“I take my cue from Mercedes Jelinek’s black-and-white photographs. They depict, among other things, weathered houses in Spruce Pine, North Carolina; the weathered hands of craftspeople or “makers”; rescued raptors; terracotta roofs in Italy; hardscrabble rodeo scenes; horses in windswept Iceland. They’re wonderful pictures. The theme I’ve been turning over in my mind in relation to these photographs is “Weathering.”
Climate change means we’re all hyper-aware of weather all the time. Here in New England, where the poems were written and the pages were printed, the seasonal changes are particularly insistent, and cherished by us locals. “Would you see your own mind, look at the sky,” Thoreau writes in his Journal. “Would you know your own moods, be weather-wise.”
But Mercedes’ photographs also capture other kinds of weathering: what time does to a wooden door. What time does to a craftsman’s hands. How we weather the world the way we weather a storm. There is a special beauty in the results of weathering. Time takes away, but it also provides. “In architecture, the gradual destruction of buildings by nature in time is weathering,” Mohsen Mostafavi and David Leatherbarrow write in On Weathering, their book about weathering in architecture. “In the mathematics of the environment weathering is a power of subtraction, a minus, under the sign of which newly finished corners, surfaces, and colors are ‘taken away’ by rain, wind, and sun. But is weathering only subtraction, can it not also add and enhance?”
Most of the poems in this book are in a 5 x 5 format. Each poem is five lines long; each line has roughly five beats, sometimes yielding to iambic pentameter. Very rectangular, almost square, my 5 x 5s constitute a frame in which, as in a photograph, I hold myself responsible for everything within the frame, with particular attention to what’s going on around the edges. I try to “point” these poems as I would a camera, eager to see what I catch in my viewfinder. I take what the day gives, as though taking a photograph. My great-uncle Josef Albers is an influence, his concentric squares and his lifelong passion for photography. There are other influences here: something of Randall Jarrell’s five-line “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner”; something of Wallace Stevens’s sequences using a five-line stanza, in touch with changes in climate and the weather; something of Thoreau’s attentiveness to his surroundings, the local.
Caption and illustration are two names for a certain imbalance between word and image. If the image dominates, the words constitute a caption; if the words are in charge, the image is an illustration. On my side, I don’t want to do captions, but rather a set of texts in dialog with Mercedes’s photographs. If the book works, the action should go both ways, with the photographs finding new things in the text and vice versa.
The process enacted in these pages reflects a longer dialogue, over several years, that I’ve had with Mercedes about word and image. Together with the master photographer Neal Rantoul, Mercedes and I have co-taught courses, on photography and writing, at the Penland School of Craft, in the mountains above Asheville, North Carolina. During those collaborations, Mercedes has tried to teach me how to be a better photographer while I have worked with her on her writing. On one of our sessions at Penland, we worked side by side with the Wolfes and their nineteenth-century printing presses, weathered survivors of a past era. From that chance adjacency comes this book.
And yet, more than chance brought the four of us together. We are all drawn to artisanal practices—the mark of the hand—in our respective crafts. We all share a sense that artists and craftspeople of the past, working in black-and-white photography or hand-powered letterpresses, knew things worth knowing and worth preserving. They labored in the face of rampant industrialization, commodification, and dehumanization. Our own book entered its final stages during the spring and summer of 2020, amid a devastating pandemic and a national awakening about racial disparity and pervasive injustice. At this unsettled moment, there is talk of hopeful societal change, along with ongoing fears of the relentless pace of climate change. We have weathered so much in this weathered world. Can we weather these things, too?”
