or, how one art form can stimulate another

Trey Heller, an (architectural) poet training at Brown University, recently contacted us.

This past August, in the midst of a creative drought, I came across Bill Moss: Fabric Artist & Designer in a local bookstore. It sparked in me a deep fascination with the tent; for a couple of months I wrote about nothing else. There is something perfectly modernist about Moss Tents and what they represent. I found myself responding to them with equal modernism, in short, self-contained moments of text.

He gave us permission to publish his poems here. Thank you, Trey.

Bill Moss

That is, he

wants it graceful. Grace

Is a very practical

thing. I can wear a shoe

over my foot but when

the same shoe

rests on the top of

my head, I am walking

Bill Moss is the forgotten modernist

in that

he made tents

and they were lived

it didn’t occur to a man

that these were

the very things

divied up

in an unfamiliar place

seeking something

a bigness

Manifesto along a straight edge

I’ve never occured to the objects that consume me. This is likely because I am understood

quickly; some symmetry, never a contradiction that can’t be resolved. I don’t take much

wondering at. Of course, I create complex things because I am not.

My shapes tend to split in half, fold. The physical thing is always separate from the picture in my

mind. But that’s the beauty of design. It’s a living thing. And that’s how I understand each and

every one of my tents. As something that breathes, because they really do.

There are many triangles that I remember

which have been like kin to me

causing me to build

if only to draw them near

The Pop

it is some miracle

how one collapses

and uncollapses

as if to say

this is the point