Alison Thumel’s debut poetry collection Architect, winner of the Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a work that builds and rebuilds with clear mathematical precision, a devastating record of how words function in the wake of loss. Architect presents poetry as process, poetry as revision itself, through a mind at work—a mind of generous intellect and innovation, but also a mind working through incomparable grief. Among the abundance of ars poeticas, often furnished with surefire answers, this collection seems more concerned with questions themselves that cannot be articulated. This can be seen in its opening pages, in the first of various question-and-answer poetic sequences:
Q:
How are you coping?
A:
Five years after my brother’s death, I audited an
architecture class on Frank Lloyd Wright.
There are three sections in the book: “Plan,” “Elevation,” and “Perspective.” Each section is built on a similar labyrinthine floor plan, beginning with a diagrammatic image followed by a definition of an architectural term, question-and-answer prose poems, course notes, and glossaries.
Thumel’s poetry is meticulous in its formal acuity, and each section within the sprawl produces a meeting of form and function, whether prose poems, lineated forms, internal rhyme, couplets, monostitch, or sonnet. Among these innovations, the visual poem adds another layer of construction. Found images and text are overlaid with hand-drawn pen marks; Thumel created these architectural drawings in the aforementioned architecture class at the University of Wisconsin.
Poetry, in affinity with architecture, is an act of building, where structure supports what is contained inside, as referenced by the Emily Dickinson quote that precedes the collection: “The Props assist the House / Until the House is built.” In this case, Thumel employs it as a container to shield from the more inexpressible pain: “I remembered that stanza means room in Italian. Maybe I believed that if I could not cross the threshold of my grief, perhaps I could build one, wall it off in separate rooms, and choose whether or not to enter.”
A structure, a building to contain grief, if only that, is the work of Thumel’s collection. “Sistering” is one such form the book takes in this aim. We are introduced to the definition: (n.) To affix a new beam to a damaged one as a supplemental support. The poem takes on the visual structure of supporting beams, in a form that can be read varying horizontally or vertically. It ends with some of the collection’s most emotionally raw lines, tempered by the limits of formal constraint:
Through all three sections, poems appear titled after some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous works, each labeled with the building’s date and location, as well as a missing diagram. The wrenching sonic poem “Fallingwater (1935–),” which captions a nonexistent “Fig. 4,” begins: “Falling back into this water. Felt the swelling, thick wet lumber. Tongue gone heavy with explaining. Peering closer, risk the spill back down the squall. Like a pier off Fallingwater. Built it off the waterfall. Wouldn’t stand or couldn’t bother.” In the absence of these built structures, the architecture of words takes over, envisioning what cannot exist outside the page. One cannot see Wright’s buildings the same way after experiencing these poems.
Wright, a master of organic architecture, had to deal with his own devastating human loss, which is a central subject in the book’s second section, “Perspective.” Taliesin I, II, and III are each captioned, wording the famous home that was marred and haunted by loss—his mistress, Mamah Cheney, her children, and Wright’s workers were horrifically murdered by a soon-to-be fired employee, who then set the structure on fire. Later on, the rebuilt Taliesen II was destroyed by another accidental fire. The speaker returns to Wright’s rebuilding of the home following fire and tragedy as a site of both salvage and futility:
When Taliesin burned down a second time, years
later, Wright again rebuilt it. The tour guide noted
that each time Wright rebuilt the house, he never
created a replica of what had been lost in the
fire. Instead, he gradually added to or subtracted
from or changed the plans. In fact, Wright made
no blueprints for the house. Preservationists are
measuring it inch by inch, mapping the house in its
entirety, its precise shape. Recreating a floor plan
that was never there to begin with.
Thumel’s poems work in the same way–a sprawl through rooms furnished with memory and image with no fixed blueprint or center. Grief does not construct a stable structure, but something slippery and shifting, a paradox of words and missing planks and moving parts, an architecture of revision.
There is no fixed solution to the problem of loss, even as Thumel responds to an architectural “prompt” with repeated poems titled “Solution to the Ship of Theseus Paradox.” This philosophical thought experiment asks: if a ship is rebuilt plank by plank, does it remain the same ship?
Thumel considers the futility of this question when applied to a body rather than a building. In one of the book’s “Glossary of Terms” poems, the lines sift through preservation, restoration, rehabilitation, and reconstruction—all architectural methods to manage what is failing or lost. It ends with a turn to poetry’s method of recovery:
[Revision] –
If I could build a brother,
I would build him differently.
What is mechanical about architecture and the construction of buildings, what is mechanical about poetry, revision and the construction of lines—both of these fail in the face of human loss. The body cannot be fixed. The absence of this resolution becomes a site of both potential and frustration because the structure can never be finished, only distantly envisioned. The space this loss occupies has no horizon but must be something like what is described in “Whirling Arrow”: “The house was on a hill. I could see all directions / in a single moment.”
In this layered space, with the accumulation of multiple readings, the reader can work through a different perspective, a different rebuilding of the ship each time. But this, too, is not and never can be the entire truth. Thumel writes: “Wright’s buildings were beautiful but unreliable, though their unreliability was forgivable. To praise Wright’s work is to praise an idea and how it came to life, but not its living. The way people praise a poem they do not have to live inside.”
The rest of us have not inhabited the poem; we do not bear the story, the destruction. Yet we, too, are called to envision the impossibility of what architecture calls restoration and poetry calls revision. Thumel’s poetry works line by line, room by room, to lay bare the skeleton of grief’s structure—the blueprints, the fixed beams, the absence at the center, not to recover what has been lost, but to reclaim the unbroken truth of love that stands amidst the wreckage.
