Verde Smoke

This week, I’m sensing that we’re going a bit deeper in our examination of landscape – moving from focus on individual vocabulary and grammar of single sentences to more complex expressions stolen from the realm of poetry. These figures of speech (as defined by Wikipedia) are , “words or phrases that depart from straightforward, literal language” and that are more figurative because their meaning lies in a play of words or recognition of a pattern or play for a certain effect. I pulled some basics from this week’s reading of Language of Landscape:

1. Emphasis: rhythm, contrast, framing, exaggeration, echoism, parallelism
2. Climax (and anticlimax)
3. Anomaly: anachronism (out of time), prochronism (from the future), anachroism (out of place)
4. Metaphor: personification (giving human characteristics to inanimate objects, metonymy (where on attribute stands for whole)
5. Paradox/Irony: oxymoron, antiphrasis
6. Address: exclamation, apostrophe (interruption for effect)

The poetics I’ve begun to observe in my wanderings around in Lawrence lately lay first in the contrast of the history left behind by the now absent industrialists and the life that has grown up in the cracks between the mill’s bricks and cement. These most obvious figures of speech are combined with the repetitive of the mills, brick upon brick on so many buildings, floor after floor of windows, iron beams, and planned street grid. The industrial workday is subtly supported by repeated landscape elements such as mills parallel to the river, clocks on most towers, and bridge after bridge over canal. I see the real character though, peeking through the repetition all over, with the satellite dishes hanging windows of apartments that were once mills.

This is similar to the anomaly of a playground in the middle of a mill building’s parking, art in the windows of an no longer industrial factory, a garden between two mill buildings. I also seem drawn to pull out my camera when I see a spark of life peeping out of these monstrous buildings, like a mother hanging out of window of a huge multifamily house to call to her son, a tiny girl standing in a alley, a father holding one child and walking another down a long, broken sidewalk.

I also love capturing a live human element in the face of all this repetition and framing, like youth singing his heart out, framed by both a new wall and window of LCW’s Our House youth center, but with the history of the old church through the window behind him. On a similar note, I was amazed by the re-appropriation of an old rectory space into office building, community fellow housing, and a performance space for talented choral youth.

But getting back to emphasis, I also see recurring lines paralleling each other but for very different purposes. For instance, I keep driving past an old train track that has become a pedestrian walkway, with pipes and beams running beside and the canals perpendicular to it. All these lines connecting, intersecting and running along each other used to be an output of the industrial process but now they are used for movement of people for other, more social means.

The lasting vestiges of the history of Lawrence seem to emerge also through the re-use of materials. This antiphrasis – where material used contrary to expected – is evidenced in the renovation of the Lawrence Community Works Our House Campus that opened last week. Paraphrasing a bit from the Boston Globe, Lawrence Community Works officially opened its long-awaited Our House campus on Oct. 25. The Our House building, in the former St. Laurence O’Toole School, will allow low-income families to take courses in dance, technology, architecture, technology and more. Our House will also offer courses in financial literacy and English as a second language, as well as serve as the home of Movement City - an empowerment network in which young Lawrencians (ages 10-19) can participate in a wide range of highly creative economic, academic, leadership development, and collective action activities. One building is an old Catholic school house, turned into an afterschool program and community learning center. The whole building was gutted but the architects choose to keep some materials, such as bricks, wooden ceiling beams with big iron rivets, and smooth wood floors. They combined it with modern, rippled iron, communicating that the old and new can co-inhabit one space in harmony.

Unfortunately, the one poetic I see lacking in Lawrence is that of monument and address. I met with Pat from the Lawrence Historical Center, who has 600 hours of oral histories in the vault, but is frustrated that there are no historical markers on buildings over 150 years old, no plagues where labor movements started (Bread and Roses), and basically no overt public monument to Lawrence’s rich past. She worked with a group of talented middle school youth over the summer to create some amazing posters, and is working to get them posted at appropriate sites around the city.

In the end, I wonder if it’s right to frame the landscapes of Lawrence as poetic metaphoric figures of speech. Should the imposing mills or large multifamily houses be personified as industrial giants looming over the little residents, unable to fight their power? Or can we instead envision them as elderly personas that need to be maintained or reborn? Should the bricks and mills be the metonymy of Lawrence? Or could we use the grass growing between the bricks, the human forged paths over tracks, or the young exuberance songs instead?

Check out my final Poetics assignment set of photo on Flickr and some other photos from Lawrence as well.