This is a Picture of Wind: A Weather Poem for Phones
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. 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 work is designed to be read on phones. It calls on live wind data. A new text was added for each month of 2018. A text about this work written by Johanna Drucker was published in December 2018.
This is a Picture of Wind was commissioned by IOTA: DATA, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Initial research for this project was made possible by a Dot Award for Digital Literature, from if:book and the New Media Writing Prize.
Winner of the Opening Up Digital Fiction Competition People's Choice Award 2018
Shortlisted for the Robert Coover Award for a Work of Digital Literature 2018
Shortlisted for the New Media Writing Prize 2018
(Source: Author's Description)
January.
Mists make dangerous travel. The air loaded with freezing particles. Attached to fixed objects. A blade of grass. Some garden shrubs. Spreading tufts of crystals. Gigantic specimens of snow-white coral. An elegant fringe. The rime falls. Transparent. In heaps beneath the trees.
February.
It’s still raining. It has always rained. We are silt dwellers, tide chasers, puddles, floods, mud. The river runs brown topsoil down and out to sea. From a fir erupts a murmur of starlings. By fir I also mean fur. A pelt of needles, hackles raised. Gale force ten at the river mouth. The scale goes up to twelve. After that the sky breaks. The fir comes down and takes two eucalyptus with it.
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