Is there a poetry in architecture?

[khashan]

I was deeply impressed by this subject written by Jonathan Glancey because it has a lot to do with numerical prosody.

There is no architecture without mathematical ratios. There is no mathematics without numbers.
Rhythm is the most common factor between both. Audio rhythm in poetry and visual rhythm in architecture. Only numerical metering can be common between them and enable comparison in this regard.

I felt the writer has the right sensation but he lacks the proper tools. This lack of mathematical tools in reprepresenting verse rhythm is common everywhere. Needless to say that there are other aspects of similarity besides rhythm. The writer mentioned : structure and balance as well. I add rhyme sometimes.

I will elaborate on this topic from time to time hoping it will attract some attention .

I hope Iam not violating any publishing rights. If there is any violation, I request to keep the link and to omit the rest.

http://www.theguardian.com/global/2008/oct/21/poetry-architecture-hardy-larkin-betjeman

Jonathan Glancey:

I s there a connection between poetry and architecture? I remember talking on this subject some while back at an Arts Council-sponsored evening at Somerset House. In preparation, I'd spent the best part of a fortnight walking through parts of London I'm particularly fond of and photographing buildings and places that seemed, to me at least, somehow poetic. I learned, by heart, a number of poems that seemed relevant to what I wanted to say. To me there was, and is, something in the structure, rhythm, balance, and the very language of architecture corresponding in certain ways with those of sonnets, odes and epics.
I didn't have an academically approved theory to back up my sentiments, yet I felt that what I had to say was in the spirit of architects, of all eras, with poetry in their souls and with the spirits, too, of poets like Hardy, Betjeman and Larkin, among many others, who have truly seen poetry in architecture.

Yet, when I had said my piece, I was torn apart by the poet Denise Riley and the author Iain Sinclair. This unyielding twosome demolished not just the decorative superstructure, but the very foundations of my argument. Piffle! Nonsense! Poppycock! This was the most stupid, most utterly inane talk they had ever heard in their lives. There has never, ever been a connection between the two, they thundered. I crept out of Somerset House like a church mouse that had been spat out by cats. My pet theory was far more ruinous than Tintern Abbey.
In foolhardy fashion, but without making a speech, I raised the point afresh last night at an event held by the literary charity, Poet in the City, in the concert hall of Kings Place, the Guardian's soon-to-be home in King's Cross close to where the young Thomas Hardy once worked as an architect, for Arthur Blomfield, before turning full-time to poetry and novels. Close, too, of course to St Pancras station and the Midland Grand hotel, an intrinsically linked pair of haunting Victorian buildings saved thanks to John Betjeman, a much loved popular poet and architectural writer greatly influenced by Hardy.
The poets who spoke last night weren't necessarily ready to agree that there is a connection between their art and architecture. Simon Barraclough, who had written poems inspired by King's Place for the occasion (the one below is a particular celebration of the concert hall we spoke in), made it clear there isn't a connection, yet did say that there is an affinity between the two.
Jacob Sam-La Rose agreed, making the point with a poem he read about a building in Lewisham he and his childhood friends took to be haunted; the building was nothing to write home about from a strictly architectural point of view, but it became the stuff of poetry when infused with the fantasies of young Londoners.
Paul Farley who was brought up in a brutalist council estate in Liverpool, yet steadfastly refuses to blame Le Corbusier (who wrote A Poem to the Right Angle, as only a truly Modern architect could) for any influence he might unwittingly have had on such terrifying forms of post-war English housing, has been inspired by architecture, but again made the point that the two arts might inform one another while being different beasts.
I'm left, slightly unsatisfied, sensing that there has been and can be a more than associative connection between the two arts, but I'd need to make a proper study of this. I'd welcome your views. There is, though, no doubt that architecture, and a keen sense of place, has been good to poetry. Think of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, Wordsworth's Lines Composed upon Westminster Bridge, whole poems by Larkin, snatches of TS Eliot, lots from Hardy, masses by Betjeman. Equally, there have been several architects or architectural enthusiasts who have been fine poets, from Michelangelo to Hardy. And, there have been, too, architects whose work surely deserves the name poetry – in stone – whether Hawksmoor, Borromini, Palladio and, yes, Le Corbusier.
The subject is potentially as long as something by Tennyson, as complex as the Four Quartets (which feature quite a bit of architecture; Eliot was good on the subject), and as rich as The Divine Comedy. Neither Sinclair or Riley will forgive me for raising the subject again, yet I can't help wondering if there's something new we could be learning here; a way, at the very least least, of imbuing contemporary architecture with a poetic vision.
Bounded in a Nutshell by Simon Barraclough
Five centuries ago, a German acorn sweetened on the branch
until it reached its crucial mass
and blew the bolts to give itself to gravity.
Then all it had to do was dodge the jay's keen beak,
the hedgehog's truffling snout, shrug off the weevil's drill.
This lucky nut was squirreled away,
a hedge fund for a hungrier day
that never came and, planted in the soil, the work began:
the cylinder of shell unscrewed, a taproot dropped,
a pale shoot periscoped towards the light,
extended leaves and rippled out its rings,
trunk thickening as history hurtled by.
Six thousand moons the shadow of the branches flew
around its base through midnight, noon, until the day
that brought the saw that bit into the bark
and turned the tree into an acre of veneer
to line this room, this snug nutshell, replanted in the earth
in which we sit and feel the taproot of the bass notes shift,
hear sonic tendrils lift.
To be continued.

[khashan]

URL not allowed.

Charles O. Harman in his book : Verse an introduction to prosody - page 87 :

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/_/rsrc/1460021378952/r3/Home/shapes1/Meter%20numerical%20prosody.gif

Numerical ! we can't go numerical without using numbers.

How about using 1 for unstressed syllable and 2 for stressed sylalble?

Is it convenient ? Let us try and see what we get:

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/the%20widest.gif

If you start from (FENCE) then you have iambic pentameter.

I found this shape as an example.

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/iambic.gif

-----------------

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/anapestic1.gif


https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/anapestic2.gif

To be continued.

[khashan]

Any two other figures would show a mathematical, graphic and architectural self-consistent representation.

Is there anything special about 1 and 2? The origin of western meters including English which is a stress-timed language go back to the classic quantitative Greek and Latin.

In quantitative meters which includes Indian and Arabic as well, a short syllable Cv has one consonant; a long syllable CvC has two consonants. Thus, if we don’t count the short syllable the counted letters in a syllable is its numerical symbol. Since an open syllable CV is composed of a consonant and a long vowel, 2 as a symbol is equal to its letter numbers. So using these two numerical symbols 1 and 2 to respectively represent the short and long syllables in quantitative meters is factual and not just a matter of convenience. Consequently, it would – at least - be convenient to use them in English meters 1 to represent the unaccented and 2 to represent the accented. Jeremy Scott used them in the opposie order ( page 191) of his book " Creative Writing ……."

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/metrical%20patterns.gif

No harm is done by using any two figures or symbols just as a denoting means. Using numerical symbols to compare both audio and video rhythms will be meaningless if there is no real – or at least logical - relation between the numbers used for measuring and the rhythmic or metric measured items.

The success of introducing this numerical representation was so limited in Arabic and was refused by one English forum.

I believe this approach deserves the right to be examined at least.

[khashan]

I will start adding shapes which are self-explanatory and comment where necessary.

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/ice%20crystal.gif

---------

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/2-%20horizontal%20bldg.gif

---------

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/spondaic.gif


To be continued.

[khashan]

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%A9%20%D9%8 8%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B6%20%D8%A7%D9% 86%D8%AC%D9%84%D9%8A%D8%B2%D9%8A%20-%203.gif


https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/Cley%20Church.gif

[khashan]

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/stairs.gif

[desiresjab]

Deep or vacuous? I think deep, but over indulgent. A structure is not built chaotically, so none of this is surprising. It is widely understood that architecture is geometric and involves the repetition of geometric patterns. Humans respond to patterns that are short enough to grasp visually or aurally. A pattern which repeats after 89 beats means nothing at all to our guts. So, of course the patterns in architecture are short as well, much like our poetic scansion, so we can respond to them.

There are only so many short patterns to go around, just as there are only so many small integers around.

At a very high level of abstraction poetry and architecture have many correspondences. At that level of abstraction it is proper to say they are alike, in that parts of geometric structures and poems can be coded identically. At a high enough level, cuisine and music could be coded identically, I believe.

The thing that is similar about them is their mathematics at a very highl level of abstraction where everything else is disregarded.

A basic schematic language connects not only the arts, but most human activites. Most or all of your parallels could be drawn with music. Try hard enough you can probably make an argument for connectiong poetry to the golden ratio, the Fiobinacci sequence and pi. A poet will never write poetry that way. But this control language in the hands of corporate and government manipulators will have, and may already have, many propagandic uses, some subliminal, some in the open. If governments had a coded way of producing calm, at certain times of course they would all use it.

[khashan]

I could not hope for a better comment as a start.
My aim is to attract attention to this subject for evaluation. I see you have gone beyond that so deep and so wide. The mere use of certain keywords made me feel you will have a lot to do with this approach.
Abstraction was the most important key word. It is only though abstraction that we can see the correspondences or analogies in sound, heat, light, pressure , gravitation and probably many more fields regarding the inverse-square law.
This abstraction does not precede wise judgment and evaluation, which I see that you have.
Galileo Galilei: " Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe. "
-
Music and Fiobinacci sequence and pi are two other significant two words. In the very limited circle of those interested in Arabic numerical prosody, we speak of poetic ratio and combine it with pi.
Unfortunately I can't publish links. I may collect many thump-nail photos and publish them.
As for music and taking the numerical represention into account, look at the following shape,


https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/_/rsrc/1461511856827/r3/Home/shapes1/Dum%20Tek.gif

There are so many pertinent fields culminating up to philosophy and theology. I was proceeding gradually. Forgive this jump in response to your comment.

[Danik 2016]

I myself don´t understand about architecture but here are some architectural poems from Oscar Niemeyer:
http://www.theguardian.com/travel/gallery/2014/jun/12/bend-it-like-niemeyer-10-of-the-best-buildings-in-brazil
Unfortunately Copan, which is very near from where I live, is in a very bad condition today.

[khashan]

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/clock-arch.gif

[desiresjab]

The scheme you are presenting will encounter much resistance. Just like the poets you encountered. Artists have an immediate emotional reaction to someone reducing their work to a number sequence. By implication, they could be reduced to such a scheme too.

It smacks of f B.F. Skinner and behaviorism. For the natural application is manipulation of human emotions and behavior. If this underlying language does exist (as we both believe), it may never produce great music or poetry, but it has scary implications for mass control. Are people these days usually entertained by great music or films on high end systems? No, they watch The Godfather on something the size of a matchbox.

People can be induced to leave quality behind for their own convenience. Computer art, music and poetry of the future may not be quite as good as what humans do, but it may be free of charge!

The biggest thing to fear from this is not that humans may be finite without free will and their arts may lose quality, but what such a language refined would be capable of in the hands of the black ops folk.

[khashan]

I agree with you, but..
A poet's attitude follows his awareness of the relation between poetry , meters and math..
Bees builds cells in an exact architectural pattern by intuition . they produce honey which has excellent taste and medical properties without chemical or medical knowledge. Birds fly without any mechanical or aviation background.
Then comes the role of architects, chemists, engineers and all relevant scientists to discover the MATHEMATICAL form that leads to the discovery of mechanical ,architectural or chemical rules and formulas that controls the different products or activities.
Poetry was there before awareness of meters. The role of science - prosody in this case-is to discover the mathematical intuitive genius of the poet by proving that the meters he intuitively abides by follow a natural mathematical pattern or even law.
Quote: "How is it that Beethoven, who is celebrated as one of the most significant composers of all time, wrote many of his most beloved songs while going deaf? The answer lies in the math behind his music. Natalya St. Clair employs the "Moonlight Sonata" to illustrate the way Beethoven was able to convey emotion and creativity using the certainty of mathematics."

[khashan]

Application on the principle of rotation according to meter clock.
9740

Theoretically speaking, this part " in the morning, the end of December " may belong to any of the three meters. i.e. if we tell three people that they will listen to a part of a line without necessarily starting with the first foot then ask them about the meter of that portion, and we received three different answers. All of the three are right, that means the same rhythm may belong to three different meters.

We know every meter has its own rhythm. Both different statements are true. Are both statements objective on the same level?

[desiresjab]

Application on the principle of rotation according to meter clock.
9740

Theoretically speaking, this part " in the morning, the end of December " may belong to any of the three meters. i.e. if we tell three people that they will listen to a part of a line without necessarily starting with the first foot then ask them about the meter of that portion, and we received three different answers. All of the three are right, that means the same rhythm may belong to three different meters.

We know every meter has its own rhythm. Both different statements are true. Are both statements objective on the same level?

The plowman homeward plods his weary way, has been used to exhibit a line of perfect iambic pentameter. The entire poem might be called highly iambic. Yet there are departures. There simply have to be. Of the, is not going to sound imabic, and we have to use such phrases all the time to make our language sound normal instead of transparently contrived.The c*ck's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn, is not iambic.

Perhaps what you are suggesting is that often the departures from true meter in the poets is equivalent to rotation of one of your wheels. Gray usually rotates right back to iambic when he can, unless he has a special purpose for a temporarily different meter.

I can buy the rotation idea. I believe no one wants to compose poetry with rotations in mind, and I think you believe that, too, but the idea does have intellectual interest and merit, though clearly it is not a tool for poets but scientists.

It can still be of great interest to poets.

[desiresjab]

An area that reminds me of the variations in the names of meters in various contexts that you mentioned a few posts ago, is chord substitution in music. My C9 chord can rightfully be called an Emi7b5 in the correct context. It is also clearly a Gm6 in a different context.

If one wants, in the case of complex chords, one can rotate the notes in the chord until the correct note is the bass note, for a more clear picture. Some complex chords contain no root note at all, but are very popular and useful sounds. A good example would be the awkward to write down here G13add9 chord, whose notes from the bass would go, F B E A, and usually sounds best and is more versatile in the higher registers, but has many applications an octave or so lower as well. Rootless inversions can carry multiple names equally well. Those same notes are perfect in many applications as a rootles Dmi6add9.

The circle of fifths? The name is a bit metaphorical, but I suppose one could even view chord progressions as clicks on a wheel. A lot of famous songs follow the circle of fifths at least for a ways, and then resolve to the tonic (key). Practically every song in existence has a (VI I) change in it, which is the last step in the circle of fifths.

A few great songs defy everything. The main verse of Light My Fire is impossible to assign a real key signature using traditional harmonic methods. That wonderfull introduction is really screwy. It has some circle of fifths in it, some leaps out of nowhere and some backwards circle of fifths, the latter of course equaling the circle of fourths.The chorus is in D. In the instrumental center part we are back to Am, but this time as a Dorian mode, or II chord, which actually puts us in the key of G major. Then back to the weird intro, followed by another key-signatureless verse.

Well, that digressed a little, perhaps. Anyway, chord patterns follow well travelled routes. That is why they are patterns. Something like the Am to F#m, the back and forth movement in the main verse of the song (LMF), is quite novel, a real stamp of creativity. No one else I know of has used it as successfully or for such a duration. It is almost impossible to repeat that chord movement back and forth a couple of times and not feel you are plagarizing The Doors. It is the only two chord progression I know of that belongs to someone, if not legally, then certainly sonically.

[desiresjab]

Them danged double posts!

[desiresjab]

By the way, you keep anticipating me, too.

[khashan]

Dear desiresjab
Your comments are enriching this subject.
For years I have been presenting this topic ; deep reaction like yours is rare.
" Abstract " then " scientist tool " make me sure we are on the same boat.
I started with Architecture and poetry, and here you add music. My main concern is the
concept of analogous rhythms audio, video and probably other types like rhythm of motion
or certain phenomena and the role numerical representation plays in comparing them.
This is – of course – the tool of the scientist. Math is the language of science.

[khashan]

I quote from : http://www.formulas.it/?p=102

"Poetry, in other words, is mathematics. It is close to a particular branch of the subject known as combinatorics, the study of permutations – of how one can arrange particular groups of objects, numbers or letters according to stated laws. As early as 200 BC, writers on Sanskrit poetry asked how many ways it is possible to arrange various sets of long and short syllables, the building blocks of Sanskrit verse. A syllable is short, with one beat, or long, with two. In how many ways can a metre of four syllables be constructed? Four shorts or four longs have just one pattern for each, while for three shorts and a long, or three longs and a short, there are four (SSSL, SSLS, SLSS, and LSSS, for example). For two of each kind of syllable, there are six possibilities. Do the sum for metres of one, two, three, four and more and a mathematical pattern emerges. It is Pascal’s Triangle, the pyramid of numbers in which the series in the next line is given by adding together adjacent pairs in the line above to generate 1, 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 3 3 1, 1 4 6 4 1, and so on"

[desiresjab]

My knowledge of architecture is entirely superficial.

At a high enough level of abstraction, a red hair and Red Square are the same, as long as we remove (i.e. abstract) almost everything else but the word Red, including the color itself.

Some of the differences between poetry and architecture should be touched on. Architecture seems nowhere nears as elastic as poetry, to me, in a single work. I do not have to make my poem a skyscraper, a mansion or a gas station. Mansion seems like the more flexible form of those three. There is room for a lot of variety in fancy office builings and corporate headquarters. This variety comes over a great number of buildings not in one building. I am guessing. I do not visit a lot interesting of office buildings. What I like in a building is change and interesting geometry, not all straight lines.

If you can, it would be absorbing to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Waterhouse put to the test. Just looking at it makes me repeat, "poetry, poetry..." Even something more complex and ornate, like a Victorian mansion such as the Carson mansion, or anything comparable. Anything, really. Don't mind me, I dream up lots of projects for other people.

[khashan]

I am glad that at last – for the sake of discussion- we have something to differ about.

My knowledge of architecture is entirely superficial.
The same applies to my knowledge of music.


At a high enough level of abstraction, a red hair and Red Square are the same, as long as we remove (i.e. abstract) almost everything else but the word Red, including the color itself.

two types of comparison :

A- Between strong current and strong man.
B- Between water current and electrical current
Comparison between red hair and red square belongs to type A
Comparison between poetic rhythm and architectural rhythm belong to type B.
The following shape is a comparison between two different comparisons in two different fields..


Some of the differences between poetry and architecture should be touched on. Architecture seems nowhere nears as elastic as poetry, to me, in a single work. I do not have to make my poem a skyscraper, a mansion or a gas station. Mansion seems like the more flexible form of those three. There is room for a lot of variety in fancy office builings and corporate headquarters. This variety comes over a great number of buildings not in one building. I am guessing. I do not visit a lot interesting of office buildings. What I like in a building is change and interesting geometry, not all straight lines.
Comparison is not limited to showing similarities only. It shows differences as well.
Comparison can be between architecture an poetry, or between different types of each. Or even cross comparison .
Classic and modern architecture, free and formal verse. Even when someone may choose to describe anything as chaotic he has to have a regular reference.



If you can, it would be absorbing to see Frank Lloyd Wright's Falling Waterhouse put to the test. Just looking at it makes me repeat, "poetry, poetry..." Even something more complex and ornate, like a Victorian mansion such as the Carson mansion, or anything comparable. Anything, really. Don't mind me, I dream up lots of projects for other people.
Nice. Stephen Gerard Dietemann:
https://theberkshireedge.com/stephen-gerard-dietemann-poets-architect/
", my interest in poetry as an architect as well as an artist, musician and writer, is more general as well, in the sense of “great imagination and expressive capabilities (and) special sensitivity to the medium,” as Merriam-Webster defines the poet and poetry. I like to say that I design in poetry and build in prose as a shorthand way of describing a complex process as simply as possible. The architect, like all artists, needs to be open to everything as the creative exploration begins; the “prose,” be it building codes, budgets, banks, materials and physics, will arrive soon enough. The prose part is no less important of course, but it cannot flower without the poetry fueling it from the start. In many ways, the animating presence or absence of this “poetry” is the difference between architecture in the best sense and simply functional building."


https://humorinamerica.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/fallingwater-1.jpg

Caroline Zarlengo wrote:
https://humorinamerica.wordpress.com/2012/06/08/frank-lloyd-wright-ice-cube-poetry-and-humor/

"Today happens to be the birthday of American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. I have always loved residential architecture, in part, for the same reasons I love both humor and poetry. In fact, Wright’s buildings have been compared to poems because they merge with their environments the way well written literature merges with the reader’s minds and hearts. Inside Falling Water (above), it’s hard to tell where nature ends and the man-made structure begins. Likewise, with a great poem, it’s hard to tell where the words on the page end and our own thoughts and emotions begin."

The cantilevering flat slabs compare to the spondaic rhythm 2 2 2 2 2 2 in a way..
Even some statements evaluating them sound similar
In her book " the Art of Speech " page 178 , Dawn Langman says :" to speak more than a in few syllables in the spondee rhythm sounds unnatural."

Quotation : https://skparrott.wordpress.com/2010/06/16/frank-lloyd-wrights-fallingwater/
" Engineers of the day said it wouldn’t work…have you ever heard that before from an Engineer?"

[desiresjab]

Kashan, in your discussion of poetic metrics, you mentioned some things I did not get back to. Since you are weak in music, you may not know that those little articles and conjunctions at the beginning of poetic lines that cause the blur between true iambic and trochaic, for instance, have almost an exact equivalent in music. They are called pickup notes, and actually belong to a fictional measure that has already passed, not the opening measure.

[khashan]

Thanks you desiresjab
I assume you mean that emphasizes the resemblance between poetry and music.
So far we have been talking about poetry and architecture – which you know little about – one time and about poetry and music which I know little about another time.
This dual relation between poetry and both architecture and music leads to the deduction that there should be a direct relation between music and architecture.
This wonderful PDF subject is about that relation. I hope you find it interesting.
https://www.google.com.sa/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&ved=0ahUKEwj-xeXAnrXMAhVDLMAKHepkCSwQjxwIAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdunedinstadium.files.wordpress.c om%2F2015%2F01%2Farchitecture_becomes_music.docx&psig=AFQjCNHusihiePAvVA89z6F5fHqQ8drJbA&ust=1462067075609340
I quote the two following paragraphs, the first after the beginning, and the second before the end.
Thus we have the rhythm triangle's three sides. Is it a triangle? Can it be a polygon or maybe a circle?

"The cosmic codes
Since at least the sixth century BC, music and architecture have been intimately joined by a cosmic connection, the idea that they both are generated by an underlying code. This order, revealed by mathematics and geometry, was first espoused by Pythagoras who lived in southern Italy, and it led to many Greek temples designed on proportional principles revealing not only supreme beauty but ‘the music of the heavenly spheres’ − either God or nature. The idea was so appealing that many later designers tried to capture the notion with new materials. For instance, as Rudolf Wittkower argued, Renaissance architects saw the cosmic connections in simple ratios such as 1:1 (a sound repeating itself, or the architecture of a square room), and 2:1 (the octave, a string doubled or halved in length, or in building the double-square front of a temple). So far so simple, one could explain these analogies by vibrating strings and, as Pythagoras was supposed to have heard, a blacksmith hammering away with instruments of different size. He and others compared the harmonic results to the rhythms of a well-proportioned building, and the code of musical architecture was born. Perfect geometrical figures were equated with perfect whole numbers − 1, 2, 3, 4 − and then with the perfect harmonic sounds they produced (called ‘the perfect octave, the perfect fifth (3:2); the perfect fourth’ (4:3) and so on."

"At the neurological level, further parallels exist between time and space experience. Cognitive studies have shown we are a bit like bats, especially when moving in a dark environment with reflective surfaces. When sounds bounce off highly reverberant materials, we can ‘see through hearing’, especially if we clap our hands, a fact well-known to the blind. As brain-scans have shown recently, music opens up the equivalent three-dimensional world inside our heads, the area of sight. Stereophonic systems exploit this aspect of hearing, as they open up a room to our imaginative projection − a picture of space or the plan of a building; or the structural layout of a symphony. Polychoral music took advantage of this spatial sense in the Gothic period, for instance at St Mark’s Cathedral in Venice where different choirs were placed across from each other. Such opposition works well for placing different instruments that seem to expand the space further in the mind, a counterpoint Frank Gehry and Pierre Boulez have exploited recently, spatial hearing-as-seeing."

[desiresjab]

Small whole numbers represent more of nature than seems natural. 17 and 89 do not play into a lot of natural patterns, but smaller numbers such as 5 and 4 do, like in the basic pythagorean musical ratios. Big numbers come into it only when you use one note as a reference point and travel many octaves up or down. But all the basic intervals (in the twelve-tone equal tempered system) are expressible within one octave, and the higher and lower ones are just multiples of those seen in the home reference octave.

The twelve tone equal tempered system is one of the greatest acheivements in the history of the human race, it allowed for twelve different keys, which were all equally out of tune just a tiny smidgen of an amount that a normal human ear could not detect, to be played on a non-continuous instrument like keyboard with a rigid tuning and sound in tune for all twelve keys.

[khashan]

Wherever the is quantity and repetition, certain patterns of regularity are expected. A regularly repeated pattern is called rhythm. The rhythm of poetry is called meter.
Using numbers as a units of measurement in various feilds facilitates comparison between poetry meters in different languages on one hand, and between poetry and other fields on the other.
"Meter" is a synonym of measure, it is used in different fields. This is the implication of " metrics " in the following subject about "comparative metrics"
The word "metrics" is associated with business, can it be generalized?
I hope you like it:

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/comparative-metrics

It is concluded with this paragraph : " aware of language coincidence, how true is this: Universe = uni – verse ? Just one whole verse? with the same " universal constant/constants " in all feilds.

[khashan]

A rhythmic break
If you repeat any word or groups of words , you have rhythm , some rhythm.
Let us repeat the name of our friend " desiresjab" four times.
To visualize the resulting rhythm let us numerate the letters according to their occurance
D=1….-e=2 …..s=3….i=4….r=5…..j=6 ….a=7…..b=8
Replacing each letter by its symbol , desiresjab = 1 2 3 4 5 2 3 6 7 8
" desiresjab" four times = repeating the above digits 4 times
Using excel web representation , we get the following representative graph.
We end up with this shape:

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/desiresjab.gif

A ny different numeration can be used. Alphabetical order for instance a =1 , d=4 .

9747

Nice . Isn't it ?

This is the principle of arabesque, some shapes of which are similar to shapes derived from Arabic poetry meters .

9748

Left : a variation of Arabic meters.
Right : An Arabesque ornament.

[khashan]

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/note%20and%20arabesque.gif

Simple Arabesque:

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/arabesque3.gif

[khashan]

http://www.ruminatemagazine.com/2009/03/the-architecture-of-poetry/

Li-Young Lee and the Architecture of Poetry
"This month, the bookclub read Book of My Nights, by Li-Young Lee. The most interesting part of the discussion, for me, was about Lee’s articulate and enlightening interviews regarding craft. His most stunning metaphor was comparing poetry to architecture. Just like in architecture, he said, poetry is not so much about the materials you use (bricks/mortar, or language), but about space. You can use the same physical materials to create a number of different
structures, but it’s the use of space and silence that make the creations unique. In many ways, space and silence are what distinguish poetry from prose. "
---
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/research/conferences_events/?id=3787

UNSPACING: THE ARCHITECTURE OF POETRY IN SHELLEY'S 'ALASTOR' AND KEATS' 'THE FALL OF HYPERION'
"Focusing on Alastor and The Fall of Hyperion, this seminar explores how catastrophic changes like world-urbanization are imprinted on poetry as a hidden figure, altering the very “space of literature” in the Romantic period. In contrast to Wordsworth’s Prelude, which keeps city and country separate, in Alastor nature is traversed by ruined cities, disorienting the poem’s internal architecture, and making it difficult to bring the poem into focus generically or emotionally. To adapt Freud, some radical event has bypassed the outer surface of consciousness and gone inside, rendering consciousness superficial and the unconscious inaccessible. Keats’s poem more consciously thematizes its own architecture so as to unground the existing conceptuality of poetry, initiating a radically modern concept of poetry as a displaced wandering through the waste land of psyche and culture that points forward to Nerval, Rimbaud and Baudelaire."
---

By simply looking at a building, are you familiar with or able to distinguish its features to determine what influenced its design? Are you able to decipher where the Sydney Opera House, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Guggenheim Museum or the Pyramids are located based on their design, structure and cultural origins? Architects employ the process of planning, designing and constructing buildings, other structures or environments based on a blueprint, suggested materials to be used and technical specifications for executing production. When composing different types of poetic expressions, the same type of process is used to design and develop poetry variations.

ArchiPoetry, a term coined and defined as the architecture or art and science of building a poem, is based on structural elements of creation. There are over fifty different types of poetry and each expression has its own blueprint for creation, construction and completion. By combining the use of language, imagery, metaphors and specific patterns of structure, the design elements of ArchiPoetry have different disciplines and poetic variations. Types of poetry such as a Haiku, Ode, Limerick, Quatrain, Tanka or Sestina, for example, are composed based on their usage of stanzas, syllables, rhyme schemes, repetition of formats and strategic styles.
---

http://ezinearticles.com/?ArchiPoetry:-The-Architecture-of-Building-a-Poem&id=7690166

"By simply looking at a building, are you familiar with or able to distinguish its features to determine what influenced its design? Are you able to decipher where the Sydney Opera House, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Guggenheim Museum or the Pyramids are located based on their design, structure and cultural origins? Architects employ the process of planning, designing and constructing buildings, other structures or environments based on a blueprint, suggested materials to be used and technical specifications for executing production. When composing different types of poetic expressions, the same type of process is used to design and develop poetry variations.

ArchiPoetry, a term coined and defined as the architecture or art and science of building a poem, is based on structural elements of creation. There are over fifty different types of poetry and each expression has its own blueprint for creation, construction and completion. By combining the use of language, imagery, metaphors and specific patterns of structure, the design elements of ArchiPoetry have different disciplines and poetic variations. Types of poetry such as a Haiku, Ode, Limerick, Quatrain, Tanka or Sestina, for example, are composed based on their usage of stanzas, syllables, rhyme schemes, repetition of formats and strategic styles."

[khashan]

Taj Mahal

http://www.alsvets.lv/upload/Taj%20Mahal.jpg


https://www.tripadvisor.com/ShowUserReviews-g297683-d317329-r152599712-Taj_Mahal-Agra_Uttar_Pradesh.html:

“Taj Mahal - a poem in white marble”
---

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Taj_Mahal:

''Not a piece of architecture, as other buildings are, but the proud passions of an emperor’s love wrought in living stones.''

---

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/india/uttar-pradesh/agra/sights/architecture/taj-mahal:

''a teardrop on the cheek of eternity''

[khashan]

https://mpora.com/surfing/7-insane-surf-lodges/6#OxtYd0Er0OXvifTa.97


https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/dadum.gif

[khashan]

Architecture, poetry meter , music , biological rhythm , economy and all types of visual ,oral and unexpected rhythms have one common denominator which is mathematics. Mathematics is the abstract common language that enables us to represent almost all types in the same way. This makes comparison feasible between seemingly two faraway fields of rhythm.

Photo references :
2- https://www.pinterest.com/pin/330029478919884078/
3- http://www2.le.ac.uk/research/festival/meet/2013/science/vanheusden/sudden-death
4- http://jeb.biologists.org/content/215/17/2950
5- http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/cycles/cycles09.htm


https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/comparative%20rhythm.gif

[EmptySeraph]

I'm a tad smitten by these details. I've never truly understood prosody. Could anyone recommend some books on rhythm, metre and prosody in general?

[khashan]

I'm a tad smitten by these details. I've never truly understood prosody. Could anyone recommend some books on rhythm, metre and prosody in general?

I suggest this link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ1S1cl8JOw

[khashan]

I was impressed by this you tube because of the general context that calls to think of mathematics as an abstract language that deals with different scientific physical fields, and shows the role it played in their progress.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWkQU99Aoxg

Most impressing is statements are those between 11:44 and 12:34.
Quote : " Mathematics is all that it is . There is nothing else but mathematics.

Many of my colleagues will say that it describes our physical reality. It is our physical reality.

Our physical world does not have some mathematical properties; but has only mathematical properties."

The implication of ( physical reality ) may sound to limit the application of math to physical science thus excluding Arts.
That may explain the clear relations or analogies between magnetism , Electricity and gravity. Unlike the ambiguity of the relation or analogy between Architecture and poetry.

He who believes the physical is fully controlled by mathematical relation should extend his belief to cover the unphysical products and activities of Man. Thus in - principle- Mathematics should fully describe poetry, sociology a, psychology and architecture .

Arts benefitted from math but less than sciences did.. Had arts been considered as the "science of arts" and dealt with accordingly, there might have been a difference. At least, Jonathan Glancey would not have " crept out of Somerset House like a church mouse that had been spat out by cats" for saying that there is poetry in architecture.

Coming to our topic of meters, I have a feeling that a lot of feasible progress though the study of mathematical properties of meters was lost.
This might have been a result of the contrast impact on the English poets by their discovery that "they were doing something that was very different from that they thought they were doing"

History of Ancient Greek by A.-F. Christidis

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/short-long-greek.gif

The terms of English prosody were borrowed from Ancient Greek and Latin.
The contrast between accentual English prosody and Ancient Greek and Latin quantitative prosodies may have left the impression that unlike the quantitative prosody, the English prosody has no mathematical features.

https://www2.bc.edu/~richarad/lcb/fea/tsurin/compmetrics.html

"English is a stress-timed language, French is syllable-timed. Poets in both languages made efforts to import the quantitative metres from classical Greek and Latin. In French these attempts failed in a very short time, and became mere historical curiosities. French poetry remained with the syllabic versification system, which is congenial to a syllable-timed language. English Renaissance poets thought they succeeded in the adaptation of the quantitative metre. But they were doing something that was very different from what they thought they were doing: working in a stress timed language, they based their metre on the more or less regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, and not as they thought, on the regular alternation of longer and shorter syllables. They used the same names and graphic notation for the various metres, but the system was utterly different, and well- suited to the nature of a stress-timed language"

I hope this thread will help the growth of a mathematical sense that deals with meters and may be other poetic features.
I was encouraged by the number of those who read the thread.
Unfortunately, there was only desiresjab and Danik 2016 participated.
I will appreciate it if you leave your general impression about this topic.

[khashan]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXfNsFPl-s4

[khashan]

This is an excel graphic representation of two Arabic lines of Kamil meter.

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/%D9%84%D8%BA%D8%A9%20%D8%AD%D8%A8%D8%A7%201.gif

Meaning translation :


A language that Allah granted iternity
It's perfume is filling space
It is shining with the glory of dhad letter
And its honey is filing the mouth of time.

There seems to be architecture in poetry.

[khashan]

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160307-the-hidden-maths-in-great-art

German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz once declared: “Music is the pleasure
the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting."

[khashan]

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/r3/Home/shapes1/clock-arch.gif

98179817

[khashan]

I sent this link to Mr. Colin Holcombe . Following is his email in response:


Dear Kashan,

I’ve read the interesting blog posts, the Guardian article and checked a little on the internet. I don’t have the time, unfortunately, or the knowledge, to add much more than broadly agree with desiresjab’s remarks. It all depends on what you mean by poetry, or what you think is most important about the art form. If it’s the aesthetic sense that’s emphasized, then all architecture is poetry of some sort. It has to be if the building is not to be a complete eyesore. Medieval religious buildings, east and west, went further and incorporated a ‘sacred geometry’ which governed proportions of height, width, length, arch span and so on right down to geometric patterns in tilework and stained glass. There’s a large literature on that.

Traditional poetry is also governed in part by aesthetics: patterns of stress or syllable length, stanza patterns, balance of argument, and much more. Poetry had to be moving, beautiful and express something worth saying. Contemporary poetry has somewhat forgotten all that, and can end up being only tiresomely clever. (That would be my assessment of the Simon Barraclough piece, incidentally: The Guardian does sterling service in bringing contemporary poetry to public notice, but the taste of reviewers can be alarmingly uncertain.) Medieval poetry, certainly in the west, but I’d imagine in the Muslim world too, often embodied numbers that had symbolic importance. Chinese poetry also has complicated rules governing tone, line and stanza lengths, which again go back to numbers, though the prescriptions are probably not overtly symbolic. Musical notes also have a number base in their pitch and harmonics. And so on. Whether your extensive analogies help in the appreciation of poetry, I wouldn’t know, but rather doubt it. Poets keep patterns in their heads that help them select the words appropriate to what they want to say, but they’re held unconsciously there, with the selection being a coming together of many requirements. On meter I’d only add that prosody is a fascinating but contentious field, though of course I’ve written about it in my free guide to verse writing at http://www.ocasopress.com/verse-writing-a-practical-guide.html (if of any interest).

Please excuse this very brief contribution -- my time for correspondence is very limited-- but many thanks for alerting me to the many enlightening posts on arood.com.

With all good wishes,

Colin

[khashan]

I'm a tad smitten by these details. I've never truly understood prosody. Could anyone recommend some books on rhythm, metre and prosody in general?

Here are two suitable subjects to start with:

http://howtowriteblank.com/the-beginners-guide-to-poetic-meters/


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vF0HySkrC4

Good luck.

[khashan]

The scheme you are presenting will encounter much resistance. Just like the poets you encountered. Artists have an immediate emotional reaction to someone reducing their work to a number sequence. By implication, they could be reduced to such a scheme too.

It smacks of f B.F. Skinner and behaviorism. For the natural application is manipulation of human emotions and behavior. If this underlying language does exist (as we both believe), it may never produce great music or poetry, but it has scary implications for mass control. Are people these days usually entertained by great music or films on high end systems? No, they watch The Godfather on something the size of a matchbox.

People can be induced to leave quality behind for their own convenience. Computer art, music and poetry of the future may not be quite as good as what humans do, but it may be free of charge!

The biggest thing to fear from this is not that humans may be finite without free will and their arts may lose quality, but what such a language refined would be capable of in the hands of the black ops folk.



Dear desiresjab,

Further to my previous comment, I find it necessary to distinguish between poetry and the science of poetry

.https://scontent.fruh5-2.fna.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/43788613_1966356990119498_2343141587543916544_n.jp g?_nc_cat=103&oh=43f8ff1896962b682d25bee31950454c&oe=5C4E795F

[khashan]

https://www.brainyquote.com/photos_tr/en/a/alberteinstein/106697/alberteinstein1.jpg

[khashan]

This is a representation of two lines of Arabic poetry.
each line is composed of repetitions of 2 3 2 = 2 12 2

https://sites.google.com/site/alarood/sfhte-rwabt-alswr/%D8%B9%D8%B4.png

[stlukesguild]

khashan... some intriguing thoughts. I would have liked to have responded earlier, but unfortunately, I lost my password on upgrading to a new computer and have been trying to have my password reset for quite some time now.

I have read before of the notion of the "music or architecture"... so why not the poetry? As a visual artist myself and a bibliophile I have long embraced the links or commonalities between different art forms.

[Danik 2016]

Welcome back, stiukesguild! Missed your posts on art.

[JCamilo]

Hey Stlukes, hows going?

[stlukesguild]

I'm as fine as can be expected after this last year. How are you, JC?

[JCamilo]

Getting old and trying to decide if the current political affairs in Brasil are a product of senility or just some 1984 fanfic :D

[stlukesguild]

We aren't doing a whole lot better here. Toss COVID into this mess and trying to teach online... and you get a good deal of stress. On top of this, one of my studio partners went nuts... Parkinson's dementia... and I ended up having to abandon my studio of 15 years. Now I'm painting in a small bedroom in my home. :(

[khashan]

We aren't doing a whole lot better here. Toss COVID into this mess and trying to teach online... and you get a good deal of stress. On top of this, one of my studio partners went nuts... Parkinson's dementia... and I ended up having to abandon my studio of 15 years. Now I'm painting in a small bedroom in my home. :(

I wish you good luck.