Kenzie Allen

poet & multimodal artist

“Longhouse” – concrete poem installation

Located on the wall of the CIBC Lobby in the Accolade East Building on York University Campus, vinyl, 18ft wide

A calligrammatic poem using the concept of contour drawing (one continuous line where the pencil does not lift off the page until the drawing is complete), concrete poetry, and anaphora (“we build it, we build the longhouse, we build the longhouse as our ancestors have done”) as means of place-making. The central fire of the longhouse is made up of words from the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin’s slogan and core values: good mind, good heart, and strong fire.

The poem is originally designed by sketching a basic contour drawing on a whiteboard, then reproducing it as a path in Photoshop/Illustrator before writing the poem directly onto the path, such that each portion of the poem corresponds to the location on the page (i.e., “we build the door wide to welcome” forms the door).

Originally installed as part of 2023 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. The poem is part of a series of calligrams–an earlier piece in the series appeared as part of Poets.org’s Poem-a-Day collection.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.