Penguin Poets at Richard Hugo House


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Beautiful Doom: Heizer's "City" and Scott's "Blade Runner"

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There’s a striking similarity between Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott’s pyramidal design for the “Tyrell Corporation” headquarters in Blade Runner (1982) and the photos I’ve seen of Michael Heizer’s monumental plaza, Complex City , which has been under construction in Garden Valley, Nevada since 1972.  I’ve not seen any evidence that Trumbull & Scott would’ve been influenced by Heizer. I think the resemblance is probably nothing more than some shared archaeological interests. Still, I love the fact of the resemblance, because it really opens up a web of thinking about art and architecture’s relationship to the future. Both works explicitly and implicitly imagine futures, and both works have monumental properties:  they commemorate the present for a viewer in distant time. I want to start by outlining the web of connections, here: Both City  and Tyrell Corporation are obviously pyramid st ructures, and the structures really are similar—it’s as if Heizer’...
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Layli Long Soldier's "38"

I'm reading Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, and in the poem "38," linked here , I learned some history about the Dakota 38 and the "Sioux Uprising" of 1862, also known as "The Dakota War of 1862" (as an aside, this is the same historical event involved in the controversy at the Walker Art Center over the sculpture, "Scaffold." Long Soldier's poem was published by Graywolf, out of Minneapolis. It wouldn't surprise me if the poem was part of what catalyzed the Walker's awareness of the issue, but... that's just me speculating). I learned many things in the poem: I learned about the 38 men who were executed. I learned about Lincoln's presidency and the historical record of his presidency. I learned about the commemorative horseback ride each winter, preserving the memory of the events and of the 38 who were executed. And I learned of Andrew Myrick, who was killed in that conflict. When asked about the condition of the s...
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Ecopoetics--Sir Arthur Tansley, A. R. Ammons (Part 3 of 3)

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             What I’ve been trying to suggest in the last two blog posts is that both “narrative” and “the environment” are limited paradigms in important ways.   “Narrative” is often considered to be humans’ “natural” way of knowing the world—we perceive and process our lives as stories—but I suggest that stories isolate their protagonists (often ourselves), and don’t successfully honor what we’ve come to know about the interconnectedness of all things.   I also suggest that narrative, while it may be underpinned by neurological structures, always exists in relationship to culture, so that our well-established narrative mode may not be inevitable .   Our ways of knowing might evolve to reflect new knowledge, new values, new imperatives.   “The Environment” is similarly limiting, in that it positions humans at the center of the natural world, construed as our “surroundings.”   In fact, our lives are fully intertwined with the w...
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