After all, what is not weather?
Alice Oswald—Oxford University Professor of Poetry and author of Memorial and Falling Awake, among other books of poems—reads from and discusses Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology, which she co-edited with Paul Keegan and which features contributions ranging from Homer’s winds and Ovid’s flood to Frank O’Hara’s sun and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Song for a Rainy Season.”
“Our ruling idea was to have no ideas: to dispense with writing ‘about’ weather, writing that knows what it’s talking about,” Oswald and Keegan wrote in their preface to the anthology. “Instead, we have preferred writing that is ‘like’ weather, that has the sovereignty of sheer event. As if the weather were to write itself. To concentrate on something as erratic as the weather has an immediate and disturbing effect on the imagination.”