -- a social practice between private actions and public/governmental actions. I think giving poetry an actual place rather than borrowed places/times can help strengthen the city and the social practices of poetry.

Glazner: What do you hope to accomplish by building it?

Childs: I’m not certain where this will go. It’s a bit like planting a seed and seeing if the tree will grow. Basic aims are (1) to help educate the students in my architecture studio, (2) to help organize the “civic sector” of poets, and (3) to provide a “home base” for poetry in the city.

Glazner: How does working with poets fit into your ideas as an architect?

Childs: Working with & for clients is central to my view of architectural practice -- it shouldn’t be something we do to society. Architecture is a political art (a term rooted in the term for city, polis). Poets have the potential to engage in a dialog grounded in practicality but also in ways of being. I found the dialog between the students and poets to be very articulate compared to other dialogs I have been part of with “clients.”

Imfl, Folsom, and Barrow speak as chorus: We are bathed and fed by the creative process.... To collaborate with poets, who are bathed by the same creative light, but articulate via word, provides a sense of acceleration. As though we are from different lands, yet we innately understand each other. This is not to say that poets are easy clients to work for; it means that we can come to the table and really communicate.

Our design process begins with metaphor, with vision. We immediately see space as poetic procession. It is through architectural rigor that we strive to maintain that poetics.

Glazner: Do you write poetry? I believe that almost everyone at one time has written poems and that interest can be the starting place for poets to build relationships with business people and folks from different art disciplines.

Childs: Yes, but not for the last decade. I actually got paid for one poem, “In Praise of your Attic.”

Glazner: Could you read us a few lines from the poem?

Childs:
Your attic, quiet chamber
built of books and garden pots
still chatters, distills ripe words,
laces quiet talk with fire dreams
ferments and effervesces
inculcated with noon sun.

Glazner: Thanks! Very architectural. Anything you want to add, or say about the project?

Childs: I would like to invite people to help with the project in various ways. We can use help raising funds, connecting to other organizations, have an organization that uses it, and have the site serve as a “seed/model” for other, better plazas in other cities. For this to happen other people need to take over the project from us.

Imfl, Folsom, and Barrow: About the larger issue of developing the art scene in ABQ... our vision of the future is the collaborative products of the different groups involved: free thinking clients and free thinking designers (architects) working to create opportunities in ABQ that don’t exist now.

• Gary Glazner is our New Mexico/Southwest Museletter correspondent.
• He served as poet-in-residence at the Inn on the Alameda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he writes “pillow poems” for the guests.
• Gary was San Francisco’s founding Slammaster & his poem, “How Do I Slam Thee?” was featured in 1999 here at About Poetry.
• A number of his poems, including “Headless Buddha,” “Coffee Science” & “Dear Sappho,” are in the Poem of the Day archives at Martha Cinader’s Planet Authority, where you will also find some of Gary’s pieces in RealAudio.