San Francisco, California, USA

The organizing committee of the Galena International Poetry Festival, made up of distinguished poets from around the world, has named San Francisco architect, John Marx as current the recipient of the John Gates Percival International Prize for Literature.

The Prize commemorates and pays tribute to the great American Poet James Gates Percival (1795- 1856) who is considered America’s first poet shortly after the Revolutionary War.

Born in Berlin, Connecticut, Percival is also considered the father of modern American Poetry.

His first book, Prometheus: A Poem, was published over 200 years ago while he studied as a 20-year old student at the School of Medicine at Yale University. His later works earned him immediate international fame. He later became a geologist and worked as the first state geologist of Connecticut and Wisconsin.

Last year, the Percival Prize was awarded to Kentucky poet Christopher P. Collins, an American War Veteran, for his poetic writings and observations entitled, My American Night, a book that was written by the poet concerning peace and his personal thoughts during the War in Iraq.

The poet John Marx is the award-winning co-founding principal and chief artistic officer of Form4 Architecture. The San Francisco office is considered one of America’s leading design firms advancing and promoting ideas in urbanism, community, and civility.

“John Marx is very much like the Chicago architect, Louis H. Sullivan,” states architecture critic, Christian Narkiewicz-Laine.

“Sullivan, who is considered the father of modern architecture, wrote poetry before and after his first and last architectural commissions.”

“Like the poet-architect Sullivan, Marx is the ultimate intellectual architect. Sullivan was equally at home writing verse while expanding his architectural vision through nature and the universe and creating absolute masterpieces of domestic and commercial design, which still, over 100 years later, resonate with such great clarity, imagination, prophecy and far-sightedness.”

“Genius: yes, both genius.”

“Marx’s poetry echoes the same sentiment of expression as Sullivan’s artistic vision, personified images either stolen from dreams or from nature, that so few architects can ever command or ever hopefully achieve,” Narkiewicz-Laine adds.

“Marx, too, whose work is ultimately philosophical, arises from the same dream-like other worldliness—yes spiritual—that makes an architect, ‘not just a good architect, but a great one’.” Marx’s Percival Prize is also tied to his most recent book of poetry entitled: études: The Poetry of Dreams & Other Fragments, which bring together his written work and his watercolors both of which first appeared in The Architectural Review and now published by ORO Editions in 2020.

Études is divided into eight sections and features 40 short poems juxtaposed with 84 watercolors, complementing the observational and even existential qualities of the poet’s art. Both are music.

“The reader is equally drawn to Marx’s writings as the quality of the watercolors, which are simple, precise and thought-provoking,” continues Narkiewicz-Laine, “and reminiscent of the Luxembourg artist/architect, Rita Wolff, and former partner of Leon Krier.”

“Like early Schinkel or Giorgio de Chirico, Marx’s watercolors have the same eerie feeling of desolation, disturbingly tragic and empty dream-like state—as what Wolff so admirably also captures in her work—while provoking some kind of unique architectural idea, expression, and, ultimately, a fleeting vision.”

In his book, each Marx watercolor is juxtaposed next to a visual and concrete poem. In the poem, “Etude 48, 2005,” Marx writes: “In the cycle of change / we endure those extremes / each adding / a layer of humanity / to our journey,” and ends with the thought that life asks “‘that we / live intensely / and in the moment.”

“Throughout the book, the poet’s words are moments in time; apertures; absent nature; objects in nature; without intention; approaching abstraction; deconstructing perception; improvisations.”

“In Études, Marx’s poems are similarly pared down to simple statements spread across the page with lines positioned horizontally, vertically, diagonally and so on. The impact is strangely powerful that only art and poetry can fully explain; communicate.”

“A modern and learned French writer once said that painting always reflects the metaphysics of the artist, and that, lost in the delights of contemplation, the true lover of art cannot but desire to penetrate the mystery of the artist,” continues Narkiewicz-Laine.

“In essence, Marx sees architecture as the simple joy of poetry; complex, archetypal, in continual exploration, and vice versa.”

“This poet-architect has discovered that both art forms work hand in hand, as Sullivan demonstrated, and have vision, color, formal language, and subject matter in common; and for this reason alone, Marx is most deserving of this recent accolade.”

The Galena Poetry Festival is held each in the historic 19th-Century city of Galena, Illinois, located on the Mississippi River, and attracts world renowned writers and literary figures.

John Marx’s Percival Prize will be officially given to him during the Galena International Poetry Festival this coming summer.

Études: The Poetry of Dreams + Other Fragments (ISBN: 978-1-943532-42-1) is hard bound, 160 pages, and available at www.oroeditions.com