JL Williams: Architecture, dreams, metaphor & poetry.

A is for Architecture Podcast

This episode features poet J.L. Williams discussing her collection 'Strange Architectures,' which explores architectural visions derived from

Key takeaways

• J.L. Williams' poems are transcripts of vivid architectural dreams experienced during a period of intense isolation and new motherhood.
• The collection explores themes of thresholds, liminality, and the intersection of physical space with the inner world.

Main topics

• Poetry and Architecture
• Jungian Psychology

Notable quotes

Architecture was not a metaphor but a means of understanding the human psyche.

Conclusion

A profound exploration of how built environments shape our internal na

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello. For professional Swiss mind reader and keen amateur builder Carl Jung, architecture was not a metaphor but a means of understanding the human psyche. His dream of a multi-story house helped shape his concept of the collective unconscious, while the homes he designed gave physical form to his propositions about the relationship between conscious and unconscious life. For Jung, the mysteries of the psyche could not be understood through words and dreams on their own, but required architectural space to embody, illustrate and explain them. For us normals, building castles in the air is as far as we can hope to get. Not so for this week's Ayers for Architecture podcast guest, poet and creative projects manager at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, J.L. Williams, or Jennifer, to those who know her. Jennifer published Strange Architectures this Speaker 2 (0:40) year, Speaker 1 (0:41) her fifth collection of poems with Shearsman Books, and in which she presents visions of architectures dreamed and written, taking us, the audience, over thresholds and interspaces of her, and perhaps our own, inner worlds. Speaker 1 (0:54) Be a good sport and support the Ayers for Architecture podcast via the Patreon or buy me a coffee links in the podcast description, where you will also find links to Jennifer and the book online. Speaker 3 (1:05) Ayers for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space. Speaker 1 (1:12) Hello and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted today to be talking to J.L. Williams, poet, otherwise known as Jennifer. Jennifer, thank you for joining me. It was delightful to be contacted by you about your book, Strange Architectures, which was published by Shearsman Books. As I say, it's a fascinating collection of poems and you're going to read some for us. which I'm really delighted about. But before we get to such fruits, would you be so kind as to introduce yourself? Speaker 3 (1:42) I'd be delighted to. And I would love to start by saying thank you so much, Ambrose, for having me here. I'm a big fan of your podcast, so I feel a bit starry-eyed here actually getting to speak with you in person. Speaker 3 (2:00) First started writing poetry when I was probably in about third grade, I think. I grew up in America, in northern New Jersey, and someone handed me a book of Shel Silverstein's poems, and something inside me went, wow, that's my thing. So I wrote poetry and plays all through school, and I performed poems and got to read a poem at my high school graduation. And I think it was a big part of my way of thinking about the world and communicating with other people. And I ended up going to Wellesley College to study English literature. I did a, as you can there, I did a kind of focus on English literature with a minor in studio art. And then Speaker 3 (3:01) Shortly thereafter came to work at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I was working on my friend's play that she brought and fell in love with Scotland to my surprise and kind of moved over here shortly thereafter. So I moved here in 2001 and I've been here ever since. So I've lived in Scotland now longer than I lived in America, as you can tell by my strong Scottish accent. Speaker 3 (3:32) That is interesting because there's something funny about one's identity, I think, when you grew up in one place, but you've been living in buildings in another place for most of your life or more of your life. Speaker 3 (3:50) I did the Master's in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow, and that was really helpful for, I Speaker 2 (3:59) think, building Speaker 3 (3:59) a community of writers that were working toward publication. Speaker 1 (4:05) Yeah, putting a commercial head on something, which is quite an interesting thing to think about. Speaker 3 (4:10) Yeah, I think I had done a lot of, I'd been doing kind of a lot of open mics, and I ran a crazy performance art cabaret. So I had a lot of friends in Edinburgh who were creative and performative in various ways. But that leap into being a published poet felt, I mean, I wasn't a performance poet per se. I would always have described my poems as page poems, but I really enjoyed sharing them out loud with people. But yeah, the emlet was helpful, I think, in thinking about how to put a book together and what that meant. Speaker 3 (4:49) And after that, I won an award to go spend three weeks on the Aeolian Islands thinking about Ovid. And so my first collection of poems is a kind of version of many of Ovid's metamorphoses, stories of change, but told in the form of these contemporary poems inspired by volcanoes and the sea and this wonderful environment of those. islands and now I have just this year as you mentioned published my fifth book which is called Strange Architectures. Speaker 1 (5:27) Yeah, and we'll get to strange architectures in a second, but like Northern New Jersey, Scotland, Mediterranean Sea, it's quite a nice journey. Do you still feel, I mean, you have an accent that doesn't sound very New Jersey to people who think they know what a New Jersey accent. You've kind of washed it through too many cultures now, but do you feel like there is still something there of that kind of space? I'm looking on my other screen here at a map of... northern New Jersey. It's incredibly urban in that American way, in that kind of mega city, megalopolis kind of way. Speaker 3 (6:01) I grew up in a little town called West Milford, which was actually, I think it had sort of begun as a summer holiday town for wealthy New Yorkers and was really beautiful. It was... Speaker 3 (6:16) lakes and fields and mountains with wild blueberries growing on them. And I would take my dog for long walks in the field. I was always trying to get lost, but that was the one problem is even though it was quite a rural place still on the edge of a lot of much bigger towns and cities, you couldn't really get lost. And I found that very frustrating you know you could be in a field or forest but eventually you'd always end up at a road and and that was that was the kind of place but I did I actually because my third year of university when I was at Wellesley I actually did at the University of Bristol and I think the the sense I had when I went to Bristol was just of of age of time in a way that I loved and and Speaker 3 (7:11) I didn't feel, you know, I don't think any of the buildings I grew up in or near were even half as old as most of the buildings that were just round and about in the city of Bristol. And that sense of... Speaker 3 (7:25) That kind of human developed time in Britain was interesting to me when I came over. I think in part, the question you're asking maybe is something that comes up for me, not so much in everyday life now, but sometimes in writing, people will say, well, are you an American writer? Are you a Scottish writer? It's Speaker 1 (7:45) the Henry James question. Speaker 3 (7:47) Yeah. Speaker 1 (7:48) The T.S. Eliot question. Speaker 3 (7:50) I was going to say, I did a class when I was... doing my undergraduate and it was about Pound and Elliot and where they came from and where they ended up. And yeah, I still feel kind of stuck in that weird place. I always had the sense of like, if you, where you were born, if you kind of dropped a string from your belly down to the center of the earth. and then you go somewhere else, that string is still sort of stuck where you started, but it gets pulled, you know, where you move to. But then over time, it's as if it starts to drift a little bit. So like, I think I'm somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic in terms of my alignment with the center of the earth. But yeah, I mean, when people ask me now things about America, it's very, you know, my understanding of America ended in, well, not, I'm not sure I ever understood it, but it, you know, my intimate knowledge of America ended in 2001. So that's a long time ago now. Speaker 1 (8:49) So Speaker 3 (8:49) much has changed. And when I go there, I feel like a visitor now, you Speaker 1 (8:55) know. Speaker 3 (8:57) But then again, I can't say I feel Scottish either, you know. And I think in terms of my poetry writing or the poetry that I feel closest to in terms of what? Speaker 3 (9:14) Maybe what I hear in my head when I'm trying to write, I suspect that is still probably more of an American voice than a Scottish voice, just because it's like something to do with the voice in my head, maybe. In terms of your influences, Speaker 1 (9:28) you've already mentioned Ovid and Ezra Pound. The Speaker 3 (9:32) fascist. Speaker 1 (9:34) Strange guy. Not Ovid. We don't know about Ovid. Speaker 3 (9:38) Ovid was guy, okay. Speaker 1 (9:39) Ovid's fine, but Ezra Pound, odd guy. I guess probably it would be... easiest to start with a poem and maybe talk about some influences from that. And you very kindly suggested some poems, and then I sent my prompts, and then you suggested some different poems, and I just brung you with a... Speaker 3 (9:54) You made a request. I made a request to start Speaker 1 (9:57) with, which is the fifth poem in the collection on page 17, and I'd be delighted if you could read it. Speaker 3 (10:02) It would be my pleasure. Most of the poems in this collection have just a number as a title, which is unusual for me, but this one has a number and then... a sort of subtitle in parentheses, so I'll read them both. Five, the Speaker 2 (10:18) German professor's Speaker 3 (10:19) house. There is a gargantuan garage along the entire side of the house. The house itself is many-roomed, extensive. The German professor and his German wife both smoke rolling tobacco. His in a brown pouch, hers in a pink. Maids are cleaning various small rooms. I sit in a patio, empty, but for a beechwood table on which rests an amber ashtray. Outside the garage turns into a health spa in which many people are bathing and being massaged. There is a problem between the husband and the wife, but it cannot be spoken. The garage has a plastic corrugated roof that allows a wan light to diffuse within the space. Speaker 2 (11:35) Fantastic. Thank you. I Speaker 3 (11:38) tried to use my best American pronunciation. Speaker 1 (11:41) I like that garage, not garage. Who says garage anyway? Could we talk a little bit about this collection, Strange Architecture? Where does it come from? Speaker 3 (11:52) So I got pregnant at the grand old age of 41, I think, in 2018. Speaker 3 (12:06) and had my baby. Speaker 1 (12:13) Maybe it would have been the beginning of Speaker 3 (12:14) 2019. I had my baby in December of 2019. Yeah, that's a long Speaker 1 (12:21) gestation if it was 2018. It would have been. My gosh. Speaker 3 (12:29) 2019. And so that was right just a couple months before COVID offered all its bounties unto us. So I had her. And that all went well. And we were living in a flat in Edinburgh, kind of four room flat on one floor. And then when she was about three months old, COVID happened. And it was not the maternity leave I had expected or dreamed of. And so that year was very strange. It was both full of the joys of... having a baby and becoming a new mom and being with her dad. And this extreme intense claustrophobia and isolation. And I was breastfeeding and waking up many times throughout each night and full of, I'm sure, a very interesting cocktail of hormones and started having the most intense dreams or remembering being aware of waking up from these. extraordinarily intense dreams. And it felt as if they were all about exploring buildings, different buildings. Some of them I recognized, most of them I didn't. And it was so real. It was so real. It just felt wildly more real than my everyday life at that time. And Speaker 3 (14:09) My first instinct was just to note these dreams down because, I think because of their intensity. And very soon I started to think that these notes wanted to become poems, but they were very strange. Speaker 3 (14:32) poems because they were coming very much from this dream space which isn't I'm some poets I know of some poets who do write from dreams but that wasn't my regular kind of practice I wasn't even it wasn't like I was regularly keeping a dream diary or had done union dream work or you know it was it was kind of new experience for me Speaker 3 (14:58) But that first year I had many of these dreams and wrote many of them down. But even after the lockdowns ended and as time moved on, I continued to have these dreams and I continued to make them into poems. I continued to explore these new buildings and spaces. And they did tail off a little bit, but... Speaker 3 (15:23) So I think it did take really four years maybe to end up with enough of these poems to fill a whole book. Maybe three or four years, and then there was a process of editing them. But that is the book. They are poems made out of transcripts of dreams about buildings. Speaker 1 (15:47) It's really interesting. My wife also has had dreams about architecture during pregnancy and in early motherhood when the baby is young. In her case, very often gargantuan buildings that are decaying. Do you know if this is common? Are architectural dreams common to mothering infants? Speaker 3 (16:06) My mom, to my surprise, because I didn't know this when she found out about it, said she had had building dreams. I don't know if it was specifically in pregnancy or new motherhood I'd have to check with her I have heard actually I think it was in one of the nice reviews of the book the reviewer wrote if in psychoanalysis dream houses stand in for the self Speaker 3 (16:40) That was Sandy Parmar who'd written that. So that made me think again, I haven't been through a process of psychoanalysis, but I thought that was interesting that that is a recognizable symbol for Speaker 2 (16:54) self Speaker 3 (16:54) potentially. And I certainly think that that moment of pregnancy and early new motherhood has got to be one of the really dramatic moments of... change in a, well, I would say both in a man and woman's life. I mean, I would want to ask that question to you, like, did you have any at that time? You know, because men are going through a change as well. But I think there's something about the, and that was something I was going to mention to you. I've just been reading this amazing essay called Umbilical Phantoms by Siri Husvett, which I've been reading, in which she is talking about the placenta. Speaker 3 (17:40) as a kind of much ignored and forgotten. Speaker 3 (17:49) organ in Western medicine. It's not very much been researched. It's often not discussed, but it's this extraordinary organ that grows within the womb to help cleanse and process and nourish the child. But it's actually made of the cells of both the mother and the child, which is really interesting. So it's like a properly shared organ between the two entities Speaker 2 (18:19) and Speaker 3 (18:20) then obviously also has the genetic material of the father in there so she's almost talking about the way the mother at this time is Speaker 3 (18:38) holding multiple entities within the entirety of her body. And I started, I was thinking of that in terms of architecture as well, right? Like the womb as the first room that everyone inhabits. And then it's got this placenta in there, which is like a shared. Speaker 3 (19:02) this kind of shared transcendent structure between the different entities. And how can we not, it's difficult for me to imagine that there isn't something extraordinary about the consciousness of these two entities being in this one shared space at that moment. Speaker 1 (19:35) I remember reading a long time ago about the possibility that the first image the unborn child witnesses is in fact of the placenta. Speaker 3 (19:45) And Speaker 1 (19:46) that visually it corresponds quite closely to that universal idea of the tree of life. which you see in all cultural origin stories, as far as I know. And if you look at a photograph of a placenta laid out and a bit cleaned up, it's very obviously either like a root system, like a rhizomatic system, but it's also like a tree. And I thought that that was a really fascinating possibility that we carry that imprint of that memory, which I think for architects, I think it's a really important kind of recognition, the kind of pre-knowledge of form. that we have. I wanted to ask about this process of writing these poems. So you've talked already about the practice that happened through COVID, through lockdown, through the beginning of your new child's life and your new identity as a mother. Can I put this word to you? You know, stanza comes from the word room, which I thought was also rather lovely. But do you see an alignment between the way that you've constructed these poems? in a way, how you imagine a building comes into being? Speaker 3 (20:54) Something I think is so interesting about that question is that in my more usual way of writing, I think I would probably say yes. This one, I feel like, had these very particular constraints or rules that I feel like makes it a little bit different, but I'll explain. Speaker 3 (21:21) Though I would like to ask you about this. Often when I'm writing a poem, and I wonder if this is the case for architects when they're dreaming