I begin on Sunday at Stockbridge Market. People are queueing up for pastries and hot drinks. Nearby, a boy is tempted to touch the dead pheasants hanging at the entry to the market. I am thanking the two poets I’ve just met for coffee, Anne-Laure and Tessa, and preparing to head off in the direction of The Walkway. I hope to make the most of the fading afternoon, following the river to its mouth along a path I’ve never taken before, to see things I’ve never seen before, and feel what I haven’t felt before. The sun is strong, but so is the wind, and the short days of late November have been catching me off guard, so I walk briskly to build up some heat and reach the Water of Leith before I lose the daylight. It doesn’t take long before I am riverside, moving toward the port, cold but still catching a little of the enchantment as the afternoon softens into an early twilight, and the riparian flora take on forms and hues that evoke the territory of dream.

Later, though, I have almost nothing to report, not to myself or anyone else. I can say I had a pleasant walk, if a bit twee, and even though I probably checked my phone too often, or tried to take too many pictures, or caught myself wishing I’d indulged in another coffee before setting out, how can I admit that, at least until the Port of Leith itself, I could feel the weight of a mild disappointment accompanying me? That my route remains vague in my mind even if I can recall various points along the way? That in truth, The Walkway, its atmospheres and congress, touched but did not mark me? Except for maybe during a moment in one low road, where path gave way to pavement, and alongside blank brick homes a massive steel floodgate stood open, painted with a giant, childish flower. I took no pictures of it, but it’s still the case that within me this gate opens and opens.

If I am honest, I set out with a bundle of expectations that would always have been difficult to satisfy and are almost as hazardous to articulate now. It was not simply a case of expecting to be impressed, enchanted, or struck by the sublime. I went without a brief but intending to immerse myself in the landscape of the Water of Leith in order to learn something ineffable and immanent about it, while I was also in the process of fashioning myself into a new role as a poet-urbanist in the making.

I was already a poet, but after several years of teaching at a school of architecture in France, I had finally allowed myself to acknowledge a growing interest in urbanism, and a desire to bridge the indeterminate gap between literary activity and spatial practice. On one hand, I had noticed that there were architect-urbanists, economist-urbanists, ecologist-urbanists, and so on, but I had yet to meet an urbanist who deliberately inflected their work in the posture of a poet. On the other hand, I had an intuition about a potential shared field of action between spatial design disciplines like urbanism and contemporary poetics centred on situated, embodied, and material practices. So, holding past experiences in mind, I went to faire du terrain,1 as I had learned to say amongst colleagues.

In urbanist practice today, we can almost take for granted this notion that immersion in territorial realities produces new knowledge as the urbanist is given to encounter not (just) the city of state chronicle or as officially sponsored by the tourism board, but rather the heterogeneous, multitudinous assemblages that live beyond synopsis. This commitment has been so normalized or naturalized that we expect a luminary like Paola Viganò to forgo following the established lines of cartographers – whether human-generated or machine-automated – choosing instead to make her own maps and models when exploring project scenarios for Greater Geneva, for example, in order to stage the possibility for fresh encounters with the territory.2 If we combine this established posture with recent renewed interest in various and sundry walking practices, whether in the footsteps of Francisco Carreri and Stalker Collective, inscribing the landscape with a kind of proto-architecture of crossings,3 or pursuing more performative and interrogative ambulations with contemporary artists like Elena Biserna,4 urbanism would seem secure in its story of situatedness and embodiment. As Orfina Fatigato recently said, referring to a dedicated colleague, everyone appears to be “an urbanist of the foot.”5

And yet I ask myself, given such a broadly adopted posture, what differentiates current urbanist practices from one another? This is a way of asking what kind of urbanist I am or want to be. A practicing poet for over two decades, cittadino and committed pedestrian, I should be at home in European urbanism, with its penchant for trekking and spatial semantics. To stage the context for contemporary urbanist practice, Bernardo Secchi writes of the “immense archive of material signs” spread over the majority of the planet and suggests an urbanism not only of reading these signs, of reading the palimpsest as theorized by André Corboz, but which “acquires meaning within a narrative,” while finding agency precisely in the figures which cross the space between discursive practices and concrete spatial interventions.6 This, it seems, would be fertile ground to walk as a poet-urbanist, working through the archives, peeling back the sheaves and layers of meaning, so as to find space in which to write new figures and add to the accumulation of signs. Secchi himself would be a good model as thinker-writer-designer – as urbanist – with his methods of sectioning the city on foot to discover new or renewed notions of urbanity such as a porosity, for example, manifesting in work today under the sign of (a) Greater Paris. It helps, then, that I have had experiences which seem to rhyme with this culture of urbanism, even if they had no relation to the operational dimensions of the discipline.

Eight years earlier, still in Edinburgh, but further east, Tom and I cross through an opening in a chain-link fence, leaving the service road behind us to walk a dirt path along a low wall, tracing a way between the bay and a waste management facility. We are headed to Portobello under an unusually bright January sky. Suddenly, as we turn a corner, up looms a white spherical structure, massive and windowless, two skips and a somersault from the water, tucked safely behind another fence laced with razor wire, vaguely lunar as it reflects the pale sunlight on us. I stop to take a picture but cannot capture it in a way that satisfies me. I take another and another, but nothing seems adequate to its uncanny grandeur. We will continue to walk – I am full of ideas and theories, riffing at Tom as we go – and we will reach the beach and the boardwalk, laughing at ourselves and the small dogs struggling happily in the sand. I cannot remember much of the journey, though, or I want to say I have now little remnant experience of it overall, not beyond an elusive feeling of gratitude to a friend and a place. In other words, I am left without much for the makings of story. If I do maintain a strong feeling of relation to that specific landscape, then, and I do, it is in the way it is drawn as if by gravitational force into and around the grassy space at the foot of the great sphere I could not capture in image or dislodge from my imagination.

The sphere appeared to me that day as an event. At the edge of a city I had only ever known for its tightly packed, storied core, I encountered an entirely new object, unexpected and untold, reopening previously established conceptual maps in an ambiguous expanse between the city port and the town beach, where the water of the bay and the waters of the waste management facility came – I want to say – dangerously close to one another, and where the sky played on our faces as a reflection that had been for me, until that moment, impossible. I say event because – even as it seemed an echo of the forms of the architecture of astronomical observatories, geodesic domes, golf balls, amusement park pavilions – something singular in the experience worked as a pivot in my understanding of the temporal and spatial fields which make up the city. The place could not have existed for me before, but now, in an urban fabric of national galleries, royal palace complexes, parliamentary seats, royal botanical gardens, castles, cathedrals, universities, bookshops, pubs, playhouses, cinemas, stadiums, supermarkets, chemists, bookies, and flats, there is a place for the well-tooled smoothness of the sphere and its pull as much on the water as on the long stretches of dull grey road as on me.

Drawing from Alain Badiou, I choose to refer to event and not landmark, to signal a marker more radical than a mere distinguishing feature on the horizon, something more like the experience of a rupture in the very notion of a landscape. For Badiou, the event is “something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable,” not as “the creation of a reality,” but as “the creation of a possibility.”7 In my case, the landscape that I had known prior to the event was finite, closed, and circumscribed by an image of the city that had failed to renew itself in my imagination. The possibility of a landscape that continues to open onto new forms and improbable structures could only be reached through some kind of break with the fixed image, not just to add something missing to the former picture, but to render the prior vision totally new through the break. Badiou was, of course, concerned as a philosopher primarily with the definition of a radical political event, and offered a mathematically restrictive account of what was, in his view, the rarity of such events. In that sense, it is hard to believe he would have much interest in my encounter with an unexpected sphere or in my understanding of a particular landscape. At the same time, his own description of the event points to a moment and space where the given situation is upended by the appearance of what in the situation itself previously seemed impossible or, in some cases, did not seem anything at all for want of being able to appear. It may be that such a description lends itself readily to thinking about the master narratives of state power and the appearance of previously unthinkable radical movements at odds with that power, but I am particularly interested in Badiou’s thought when we think across other scales. By transposing his understanding of event into a language of landscape poetics, I begin to see how, in the field between embodied urbanist experience and the dominant – most often narrative and imposed – imaginaries, space opens up for new possibilities to emerge from the territory. The urbanist, in this case guided by a friend, drifts away from the established path – be it a Royal Mile or a Leith Walk – to discover an expanse of endemic grasses, rough concrete, utilitarian fencing, technical facilities, and an uncelebrated stretch of water, all given the potential for new meaning in a moment of encounter. In my case, the scale of my encounter with the sphere – I now believe it to be a digester, diligently staging anaerobic metabolisms to create methane-based energy from our excrement – was rather small, especially in terms of its consequences, but this relative lack of significance in global terms would never be able to make it wholly inert.

* * *

I arrive now, a few years still further back, this time in eastern France, at the point where and when I meet the heron. It may be the fifteenth or the fiftieth time in which I meet this particular bird, I cannot be sure, but there are always reverberations from the first meeting. In a narrow, wooded valley, flanked on one side by a heavily used motorway and the old city fortifications on the other, I stop my bicycle beneath an underpass to greet the heron standing near the opposite bank of a river that should have long ago lost its vocation as a moat. With water rushing below, the sound of motor traffic overhead, the scent of mud and petrol fumes, and the heron stock still in the act of hunting, I am caught fully in the moment, in total rupture with the life of duty that has brought me to this point – in time, in space – placed at the lip of the incongruence between this place and the historic centre of a European capital, less than a kilometre away. As begins to seem usual, I am standing in a gap, a residual space between infrastructures, discovering what grows there, spun off my prior axis by one of the figures I have met. This time it is not architecture but the heron, not a sign but a non-human actor, another – an Other – life shaping this territory in the furious energy of its pose, that tears into my understanding, bringing me to sense how the edges of a city are not necessarily at its farthest extremities, but can also be held deep within, like the vestigial folds of a bodily organ.

It is becoming more difficult to say exactly how I came this way, by what route. As a researcher walking the walled-off perimeter of a decommissioned industrial zone west of Naples, slowly growing back green and red and purple despite the metals and other chemicals polluting the soil? As a master’s student skipping a home football game to photograph the immobile lock and dam across the Black Warrior River? As a child tracing a line of abandoned service rails running through the woods behind his neighbourhood and then behind the shopping plazas and then out toward the city limits in a Hudson Valley town left stripped of industry? As a recent college graduate paddling in a canoe through the oily water of the Gowanus to test planting sea grass against sludge? As a guest following the canals on foot from Delft to the sea, to see what really lies in the lowlands? As an immigrant cycling between factories to reach the Franco-German border, startled at one instant by the deep tang of malt on the air? Residual space, urban infrastructure, pollution and both the human and non-human lives resisting it, and, frequently, water: there are particular textures to the conditions that trigger my perception of a landscape and to the kinds of experience they produce. I think of these experiences as lyric, in that in their becoming, they reframe a world and its possibilities through the production of new relationality.

In literature, the lyric is most often equated with the musical, which is also a frequent proxy for the beautiful, and even the pathetic, for reasons that are roughly as historical as they are wishful.8 Lyric comes from lyre, the harp-like stringed instrument that accompanied the singing poets of ancient Greece. Among several contenders, one popularly held origin myth for Western notions of lyric poetry, the figure of the bard Orpheus, connects us to a tradition, a pathos, and also the musical instrument. He appears in sources as varied as Pindar’s odes, Aristophanes’ comedies, and Plato’s dialogues, but in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we see the singer, overcome by grief, strum his lyre, and succeed in gathering not just an assembly of wild animals but also a new grove of trees around him, each individual moved emotionally and spatially by his song.9 In this myth, we can see the figure of the poet as the one with the power to move the world with the emotive musicality of language, and to create new forms – in this case, the grove – within the forest of signs. While there are other arguments for the origins of lyric, it is particularly tempting to find a model for the poet-urbanist in such an Orphic perspective, shaping the landscape through the imagery of a text, bridging the discursive and the material with song. Due to my own predilections, I also cannot totally ignore Orpheus’s encampment on the banks of the Styx, his residence at the periphery of the land of the dead. The lyric cannot or should not be reduced, however, to its musicality, its pathos, or both. As Jacques Rancière has already described with nuance, lyric poetry cannot be fully equated to music, since language carried to the extreme of musicality would simply be music itself, and a similar argument could be made for language carried to the limits of emotional expression.10 Short of such extremes, though, and in the territory of poetics conventionally discussed in terms of modes of representation, it may still be worth asking what remains of the lyric if we look beyond the mere presence of aesthetics and pathos as generic criteria.11

In Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler shines a light on the finer difficulties of what may initially seem to be of a mostly disciplinary nature when it comes to the study of genre and a definition of lyric poetry. A literary critic can easily fall into dogma when taking up either a too-essentialist or a too-sceptical position on the literary value of the study of literary genres, and potentially miss how “a broad conception of lyric as genre” can provide the capacity to “enlarge the possibilities of reading and engagement.”12 Culler guides us instead toward a more flexible understanding of the lyric genre(s), in order to avoid the mise-en-abyme of generic definitions and rather to allow a group of tendencies to emerge. In other words, he invites us to make strategic use of the generic frame, without absolutist commitment, to the benefit of relationships to be observed or even induced across a diversity of texts considered to be lyric. This is where Culler’s own project on the lyric began, from an early observation of and “fascination with lyrics’ strange way of addressing time, winds, urns, trees, or the dead.”13 This fascination led to a foundational essay on the figure of apostrophe – where the lyric speaker addresses anything that could not be expected to answer in conventional logical terms – and a career-defining break with the dominant schools of literary criticism that had trained him.14 In his advocacy for a reading of the lyric across historical periods and cultural geographies to allow for tendencies to emerge, the problem gains contemporaneity as we ask not what lyric is, but what can it do, what can we do with it, and what affordances it brings. I understand these to be questions of the strategic arrangement of specific conditions of possibility for creative action that we gather under the heading of the lyric – in other words, I consider the problem to be modal. Within and beyond the written page, then, I ask what the modalities of the lyric can afford me in practice? It must be more than mere encounters with difference in the urban landscape, which would not be the special province of poets.

When Secchi and Viganò set out to gather and build narratives in Greater Paris based on rhetorical figures, they are engaging with a logic of persuasion, seeking to shift the discursive field at work in the play of actors so as to convince stakeholders to commit to spatial projects and the requisite interventions that would transform the city and territory.15 These are urbanists as rhetors, as negotiators, as planners, whereas I believe the urbanist as poet would have to work in a different modal register, with a lyric approach that while maybe not permanently separated, for example, from the arenas of rhetoric – such a drastic schism could not be real – does operate primarily via other logics, that is, other poetics. In truth, I believe every “urbanist of the foot” is, at least at certain points in their practice, in pursuit of lyric experience, meeting their spheres and their herons, even if a more operational mode may follow. First, though, there is the moment of encounter, and the mise-en-relation (putting into relation) made possible through it, one that catches us in a dialectics of address.

* * *

On Via Bagnoli, two of my colleagues and I are tracing the edges of an aporia. The city fabric stretches northeast to our right, the industrial zone hidden behind a concrete wall to our left. On the right side of the street, my companions notice how small apartment blocks give way to villas built for the managerial class of the now defunct mills and factories. On the left, I follow the sliver of pavement at the foot of the wall, squeezing between the concrete and parked cars and scooters, lines of oversized trash hoppers, abandoned junk, piles of discarded fruit crates. The wall is itself a kilometre-long palimpsest of graffiti art – signatures, declarations, warnings, invitations, invective, encomium. Three meters above me, planters placed on the top of the wall by former workers flash brightly with endemic plants flowering into late October. After walking for twenty minutes, I see a stand of trees rise suddenly a few metres behind the wall, hinting at processes invisible from the road. It is thirty years since the last factory shut down operations, but the site has been anything but inactive. From another vantage we will be able to look out on how the old industrial structures emerge from a verdant elsewhere, and never will I have seen a place on earth so evocative of “the Zone” in Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stalker. Now, though, I can only look on the life of the paint on the wall and the scree of ancient windshields in the road. I do not know what my colleagues are discussing on the other side of the street. Across from them, I appear as their uncanny reflection, walking the wall. All at once, I reach a point where I am struck by the sudden smell of the sea, still unseen though less than 200 metres away.

This time the event which triggers lyric experience is nothing so specific or contained as a geometric structure, nothing so concentrated in living as a heron poised in the stasis of the hunt. It starts before the Via Bagnoli and goes past the advent of the sea, though without any of the makings of story. The experience moves around a site, skips across certain spans of time, and holds up various figures as if etchings – a wall of graffiti, an expanse of polder vibrant with rust-coloured and magenta grasses, two chimneys breaking the horizon, a gate closed to the trees, empty fruit crates piled higher than I could reach even jumping. The event comes in the form of a multiple, a heterogenous array assembling loosely around a time and place, confronting me with its collapsing scales of magnitude and the countless dynamic components of an urbanity some would call dormant or even dead. It is an encounter with the millions of plants and fungi growing despite soil too poisoned for even the most cynical of promotors to build sea-view condominiums. It is a meeting with a three-decade moratorium on nearly all human activity inside a given perimeter. A rendezvous with the material value of fencing.

Unlike narrative modes, which even in the most experimental forms must reckon with degrees of causal sequentiality, or expository modes, which are beholden to revealing an object in coherent frames, I understand lyric modes to specifically allow for the rapprochement of what would otherwise be distant, disparate, or even alien. This is the very structure of metaphor,16 where dissimilar terms are brought together in a comparative couple, despite their apparent difference. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, reading across Paul Ricoeur and others, argues for the critical role of metaphor in architecture as a mediating device between cognition and material reality, loosening objects from their fixed denotations, and giving birth to new images in language, which in turn give way to an “increment to consciousness” and all the affordances that come with it.17 In Bagnoli, I can take this plainly, to examine how bringing together the closure of steel manufacturing and the slow growth of a singular local ecotope can revive – enliven, reanimate, resurrect – what we understand and feel when we think of an “industrial park.” But if metaphor powers much of what is found in lyric poetry, it has no special allegiance to the latter, and in truth, I want to understand the moments of rapprochement before lyric formation is given either provisional or enduring shape. In other words, I want to better identify the lyric mode of experience itself, which in landscape would correlate to these encounters that draw us closer to what is outside of us and what make us receptive to affinities despite or even through alterity.

When Edouard Glissant proposes a “poetics of Relation,” he does so in defence of a world of particulars in danger of being ground down into just another indistinguishable stretch of the absolute (in urban architecture, the blankness of Rem Koolhaas’ assessments of context),18 because any practice or thought that would efface the particular would be impermissive of alterity by default. In Glissant’s formulation, this takes on special resonance in the material of language through monolingualism and the worlds of difference and therefore experience that are lost when languages such as French Creoles fade from existence. Differences act as conditions for experience in a poetics of relation, after all, since only the movement from and between positions of difference allows encounter with an Other that provides us anything like knowledge or consciousness. “Encountering the Other superactivates the poetic imagination and understanding,” Glissant writes in a discussion of Victor Segalen that pre-emptively describes my own encounters in the peripheral city.19 Faced with new life on the grounds of a dead factory, and with a heron silently stalking a noisy underpass, with a sphere reflecting the light of the sky as it digests human waste, or even with a gate painted gaily with a flower while it waits on flood – all this prior to the formation of any new linguistic material, let alone a metaphor – I am enlivened by the experience of relations previously unknown to me and the opening of new situated understandings of the city and the territory. I am not inspired – inspiration being the key to a passive poetics of waiting for it to happen to the poet – as much as jolted by the energy of differential relations put into play, in part due to my will to cross the territory. “Poetic thought safeguards the particular, since only the totality of truly secure particulars guarantees the energy of Diversity,” Glissant explains or warns.20

* * *

The energy of encounter can be thrilling, and if there is something I share with nearly every urbanist I have met, it is the pleasure taken in fieldwork, the desire to set out – if we do not all always set out exactly to err – and to meet the unexpected and the particular in the terrain. But like any thrill, it cheapens if only sought out for itself, and if Glissant argues that “the power to experience the shock of elsewhere is what distinguishes the poet,” it is not to create a philosophy out of that singular shock, but to bring it into play within the deeper context of a mise-en-relation.21 Meeting the heron, I am startled by the abrupt experience of difference that brings into relief the relation of particulars. From the jolt of my initial encounter, however, an event that disrupts my prior understanding of the landscape and its creatures, my imagination addresses not only my relation to this individual bird, but also with particulate pollution in the air, fluid dynamics in the river, bushes and trees and insects and rodents, paving stones laid by long-absent workers, the roots pushing them up or mud swallowing them down, my own awareness as a node of energy, my constantly networking mobile phone, my bicycle stood still, decaying leaves, a scrap of blue plastic. All these particulars come into play in a space just twenty metres square. But I must also readdress my understanding still further, beyond my focus on the heron, to where a hundred metres away men are cruising in ones or twos on the small trails flanking the main path, or where the drug users who also sometimes cruise often gather in one lobe of parkland rising over the water, up a small slope, and tucked into a curve in the motorway like an oxbow lake. But also to the small tent city that has appeared with the winter thaw and following another shockwave of violence in Syria. And also to the people more regularly hidden behind the locked fences and closed hedgerows of a long, narrow strip of allotment gardens, planting their annuals and salad greens. And to the joggers sweating off last night’s fête, or to the other cyclists cutting their own trajectories away from the major roads, and to the people in a small parking lot just out of sight, meeting driving instructors as they chase automotive licence. If I were to stop with the thrill of the heron, I might even forget the fish in the river, or the fact the bird is fishing for them. The mise-en-relation of the lyric experience of landscape should tend toward proliferation. This calls back also to Badiou, who argues against the significance of simply marking an event, noting “the entire effort lies in following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence.”22

If there is a certain metonymic quality to how I represent these relations now – this lateral slide that might give an impression of continuity and contiguous space – it reminds me of how I could stake a claim for the lyric as a necessary component of descriptive urbanism, where the encounter with the territory is both subject and object of the descriptive act that would prefigure the territorial project. As Viganò reminds us, “every act of description is an attempt at logical restructuration of the world, proceeding through deconstructions, erasures, and highlighting,” offering up new understandings upon which we can cast our vision onto possible futures.23 In her case, this is specifically a way of challenging the traditional linearity of the analysis-design approach to urban and territorial projects, with a “hybrid space” opening “between description and project”24 where the evocative image has the “capacity to structure the gaze that reads, and to already be design.”25 It would be tempting, even reassuring, to lash myself tightly to this position, to be able to say that, when I was a small boy following railroad tracks and looking for dead bodies, I was already pursuing the encounters which would allow me to design the territory. Perhaps.

Glissant writes, though, that the “poetics of Relation interweaves and no longer projects” and that “it inscribes itself in a circularity,” which, if taken at face value, could question the sense of an urban or territorial project with an aim – however multi-actor, however multi-disciplinary – to transform spatial realities.26 A more nuanced reading, though, suggests that “interweaving” still transforms space, but with an emphasis on the existing in lieu of a teleological product, and Viganò would surely agree with Glissant insomuch as even her most concrete spatial realizations can only be conceived of as temporary installations in the scheme of a never-ending dynamics of relation, not to overlook the social relations that are increasingly present as “project material” in her design work. But the lyric experience of landscape with which I am concerned is not simply a question of relating to the Other and then casting the gaze further, and then further still, to find and gather particulars to be woven. It is not any more intrinsically metonymic than it is metaphoric. Its logic or rather force of rapprochement requires no a priori structure to bring terms together across disparate positions in space and time. The heron, the industrial zone, the sphere, and the floodgate approach one another without a prior figure to encompass or hierarchise them.

* * *

In Ovids’s retelling of the myth of Orpheus, the anthropocentric nature of the story, of the poet bending the world to his song, can distract from the ways in which Orpheus’s words do contribute to a collapse in distance between species, a shortening of psycho-affective distance as plants, animals, and gods are moved by an expression of grief. Luckily, Culler analyses a more modest but perhaps even more generous example in ancient Greek lyricist Sappho’s “Ode to Aphrodite,” in which the poet invokes the goddess of love in order to request her intervention in an affair of the heart.27 In both cases, the lyric displays an incredible power to summon into presence – at least of mind – through the device of address. Even when the so-called speaker of the poem is distinct from the poet, the vocation of the lyric to be voiced creates what Heather H. Yeung identifies as a “vocalic space” by positioning the voice in the body of that utterance, a space taken to its full extension when an address is formed to reach an otherwise alienated addressee.28 In Sappho’s “Ode,” the address is capable of crossing the span between the banal corners of a thwarted love affair and the celestial realms of the gods. In spectacular fashion, the lyric invokes Aphrodite to such great effect that the goddess is made to answer: “Oh who is hurting you this time, Sappho?”29 The vocalic space of the lyric reaches the heavens and welcomes Aphrodite into it, interweaving her with the voices of the poet and the reader.

Though my own sense of lyric experience may be drastically less divinatory, I see my encounters with alterity as being caught up in the rapprochement of address before metaphor. What surprises me, however, is that, unlike a lyric text where my voice may invoke and summon through the device, the lyric experience prior to writing seems to invert address, directing it instead back toward the poet. On the one hand, the event of initial encounter interpellates me – interpellation itself being a form of address – drawing me into relation, for example, with the sphere of the waste management facility; on the other hand, each new encounter appears to make a conduit of me to call out to other encounters, and call out to what I have previously known of the landscape, so that the heron not only comes into relation with the drug users up the hill or the renaissance architecture of the more distant historic city centre, but also with the red grasses of the Neapolitan industrial zone and the rails I followed as a restless child.

Discussing more-than-representational theories of landscape, Emma Waterton reminds us that we must “be prepared for landscapes to ‘answer back’” as we take into account non-human and post-human agency, as we reckon fully with what embodied practice means and how it interacts with us.30 This strikes me as critical to understanding lyric experience – not as a narrative thread with its causal sequence, but as a state of receptivity to the landscape’s response, even if it is responding to an act as simple as the paying of attention. In myth, it answers back literally: The Maenads eventually tear Orpheus apart out of anger at the way he endlessly addresses the world around him with his grief. In practice, it can be a reflection of the light, a rushing of water, a rank smell, or just an extension of awareness from a previously unmarked point. Lyric experience of the city, the territory, or the landscape seems as much about listening, or, to use Pérez-Gómez’s terms, attunement, as it would be about any lyric production that may follow in a projectual form. It is a question of receptivity to the address of the encounter with alterity that would open the poetics of relation to us.

And so, when I am following the Water of Leith on a bright day, alone, having left my friends behind, and find myself struggling along the wooded slopes and soft brush growth of the banks, I feel the burden of disappointment, even low-level frustration at the apparent lack of event. Where is the encounter I am seeking? Where is the point in which I feel the approach of difference? A footbridge is quaint and practical and that is all. A statue partially emerging from the river doesn’t speak, to no one’s surprise. On the path everything is tidy and suggests maintenance; to the sides, nothing appears wild or untamed. I already feel too close to my fellow walkers, while at the same time we do not communicate even with gestures. Whatever the maps suggest, there is nothing residual here, this is no city edge. I take my phone out again and again, waiting for something or someone to reach out, framing images I am uncertain ever to use or even to keep. Am I the problem, am I not receptive to it all? Badiou writes that preparedness for the event “consists in being disposed to welcome it.”31 To welcome the event as a poet-urbanist would be, in Badiouian terms, to show fidelity to past events and dispose oneself to the appearance of an impossible address, one that would appear at the boundaries of a situation that could not see it, let alone admit it into the situation itself. It would be to open oneself to the possibility of a lyric experience to call into relation what had previously been unthinkable. On The Walkway, I cannot help but be frustrated at the order which seems to preclude any such thing. Until I come to a floodgate painted to bloom against the water when it rises, and there the verse appears to end in a kind of enjambment.

1 A translation according to Saint Jerome would probably carry a spirit of “going into the field” and “doing fieldwork,” but the peculiar French way of lettering how we will “do/make some terrain” speaks to a continental understanding of the

constructed character of landscape, even before reflections on the anthropogenic contours of European cities.

2 Paola Viganò, “Du sol et du travail: La transition, un nouveau projet biopolitique,” Fondation Braillard Architectes, 13 October 2020, YouTube Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeRdVToU5kY.

3 Francisco Carreri, Walkscapes: Walking as aesthetic practice, 2nd ed., trans. Stephen Piccolo (Middleton, WI: Culicidae Architectural Press, 2018).

4 Elena Biserna, Walking from Scores (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2022).

5 Orfina Fatigato, Personal remarks in the presence of the author, October 27, 2022.

6 Bernardo Secchi, Première leçon d’urbanisme (2006; repr., Marseille: Editions Paranthèses, 2006/2011), 14–19. Unless otherwise noted, translations are by the author.

7 Alain Badiou and Fabien Tarby, Philosophy and the Event, trans. Louise Burchill (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 9.

8 For a thorough presentation of modern and contemporary accounts of the lyric in literary criticism see The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, eds. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 1–5, 114–15.

9 See Book X: “When here the heaven-descended bard sat down and smote his sounding lyre, shade came to the place,” Ovid, Metamorphoses, Vol. II, trans. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977/1989), 71.

10 Jacques Rancière, La parole muette (Paris: Editions Fayard / Pluriel, 2005).

11 Alternative but still traditional oppositions in the lyric are described as being between sound and sense (“a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense,” Paul Valéry, cited in Gorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], 109), or between melos and opsis (sound and image in Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957]), but in relation to the Orphic myth, I am opting to call attention to the plaintive character of lyric in popular reception.

12 Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 90.

13 Culler, vii.

14 Any dispute with or disregard for Culler’s thinking on the basis of his long commitment to and prolific contributions to structuralist and post-structuralist theory are likely to overlook how much of the contemporary field of literary criticism owes its current formation to positions he has developed, both with and without collaborators.

15 Jeremy Allan Hawkins, “From Narrative Objects to Poetic Practices: On Figurative Modes of Urbanism,” Urban Planning 7, no. 3 (2022): 430–39.

16 As has been noted by an anonymous reviewer of this essay in an earlier form, the linguist Roman Jakobson made a strong critical distinction between the figures of metaphor (likeness) and metonymy (contiguity), specifically associating the former with the foundations of poetry, and the latter with the foundations of realistic prose. I prefer to avoid this particular opposition here, not to deny the pertinence of Jakobson’s theory, but out of an interest, in the scope of this essay, in the lyric as it can be understood before the appearance of a rhetorical situation. See Roman Jakobson, “The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles,” in Metaphor and Metonymy in Comparison and Contrast, eds. René Dirven and Ralf Pörings (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2014), 41–48.

17 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Attunement: Architectural Meaning after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016) 183–86.

18 Including, but not limited to his writing on “bigness” in Rem Koolhaas et al., Small, Medium, Large, Extra-Large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau (London and New Yori: Monacelli Press, 1998).

19 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997) 29.

20 Glissant, 32.

21 Glissant, 29-30.

22 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 211.

23 Paola Viganò, Territories of Urbanism: The Project as Knowledge Producer, trans. Stephen Piccolo (Lausanne: EPFL Press: 2010/2016), 171.

24 A reminder of Secchi’s previously mentioned figures, which cross the space between discursive practices and concrete interventions.

25 Viganò, Territories of Urbanism, 162.

26 Glissant, 32.

27 Culler, 10–16.

28 Heather H. Yeung, Spatial Engagement with Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 67.

29 A playful paraphrase of Aphrodite’s answer, available in a modified version of John Winkler’s translation in Culler, 11–12.

30 Emma Waterton, “More-than-Representational Landscapes,” in The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, 2nd ed., eds. Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, Emma Waterton, and Mick Atha (London: Routledge, 2019), 96.

31 Badiou and Tarby, Philosophy and the Event, 12.