Looking back on my education, I left high school with only so many authors in my consciousness. Thinking I was going to spend my life building aeroplanes or sports cars, I was keen to start my engineering course and I gave scarce thought to literature. At 17, Janis Ian might have learnt the truth but walking around as I was in a general state of mental and spiritual confusion, I can't say I knew myself that well. After a year completely lacking in any kind of intellectual stimulus, I flunked and realised I must pursue something that was artistically engaging so I switched to architecture. Even then no one dared to suggest that architecture and literature might well be related.

John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Wilfred Owen, Albert Camus, William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Colin Thiele, Judith Wright and perhaps even Alistair McLean come to mind as the important authors who peppered my reading. I was aware mainly of novelists but at school we were not taught poetry specifically and certainly not its structural aspects. As for the rest I read mainly current affairs journals and books about photography.

After I finished with studies, I remember that I was always reading something at one time or another although I am a notoriously slow reader. I rediscovered Hemingway by way of 'Death in the Afternoon'. Bullfighting has become a taboo but Hemingway saw something primal in it. These kinds of subjects interest me.

About twenty years ago at a bookshop on Hindley Street in Adelaide, I came across an intriguing title, 'The Conscience of the Eye'. This gave me another kind of reading experience altogether. Its author is Richard Sennett, an American sociologist who has a rare insight into the social character of cities. Simply put, his idea is an extension of Marshall McLuhan's thesis that the Mass Media is an extension of the human mind. In an even more compelling way, cities are an extension not only of Man's mind but also of his body and his spirit. The book was hard to put down as he made links between places, memory and emotions. Structured like a novel, it described the city as a living being, the collective soul of that particular human society.

Many years later, I still haven't taken up contemporary literature. There are the star authors like Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan but in the few times that I have started reading their works, I disliked the narrative pretensions: the overbearing display of literary talent. That dry craving for a cigarette and coffee that comes from the lean prose of say, Camus or Hemingway is just not there. I tried Saul Bellow, but I couldn't take all the grimy descriptions of egocentric neuroses. I refer often to the 'Author's Calendar' to find out more about writers who have, more recently, come into view like Stendhal, H G Wells, Melville, among others. The last writer in the list at the Author's Calendar is Stefan Zweig. Evidently a fine writer who committed suicide in Brazil during WWII, unable to imagine an end to the horrors caused by anti-semitism. I'm still in two minds about the validity of literary criticism in terms of what it adds to the arts. It seems that some people like writing and reading 'critiques' rather more than stories. I find them quite useful myself and have at times attempted some film reviews analysing style and the ideas present in the works but at the same time I can't help feeling that this is very much a secondary activity compared to creating the work itself.

I entered poetry via Wordsworth's 'Lines Written in Early Spring'. I found a perfection there of inscribed thought and a certain delight that comes from the rhythm of versified speech. Wordsworth seems to puzzle many critics, in that, they are not sure why he is regarded as a great poet. Nor am I but I noticed that his lines are aphoristic. They say that Anthologies are to be avoided but I owe a great debt to Seven Centuries of Poetry - Chaucer to Dylan Thomas' edited by A.N. Jeffares for giving me an outline of the poetic heritage in the English language.

From W H Auden, one learns that poems ought to be read singularly, word for word, line by line, examining all the possible meanings that the poem offers. This form of celebrating words in structured verse, critics say, comes down to us from Chaucer, via Shakespeare. It was also salutary to learn about the French poets Mallarmè for his liguistic (rather than philosophical) emphasis and Rimbaud whose celebration of the transgressive lifestyle predates Lou Reed and the subsequent degradatory urgings of Grunge. Fluids must flow.

The common ground between literature and architecture is of course, the way in which good authors first create the space in which they place the action. It is the creation of plausible realities through narration of which the creators of concrete realities need to the take heed: the watercolour of words as it were.

As an autodidact, I may have a limited view of literature's magic, somewhat like a religious convert who has to imitate others in participating in the liturgy but who's to know? I care for it anyhow - even if it's just for myself.