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.
J. R. Carpenter, This is a Picture of Wind. Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2020
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.
J. R. CArpenter, This is a Picture of Wind. Sheffield: Longbarrow Press, 2020
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.
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.
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
This is a Picture of Wind expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter 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 in Devon. Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.
The is a Picture of Wind || J. R. Carpenter
This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA:DATA. It was created in part with the support of the Dot Award for Digital Literature. The work is designed to be read on phones but it also works on computers. It calls on live wind data, so it will look different every time you view it. A new text will be added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker will be published by the IOTA Institute in the autumn of 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.
I’m thrilled to announce the launch of a new, web-based work called This is a Picture of Wind. This work expands upon a series of short texts written in response to the winter 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 in Devon. Following the news in the months after these storms, I was struck by the paradox presented by attempts 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 in all its written forms.
Part poetic almanac, part private weather diary, and part live wind report for the South West of England, this work attempts to call attention to climate change by picturing through variations in language the disturbances and sudden absences left in the wake of wind.
This is a Picture of Wind || J. R. CarpenterThis work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text will be added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker will be published in March 2018.
Many thanks to Mireille Bourgeois, Chris Meade, Kay Lovelace, Johanna Drucker, Michael Saunby, Peter Dickinson, and Jerome Fletcher for walking into the wind with me.
