Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems is a provocative foray into experimental poetry. Exploring fertile gaps and overlaps between the architecture of poetry and poetry of architecture, this work of serious play is sparked by a double inquiry. Shaped by rules—found, broken or bent along the way to archi-poetry—many of the poems are also transformative responses, remediating off-cuts and jump-cuts, radically renovating exemplary sources (archai): Homer and Aristotle; Berrigan, Hejinian and Silliman; Bök, Bowering, Olson and Creeley; Musil, Barthes and Lefebvre; Shklovsky, Ruskin and Poe. Harmonizing with and against this global carnival of “midway radical” wisdom, the layered voice of the poems does not belong to a single poet, genre or discipline, but resonates in the polylogue of an open chorus.

“Channelling through edgy filters, Ted Landrum, the ringmaster of Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems, parades wisecrackers—from Homer to Hejinian; Aristotle to Silliman; Bök to Berrigan—into an ostranenied, multi-tiered show tent. Landrum’s inventive and recombinant whipcracks make language and meaning torque and tumble, twitch and shout, into a phantasmagoric performance that challenges and delights.” — Steven Ross Smith, author of Emanations: Fluttertongue 6

“Ted Landrum’s debut book, Midway Radicals & Archi-Poems, is a delightful impertinence. Landrum takes sly care with serious philosophical matters & his eclectic humour ‘burbles’ up early & often. I could happily live in the architecture these poems dream.” — Colin Smith, author of Multiple Bippies and 8x8x7

“Like brickworks of a thousand shades, the quirky walls and openings of these poems invite readers in and demand a visceral response. Read them aloud to oneself and others, in rooms small and large, or in the open air. Savour the sounds, the semantic traction, and strange juxtapositions of metaphor. Not easy, but strangely affecting, these poems tantalize and amuse.” — Simon Unwin, architect; author of Analysing Architecture and Doorway

from Agog

the poet hammers up
to demand
the right
light
to exhume
the lost will
of us
every word
ours for life
listens in the cells


Note: The source for this found/erasure poem is the middle-most poem called "The Xenagogue", in C. Bök's The Xenotext.