An Architecture

Poetry. "In AN ARCHITECTURE, Chad Sweeney reveals himself to be a Frank Gehry of language: making an overwhelming but coherent form in precise words that measure 'the violet gleam of girders,' where 'art is/the ghost between us.' The world swells with meaning before things 'smolder,' 'collapse,' 'drown.... And within the violent changes that he so precisely records, there are moments of rest and deep regard for what is passing. The poem is an elegy for the world in all its beauty and disturbing variety"--Maxine Chernoff. "Chad Sweeney's AN ARCHITECTURE, with its epigraph from Heraklitus (the philosopher of fiery flux), looks like a house that can't stand still, its 56 sections shape-shifting through spaces of meaning that are 'excavated / rather than built.' Among these magical passages, 'the nouns are verbs / the conduit between I and I.' Here, house and inhabitant (as form and content) perpetually exchange their positions, showing 'the snake / swallowing // peristalsis of / the world // by which these rooms // are constituted.' In Sweeney's swift architecture, memory assumes the power of imagination, and language becomes a platform for the mind's multiplicity: 'I speak, therefore I are.' Sweeney, as Vitruvius before him, makes architecture the sister-discipline of music"--Andrew Joron.