Gil McElroy is a poet, visual artist, critic, and curator. His most recent book of poetry is Long Division (University of Calgary Press, 2020). He’s previously published four books of poetry with Talonbooks, as well as a memoir of growing up a military brat during the Cold War. In 2001, Gaspereau Press published a collection of his writings on contemporary Canadian visual art. McElroy currently lives in North Bay, Ontario.
“I’ve been researching the life and work of my grandfather, Garnet A. McElroy, a Windsor, Ontario-based architect. He is perhaps best known for having designed the Kresge stores that were built across Canada from the mid-1920s to the 1950s. His architectural practice focused primarily on commercial structures (he designed, for instance, the Humbertown Mall in Toronto), but on at least two occasions, he made forays into residential architecture.
“In the late 1940s, he designed perhaps his most beautiful structure, a private home at 1380 Ypres Avenue in Windsor. I can give that address as the home has a public presence courtesy historical designation by the city of Windsor. It is unlike anything else he designed, buildings which were designed to be utile. This home was designed to be more. I only learned of its existence several years ago, and early in the summer of 2023, I was finally able to see it for the first time. It’s in an upscale neighbourhood but overshadows the other exclusive homes in that area, utterly unlike them. I responded to its presence with this poem.”
The plan
The great necessities
The style epoch
The result character
There there
The lesson of the statement
The problem nevertheless
The business
The relationships
The drawing of order
The sense of passion.
The one hand, dwelling
The other hand, quiet
There there
The plan the result
The elements & space
The rules of a leaning toward
The contour here, the contour there
Free & plastic
A great geometry exactly determining & accusing & moving
A time
A mass
A measure
A brutal cube
A stage of tools
A manifestation of bad tools [A manifestation is not quite right]
A house, then, of storeys above
A living room of a past
A house of two 1/2 waters & slight ornament
A house, inquisitive
A room in its right place
Little panes & pretty suburb
Daylight difficult to open, where eyes are an impertinence
An eating within a labyrinth
The order which is shape
The last before conformity
The windows are ready-made, serene, amplify the basis of you
The living room, the clear panes, the right angles, the horizon
The humbler exterior
The sides of the middle of the room
The arrangements they imagine
The move left [On the other hand the right is pure treachery]
The nearby
The architecture clean
The inert combinations
The pediment. I repeat: the pediment [Not at all]
The bewilderment between ourselves
The magnificently hard facts
And so on
A witness of light
A little nothing, harmonious enough
A normal cradle
A necessity against wilfulness
A great there
A march toward regression
A question that perished
A house forged of itself
A mass of surfaces
A happy Parthenon [Of course]
A recourse
A way
A you who has much indifference
A you yourself
A mass & surface manifest in the conditions
A form which is savage
An axis
An undressing kind of thing to do
The greater value of stones [Not at all]
The flourishing ornaments
The problem of equilibrium
The spirit we eliminate
The method employed
The march of retrogression
The machinery of catastrophe
The realization of hysteria
A sort of representation of everything
A convenience that persists
A need practiced
A geometrical figure & the principles of time & tricks
An accommodation about the whole town an idea I had myself an encumbrance an imminence an inevitability
But anyway…
