lapsus linguae

This is a Picture of Wind

On 30 June 2020 Sheffield-based Longbarrow Press published my new poetry collection, This is a Picture of Wind. On Saturday 28 November 2020, it was named one of the best books of poetry of 2020 by The Guardian. A month later, I’m only just getting around to blogging about it. It’s been a heck of a year.

In The Guardian, Rishi Dastidar describes This is a Picture of Wind as “title that gives shape to the ineffable […] a digitally tinged pillow book full of staccato language inspired by John Ruskin’s “sky-bottling days”, Francis Beaufort’s wind scale and Luke Howard’s observations of clouds.” And in SPAM Press’s Deep Cuts 2020 Kirsty Dunlop writes: “this collection felt like a necessary breath in the stagnant air of this year.”

This pocket-sized hardback collection is based on This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Phone for Phones, a web-app optimised for smart phones, commissioned by Iota Institute in 2018. The book features an introduction by Johanna Drucker, and a poetic afterword by Vahni Capildeo and contains new material from me, some of which will be added to the web-app over the course of 2021.

There’s also a Twitterbot companion to the project, posting randomly-generated, poetic, yet plausible weather observations every six hours @apictureofwind.

The best way to purchase This is a Picture of Wind is direct from the publisher, Longbarrow Press. On the Longbarrow website you can also view a series of short videos featuring excerpts of the work.

A General History of the Air

In the blur that was March 2020 the Ottawa-based above/ground press published some new work from me in a single-poem pamphlet called A General History of the Air. The launch was meant to coincide with my appearance at the 10th annual VERSeFest in Ottawa, March 24-29, 2020. Though the festival has been postponed due to Covid 19, the chapbook is available for order online (details below).

the first page of A General History of the Air — The first page of A General History of the Air, J. R. Carpenter, 2020

The cover image and all of the text comes from a book called The General History of the Air, Designed and Begun by the Honourable Robert Boyle Esq., Printed for Awnsham and John Churchill, at the Black Swan in Pater-noster-Row, near Amen-Corner, June 29, 1692. I consulted a first edition held at the British Library in London, UK, Shelfmark 1651/1033.

The General History of the Air, Robert Boyle, 1692.

After some months at sea, my author copies have now arrived in the UK and are available for order via PayPal paypal.me/jrcarp. £8 for shipping within the UK, £10 for elsewhere in Europe. These prices include postage, packaging, and PayPal fees. North Americans would do better to order directly from the publisher.

A New Year of Wind

For the whole of 2018 I posted a new poem at the start of every month to my web-based work, This is a Picture of Wind, a weather poem for phones. These monthly poems were based on weather observations made two centuries ago by Luke Howard. A Quaker, chemist, and amateur meteorologist, Howard is perhaps best known as the author of the essay On the Modifications of Clouds, in which, he gave the clouds the Latin names we still use today. Hendecasyllabic fragments of that essay made their way into my my web-based work The Gathering Cloud. For This is a Picture of Wind, I consulted a later volume by Howard: Barometrographia: twenty years’ variation of the barometer in the climate of Britain, exhibited in autographic curves, with the attendant winds and weather, and copious notes. This large, beautifully printed folio was published in London in 1847. It can be found in the British Library at Shelfmark Tab.817.a.

Detail from Luke Howard, Barometrographia, 1847

Some readers may have noticed as the year progressed, that lurking below these new posts was a second row containing a full year of poems. Those poems were written first. The form the core impetus for the piece. They were written in response to the conveyor-belt of storms which battered southwestern England in 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall at Dawlish, near where I live in Devon. For 2019 I’ve moved that year of poems up to the top row for greater visibility.

This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter

Initial research for This is a Picture of Wind was made possible with the support of the Dot Award for Digital Literature. The finished work was one of three web-based works by Canadian women commissioned for #IOTADATA by IOTA Institute in 2017 with the support of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. In December 2018 IOTA released a free e-publication about the #IOTADATA project containing an introduction by David Clark, a three-way interview between the artists, and an essay about each artist’s work. I am deeply indebted to IOTA curator Mireille Bourgeois for commissioning this work in the first place and all the more so for convincing Johanna Drucker to write about it.

By choosing a calendar grid to organize the presentation of observations in This is a Picture of Wind, Carpenter puts the dialogue between the phenomenal world and its connection to human frameworks of perception into immediate, graphical view […] the wind cannot be caught in calendar frameworks any more than the waters of the sea are held in a net. The wind rushes through the rational structure, even as it leaves behind, in this case, a residue of poetic notes, observations formulated in relation to fleeting sensations of the volatile atmosphere.

~ Johanna Drucker, DYNAMIC POETICS: JR CARPENTER’S THIS IS A PICTURE OF WIND

Drucker’s full essay is available for free download. It begins on page 20 of this PDF.

In 2018 This is a Picture of Wind won the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People’s Choice Award 2018 and was shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Electronic Literature 2018.

In 2019 I will be presenting the work at Land Lines: British Nature Writing, 1789-2014.

Twitter users can follow a remix of the work as it unfolds year-round. Fragments of text from the project are blown about but a Twitter bot posting variable poetics of wind into new configurations every six hours through this account: @apictureofwind

Upcoming Events in Montreal

I’m heading Montreal next week for the first time in 2.5 years. I’m doing two public events: a performance lecture at the HTMlles Festival hosted by feminist artist-run centre Studio XX, and a book launch at L’Euguélionne, a feminist bookstore. I look forward to seeing friends old and new. For more details about both events, read on…

On Thursday 1 November 4-5:30 at OBORO (4001 Berri, 2nd floor), twenty-one years after participating in the first HTMlles Festival, I am delighted to return for this 13th edition. Beyond the # — Failures and Becomings looks at the role of digital technologies in this new space of expression, the reclaiming of voice, as well as obstacles and ways to successfully move forward.

I will present a performance/lecture called Things Rarely Turn Out the Way I Intend Them To. Social media has exponentially expanded the audience for web-based art and writing, but the hashtag operates largely within proprietary zones of the internet governed by neoliberal corporations. What does it mean to write into spaces we don’t own? When does success constitute a failure? Will the new ever get old? Things Rarely Turn Out the Way I Intend Them To reflects with humour on failures and becomings engendered by women web artists and writers over the past quarter of a century or so. It prompts us to think about how far we’ve come, to figure out how far we have yet to go.

The festival launch event will take place immediately after my event at Studio XX, just across the hall. Full Festival Calendar.

An Ocean of Static || J. R. Carpenter, Penned in the Margins, 2018

Friday 9 November at 18:30 will mark the North American launch of my debut poetry collection An Ocean of Static (Penned in the Margins 2018). This event will take place at L’Euguélionne, a feminist bookstore at 1426 Beaudry, Montreal, Quebec H2L 3E5. I will be joined by Montréal poet, Deanna Radford. Books will be available for purchase at the event.

An Ocean of Static was highly commended for the Forward Prize 2018. An excerpt from the book has been published in The Forward Book of Poetry 2019 (Fabre & Fabre). More info on that here. For more information about the book itself, to read reviews, to download a sample, or to order online, visit the publisher’s website.

a ria – a poem for National Poetry Day

This autumn I’m writer-in-residence at Greenway, the former holiday home of Agatha Christie, now run by the National Trust. Greenway is situated high on a hill overlooking the River Dart near Dartmouth in Devon. As part of my residency, for National Poetry Day, Thursday 4 October 2018, I Tweeted fragments of writing about the River Dart near Greenway. The thread grew throughout the day to form a poem. Here it is in its entirety:

a ria

a rise
a river runs
green in the shadow
of a steep wooded bank

deep roots tangle in dense strata
the rucked sheets of the Dartmouth beds
the ancient stone of the Lower Devonian
a dark strip between water and leaf

slate slants askance at the falling tide
mist eats green leaves alive
cloud shadows the far shore
counterfeits the coast

the river rolls out its yardage
bolts of shot silk shiver silver
pocked pewter
puckering grey

rain like we haven’t seen for some time
stains the parched fields green
pummelled plums fall
purple eggs from the sky

a ria || a poem for National Poetry Day written as writer-in-residence at Greenway

Upcoming activities:

Join me at Greenway on Saturday 13 October 2-4 PM for an informal discussion on Writing and Weather. Bring along a short piece of writing by you or your favourite author to share with the group. Please also bring proof of booking with you. Booking info.

On 15 November I will be leading a creative writing workshop at Greenway on Writing and Time. The aim of the workshop is to provide writers at all levels with strategies for getting started, getting going, and getting inspired, which can then be used for future writing projects. Open to writers at all levels. Booking info.

This residency is co-sponsored by Literature Works and the National Trust. For more information about upcoming activities happening at Greenway as part of this residency please visit Literature Works.

An Ocean of Static Highly Commended by the Forward Prizes 2018

I’m thrilled to share the news that my debut poetry collection, An Ocean of Static, has been Highly Commended by the Forward Prize 2018. Congratulations to all the other Highly Commended poets for their fine works.

Many thanks to my wonderful publishers Penned in the Margins for supporting this book. The book launch was held at the British Library in London in April 2018, thanks to the Eccles Centre for American Studies. An Ocean of Static has been presented at Cuirt International Festival of Literature and Edinburgh International Book Festival. It has received excellent reviews. Ian McMillan from Radio 3’s The Verb called it: “A marvellous firework of a book … a Moby Dick and Ancient Mariner for our times.”

An excerpt of one of the poems in the collection has been published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2019, which is now available for purchase. This poem started off as a digital text called, Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl. This work has been performed at Le Cube in Paris, The British Library in London, The Club at The Banff Centre, The March Hare in Newfoundland, and many smaller venues. A print iteration of this poem was first published in Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review, in May 2014. Many thanks to all those who helped Owl and Girl along on their long voyage. I’m especially thrilled to see traces of JavaScript grace the pages of the Forward Book of Poetry 2019.

For more information about An Ocean of Static, check out this interview I did with Penned in the Margins in July 2018: J.R. Carpenter talks to Elle Eccles about translation, migration, and variance in her newest poetry collection An Ocean of Static

Upcoming Talks – February 2018

I’m hitting the road next week, to talk archaeologies of experimental wind weather writing and unconventionalities of weird web art design to students, faculty, and anyone who turns up really, at Epsom, Southampton, and Winchester school of Art.

On Monday 5 February 12:30-13:30 I’ll be speaking to Graphic Design students, faculty, and members of the public at the University for the Creative Arts in Epsom. I think the event poster gives fair warning of my highly eccentric approach to web ‘design’. I hope a lively discussion of how very best not to do things ensues.

UCA Epsom || J. R. Carpenter, 5 February 2018

On Thursday 8 February I’ll head south to Southampton to give a reading at the excellent ENTROPICS experimental poetry series. In advance of the reading, Sarah Hayden asked me a few interview questions. My answers, along with interviews with past ENTROPICS poets are online here. I am deeply indebted to the organizers for the fabulous event poster, below. The reading will take place at 18:30–21:00 at Mettricks Old Town Cafe, 117 High St, Southampton SO14 2AA, UK. All are welcome.

ENTROPICS || J. R. Carpenter, 8 February 2018

And then onward on Friday 9 February to talk about my new web-based work This is a Picture of Wind at the Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) Research Group at Winchester School of Art as part of their Talking Heads Series. The event will take place at Winchester School of Art, Lecture Theatre A, 15:00-17:00. It’s free, and open to the public. For more information, see the event page Writing a Picture of Wind. Many thanks to AMT director Jussi Parikka for putting the Southampton-Winchester bit of the tour together.

Touring Newfoundland with The March Hare

As West Country folks have done for centuries, I’m preparing to depart from balmy Plymouth for blustery Newfoundland for a week on the road with The March Hare, Atlantic Canada’s largest and certainly most eclectic poetry festival, in which:

Traditional stories alternate with contemporary poems, emerging writers appear alongside established writers, local performers share the stage with performers from all over the world, and all of them are accorded the same courtesy. While long-term achievement may be given the nod of respect in the form of an extra two or three minutes at the podium, the time allotments are tight and more or less equal. There are no stars at the March Hare.

I’ve been timing various pieces and it turns out everything I’ve ever written can be read aloud in eight minutes and thirty seconds. I’ll be reading a mix of new and old work, including Air Holes, Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, and Once Upon a Tide, a print iteration of which will appear in Arc Poetry Magazine this month.

Mostly I’m just looking forward to listening, meeting new people, and getting to see more of this wonderfully wild island.

Here are my dates:

Tuesday, March 7th, 8:00
Chidley’s Place, Renews

Wednesday, March 8th, 8:00
St. Patrick’s Parish Hall, Tilting, Fogo Island

Thursday, March 9th, 7:30
Gander Hotel, Gander

Friday, March 10th, 8:00
Swirsky’s, Corner Brook

The full program is online here: http://themarchhare.ca/2017-programme/

The Gathering Cloud Wins The New Media Writing Prize 2016

My recent hybrid print- and web-based work The Gathering Cloud won the Main Prize at the New Media Writing Prize 2016. Winners were announced at the New Media Writing Prize Award Event, which took place at Bournemouth University 18 January 2017. The award, now in its seventh year, saw entries from around the world from across a variety of different styles and media including poetry, non-fiction, digital novels, web-based works, and trans-media pieces.

The judges admired Carpenter’s grasp of digital and non-digital elements, and found her piece, about the relationship between the digital and the natural, beautiful and engaging.
The Literary Platform

Research for The Gathering Cloud began in 2015 when I submitted a proposal to the inaugural Dot Award for Digital Literature, sponsored by if:book. I proposed to create a new web-based work in response to the storms which battered South West England in early 2014, resulting in catastrophic flooding in Somerset and the destruction of the seawall and rail line at Dawlish. Reading the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by how difficult it is to evoke through the materiality of language a force such as wind which we can only see indirectly through its affect. I began to explore weather, and wind in particular, in all its written forms.

Winning the Dot Award enabled me to explore the intertwined topics of language, weather, and climate change in a freer and more open-ended way that I might otherwise have been able to. I looked through mountains of private weather diaries held at the Met Office Library and Archive in Exeter. One thing I figured out pretty early one is that it’s hard to study only one kind of weather. On one single page of a weather diary it is possible to see noted thunder, lightening, lilacs, a meteor, and hyacinths in full flower.

Detail of a private weather diary held at the Met Office Archive in Exeter

During the first week of August 2016 I was a principal performer in the South West Poetry Tour, along with Steven Fowler, Camila Nelson, John Hall, Mattie Spence, and Anabel Banks. Each night we performed new works written in collaboration. I wanted to use this as an opportunity to generate new writing on weather. In my collaboration with John Hall (video) I used classical texts on weather as raw material, and in my collaboration with Anabel Banks (video), we worked with two texts on clouds. She drew upon Gavin Pretor-Pinney, The Cloudspotter’s Guide, written in 2007, and I used Luke Howard’s classic Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, written in 1803. Howard was the first to standardise the names of clouds that we still use today. Anabel added one tricky constraint to our collaboration, that we write in hendecasyllabic — eleven syllable lines.

In September 2016 I was commissioned by NEoN Digital Arts Festival in Dundee to create a new web-based work in response to the theme “The Spaces We’re In”.

Physical urban space and virtual information space are inseparably intertwined. How does being digital change our sense of our spatial surroundings? Can we play in or animate the hybrid or glitched spaces in-between? Is there negative space in cyberspace? […] NEoN will interrogate the materials that make up our built environment – from air and glass, to cardboard and concrete to circuits and steel – and the designed devices we use to navigate it. As buildings and bridges seem to emerge readymade from the screen to real space, NEoN’s programme will help us figure out how ‘the digital’ helps us through the transition, or at least helps us to understand and critique it.
NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2016

When the festival’s curators told me about the theme I knew immediately that I wanted to call attention to the environmental impact of so-called ‘cloud’ storage. I’ve thought a lot about the complex relationship between biological and digital memory in previous work. The scale of the digital cloud is too vast to think about in terms of the body. I had to think bigger, so I turned to the clouds in the sky.

I decided to continue to build upon the structure of Luke Howard’s Essay on the Modifications of Clouds, to incorporate more recent texts on cloud storage and media theory, and to stick with the hendecasyllabic constraint. The resulting work, The Gathering Cloud launched to a crowd of 350 people at a Pecha Kucha Night in Dundee on 8 November 2016, the night of the US elections. I hadn’t intended for the title to wind up sounding quite so ominous, but I do think that now more than ever we need to find ways of talking about the enormity of climate change in human terms that we can understand and act upon.

Many thanks to everyone at the Informatics Lab at the Met Office, all the performers on the South West Poetry Tour, the curators and staff at NEoN Digital Arts, and everyone involved with the Dot Award and the New Media Writing Prize, with special thanks to Michael Saunby, Kay Lovelace, Chirs Meade, and Jerome Fletcher.

Print iteration of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl published in Fourteen Hills

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl (2013) has been published in print Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review, 20.2. The web iteration of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl was first presented in “Avenues of Access: An Exhibit & Online Archive of New ‘Born Digital’ Literature”, curated by Dene Grigar & Kathi Inman Berens, at the Modern Languages Association (MLA) Convention in Boston, MA, USA, in January 2013.

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl is a work of fiction. Any resemblances to actual events, locals, persons or texts are entirely intentional. This computer-generated narrative conflates and confabulates characters, facts, and forms from accounts of voyages into unknown seas undertaken over the past 2340 years. This ever-shifting text is composed of fragments of stories of fanciful, fluid, and quite possibly fictional floating places described or imagined in such diverse works as Tacitus, Agricola (97-98), Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries (1589–1600), and Eugene Field, Wynken, Blynken and Nod (1889). The title characters Owl and Girl are borrowed from Edward Leer’s Victorian nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussy-Cat (1871). In my version, the passive Pussy-cat has been replaced with a Girl most serious, most adventurous, most determined.

Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl || J. R. Carpenter

Girl and her lazy friend Owl set out, set sail, sail away toward a strange sea in a boat, craft, raft of pea-, bottle-, lima-bean- or similar shade of green. The cartographic collage they voyage through is an assemblage of fluid floating places – discontinuous surfaces pitted with points of departure, escape routes, lines of flight. Five horizontally scrolling texts annotate this mythical, implausible, impossible voyage toward seas unknown, the northern lights, the fountain of youth.

Following the launch of the web-based iteration of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, I pillaged the JavaScript-generated narrative and four of the horizontally scrolling lines of text to create a script for live performance, which has since been performed during In(ter)ventions: Literary Practice at the Edge at The Banff Centre, Banff, Canada, February 2013, and ELO 2013: Chercher le texte, Le Cube, Paris, France, 26 September 2013. The piece published in Fourteen Hills: The San Francisco State University Review, 20.2 is based on this script.

This print text comprises two distinct sections: narrative and notes. The opening ‘narrative’ section undermines the authority of an authorial voice by interrupting the linear narrative flow of its sentences with incoherence, indecision, vagaries, possibilities, and multiplicities by inserting some but not all of the variables contained in the JavaScript variable strings. For example, the first sentence of the ‘narrative’ section:

An owl and a girl most [adventurous’, ‘curious’, ‘studious’] [‘set out’, ‘set sail’, ‘sailed away’] in a [bottle-green’, ‘beetle-green’, ‘pea-green’] [‘boat’, ‘sieve’, ‘skiff’, ‘vessel’]; a [‘beautiful’, ‘ship shape’, ‘sea worthy’] [‘craft’, ‘raft’, ‘wooden shoe’], certainly, though a [‘good deal’, ‘wee bit’, ‘tad’] too [‘small’, ‘high in the stern’] to suit the two of them.

In the ‘notes’ section, fragments from the horizontally scrolling texts have been heterodyned, or forced together, into one long text. On the page, the different lines of Girl’s notes remain differentiated by indentation, which, alas, is not easily representable in blog formatting. You’ll just have to take my word for it. By my word, of course, I mean the girl’s.

For more information on Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl, take a look at Poetry Connection: Link Up with Canadian Poetry, an initiative of Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate Fred Wah (2013) aimed at making experimental writing practices accessible to a wide audience through the distribution of YouTube video recordings of readings and PDFs containing discussion topics, writing ideas, and other pedagogical aids. Here is a video description and performance of Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl (YouTube). And here are discussion topics and writing ideas based on Notes on the Voyage of Owl and Girl (PDF).