In Poetry and the Built Environment Elizabeth Fowler offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment. Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to human bodies. The phrase "the flesh of art" signifies the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts and signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. As we move through the built environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. Art mobilizes this expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. The notion of collaboration is important, because no matter how powerfully art twists our arms, moves, or injures us, there is always the interesting likelihood that our divergent bodies will contravene its instructions and take its insights somewhere new. In ten chapters, this book explores a range of works by poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Merci? and Kara Walker. These studies model a practical criticism of the flesh of art that exposes its radiant invitations. The book's critical demonstrations partner with a theory of the central role of art in human culture. Sensory, emotional, and intellectual interactions with art enflesh and acculturate human beings, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our emplacements in the social world. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto and includes many whole poems and 35 striking images. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence. In poetry, it argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.

A breath-taking collection that moves between local and distant, urban and rural, past and present. This is poetry of emotional density with a lightness of touch, structural but organic, detailed but lively, thoughtful but playful. A rare combination of exactitude and wonder leading the reader in and keeping them there.

Governing by Design offers a unique perspective on twentieth-century architectural history. It disputes the primacy placed on individuals in the design and planning process and instead looks to the larger influences of politics, culture, economics, and globalization to uncover the roots of how our built environment evolves. In these chapters, historians offer their analysis on design as a vehicle for power and as a mediator of social currents. Power is defined through a variety of forms: modernization, obsolescence, technology, capital, ergonomics, biopolitics, and others. The chapters explore the diffusion of power through the establishment of norms and networks that frame human conduct, action, identity, and design. They follow design as it functions through the body, in the home, and at the state and international level. Overall, Aggregate views the intersection of architecture with the human need for what Foucault termed "governmentality"—societal rules, structures, repetition, and protocols—as a way to provide security and tame risk. Here, the conjunction of power and the power of design reinforces governmentality and infuses a sense of social permanence despite the exceedingly fluid nature of societies and the disintegration of cultural memory in the modern era.

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they’ve been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leithauser reminds us in these pages, “not for its what but its how.” In chapters on everything from iambic pentameter to how stanzas are put together to “rhyme and the way we really talk,” Leithauser takes a deep dive into the architecture of poetry. He explains how meter and rhyme work in fruitful opposition; how the weirdnesses of spelling in English are a boon to the poet; why an off rhyme will often succeed where a perfect rhyme would not; why Shakespeare and Frost can sound so similar, despite the centuries separating them. And Leithauser is just as likely to invoke Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, or Boz Scaggs as he is Chaucer or Milton, Bishop or Swenson, providing enlightening play-by-plays of their memorable lines. Here is both an indispensable learning tool and a delightful journey into the art of the poem—a chance for new poets and readers of poetry to grasp the fundamentals, and for experienced poets and readers to rediscover excellent works in all their fascinating detail.

This volume presents a chronologically ordered and detailed account of the developing relationship between technics and poetics in environmental design in architecture through a consideration of the work of major names in the field.

On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment. In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War. Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.

Green Rape: Poetry for the Environment is an anthology of poems written in strong support of environmental literacy. Each poem is the poet's cry of protest against the rape of natural and built environments. The anthology examines a wide range of issues including the clash of global capitalism with environmental activism. It takes a close look at the major themes in international discourse on environmental degradation, climate change, renewable energy sources, global warming, Gene technology, biodiversity and more. The poet dispels a number of myths, notably the existence of an inexhaustible bank of natural resources at the disposal of Man. He attempts to provide a solution to the abusive and unbalanced utilization of scarce natural resources. In a unique way, the poems contribute to the fostering of environmental awareness that would contribute to the sustainable management of natural resources. The poet invites us to look beyond the doomsday rhetoric about the state of the environment and to commit more of our resources where they will do the most good to lifting the world's population out of poverty. The significance of this anthology to environmental education resides in its contribution to the debate on global sustainable development, especially efforts to protect the environment and eradicate poverty.