Poems create space in multiple ways. Two recent books, Midway Radicals by Ted Landrum, and This Being by Ingrid Ruthig, are both by poets educated in architecture. Landrum is on the faculty of the School of Architecture at the University of Manitoba; Ruthig trained as an architect in the 1980s, but for decades has been a full-time writer and visual artist. Ruthig writes about space; Landrum writes with space. Ruthig uses conventional syntax to privilege content; Landrum engages in word play to privilege form. Taken together, the two books reveal something about the range and scope of both poetry and architecture. 
Ted Landrum?s poems look obscure and feel obscure, much like an architect?s construction drawings may appear to the uninitiated. And just like the verbal notations that help to explain architectural drawings, the notes compiled at the end of the book are essential to unraveling the mystery of words on the page. In the endnotes, Landrum reveals that most of the poems are essentially ?adaptive reuse? of existing prose or poem writings by such diverse authors as Aristotle, Edgar Allen Poe and Lynn Hejinian. Take, for example, ?So nets a beginning,? which begins as follows: Landrum describes this poem as a section cut through six of Ted Berrigan?s sonnets of 1964, implying that even Berrigan?s poems are works of architecture, within which a space may be discovered. ?Lamp of Beauty,? he tells us in the endnotes, is a ?radical abbreviation? of John Ruskin?s classic tex...