Monday 2 February 2009

explicate this process

Beginning eight days ago
some men began
to erect scaffolding around the adjacent block.
Built in 1975 of light ochre bricks, it now has an exoskeletal form,
but not quite a shell.

Beginning in 1971
six designers and many other men
spent six years erecting a building in Paris.
15,000 tonnes of steel exoskeletal form,
something like a shell.

In 1942
a French poet spends some time pursuing the challenge
that objects offer to language.
A revelation drives his repeated attempts to to explicate this process,
something of an exoskeleton of revision and frustrated refinement
of phenomena of the everyday sublime.



Things that I am not in writing this concerned with:
the revelatory,
the sublime,
the spectacular,
the phenomenal,
the extraordinary,
the allegorical, or
the ineffable.



But then it snowed.



3 comments:

Philip Sanderson said...

But then it snowed.
and then there was ice
which melted away
and large red machines once again were on the streets
But then it snowed once more?

Steven Ball said...

Indeed, see the problem is what to write about and how to write about it. At the risk of creating a false binary is it more important to write about the everyday or about the extraordinary? The scaffolding might even have been pushing it a bit, a weather event paralysing the capital would have been a step too far!

SAM RENSEIW said...

as i can see from weather
reports the snow in
the uk
certainly beats similar conditions in
denmark two years
ago -almost on the week