Unter den Hohen Brücke Case Study: Disclosing Poetic Practices

In sharing the process of the work Unter der Hohen Brücke, the author explores poetic practices engaging with the complex lived experience of places: through lingering, the slow spatial practice of elongated, and repeated site visits, a somatic, sensing approach was developed which allowed capturing the lived experience of the place. The author discusses how close reading and translating the work of other writers, particularly Ilse Aichinger’s, extracted potential qualities of architectural poetic writing, such as the curious gaze and cyclical structures. Further the iterative sequence of poems is described as a poetic form that allowed to (re)construct the complexity of place in written text. Further, the author discusses how carefully selected vocabulary, rhythm and punctuation, as well as syntax and typesetting can steer the readers’ movement through spatial sequences. The key ingredient in all these practices is generosity in time. The repeated, intuitive and agile shifts from one poetic practice to another, from one mode of attention to another, is presented as a crucial method enabling the writer to remain receptive, and add layer upon layer. This slow accumulation of approaches is crucial to construct places as multisensory processes, both in architecture and in poetry.