atmospheric 1.1: an editors’ note, a beginning (3/19/24)

note-within-note: Anthony wrote the following on our collective behalf while Jo put our website together. enjoy! —atmospheric

I once tweeted that writers will say things like the syntax of their movements, the grammar of tree branches, the alphabet of clouds. The self-parody came from the real pleasure I take in writing that assigns its own attributes to the natural world, and then weaves the world back into itself as it does. A couple of years later I joked that for several years I’d been leading people to believe I'd been writing a stream-of-consciousness novel only for it to be hundreds of pages of descriptions of clouds. I thought like any verbal ephemera the idea would soon evaporate, but it lingered with me—I wanted to write that book—until a few months later I asked in that same online space whether anyone wanted to collaborate to write just such a book. The responses, in number, quality, and generosity, exceeded any expectation I had had several times over. I had no grasp of how to tell so many people I couldn’t write a book with them in the same spirit of kindness and community with which they had responded to my query. A smart and energetic writer named Joely Fitch, who I had only just begun to interact with, reached out with both the perfect idea about what to do with so many eager voices and an enthusiasm equal to the task.

The initial concept for atmospheric quarterly then formed out of a desire to amass a literature of clouds, and though that desire provided a catalyst, it also immediately raised questions about what such a literature would be. What it would be about appears clear and obvious at first, and yet few would list clarity among a cloud’s attributes. In the theater production of abstract concepts (we’re talking off off broadway), clarity and cloudiness always play opposite each other. Knowing a cloud’s contents doesn’t draw its shape. What is the form, what are the forms a literature of the clouds will take?

Different classification systems identify between four and ten basic cloud types, but rarer formations and, from those more and less common clouds, combinations of formations can send those numbers soaring into the hundreds, and that’s before you add fog, smog, dust storms, dust devils, tornadoes, and countless other meteorological phenomena. Look away from a cloud and it will look different by the time you look back, never remaining a thing it had never remained. The longest the duration of a cloud’s shape could be described as is momentary. Clouds are landscapes whose geographies never settle. Just as a cloud never allows itself to be thought of in terms of permanent boundaries, moving its hand away in the moment we start to trace its fingers, and similar to the tree branches Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò climbs up into and never comes down from again (not to mention roots, seeds, pollen), weather doesn’t read the property lines or state borders drawn on maps.

The most prosaic descriptions of clouds can’t help but hold some poetry. A description of clouds doesn’t read as fiction or nonfiction. atmospheric quarterly arises from a craving for writing that reads everything other than the borders drawn on literary maps, from an excitement about literature that refuse its own calcification. The discerning reader might feel they can designate pieces in this magazine as one genre or another, and undoubtedly that is true; I don’t want to throw out the numberless things literature already does, nor the techniques it has used to do them, but I want to insist literature continues to realize more capabilities for itself

Multiple pieces in this issue confront and play with the definition of literature. Through video poetry Raye Hendrix heartbreakingly portrays the interiority of a person seeking connection as they attempt, across distance, to talk about the weather. Amie Souza Reilly describes personal and environmental loss in an art installation translated for a digital space. Andy Sia’s piece disputes and expands the ways sound, space, type, and diction create meaning.

The review is a genre that never accepts the writer’s solitary genius. Its very form insists on literature’s porousness, demonstrating that, not only its own creation, but writing generally is another form of reading, that writing is the continuation of reading by other means. The reviews here go beyond that. S.M. Badawi explores the poetic and theological richness of Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies. Alexander Pyles recommends the prose poems set in the fictional future (or are they?) of Jenny Irish’s Hatch. Mahrukh Aamir and Rebecca Hussey give thoughtful and engaging readings to books inventing new forms, Aamir to Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries and Hussey to Sofia Samatar and Kate Zambreno’s Tone, while also describing the overlap between the texts and their lives. Further collaborations happen in editor Joely Fitch’s conversation with Stephanie Burt and mine with Anton Hur.

Stephanie Burt and S.M Badawi also both provide achingly beautiful poetry about experiences in the natural world. As do Jessica Coles, Cameron McLeod Martin, Michael McGriff, Emmy Newman, Róisín Ní Neachtain, Anna Laura Reeve, and Addie Tsai, playing with poetry’s literal shape while also grappling with the way the world has shaped them. Tom Snarsky and Lauren Theresa make me see how much can be expressed in how few words. john compton paints the overlapping weather systems between people, Adrian Dallas Frandle those of museums and the veil between worlds. Brian Blanchfield makes a poem out of a lifetime of reading, everything from the first troubadour to the sign for the gay bar being replaced by a barbecue.

Susana Villalba and Robin Myers, as poet and translator, grow a bilingual edition of a tree that reaches down toward the dogs in the dirt and up toward the night’s stars. Elisheva Fox faces what happens when the places one has called home commit unspeakable violence. At eighty years old, DeeAnna Brady-Leader publishes a first poem that leaves me excited for everything she will yet create.

J. Mae Barizo, Ben Kline, and Di Jayawickrema practice the art of the poet’s sentence. Teaching me about longing and the color blue, Isabella Streffen designs a cyanometer. Julie Carr traces the impossibilities of the infinite and the infinite of impossibility in an entirely new form.

The sky’s blue is outside your door and behind it. It is in your lungs and your guts. The sun rises on the evil and the good. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. Climate change is where you are now, and its change hasn’t finished. In her book The Second Body Daisy Hildyard writes, “Nobody in the world can be completely insulated from the atmosphere; the atmosphere can be influenced by any living body.” A promise: you will not be able to insulate yourself from these writers’ work once you start reading, that atmospheric quarterly, without becoming susceptible to its fads, will remain open to the world, pliant to its weather.

∞

At this magazine’s inception, the state of Israel is several months into an active campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing against the people of Gaza. As its editors have done as individuals from the beginning of the ceasefire movement, we add this magazine’s platform to the many voices calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Further, atmospheric quarterly commits to the Palestinian-led call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), including a commitment to adhere to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and its guidelines. The BDS National Committee (BNC), including PACBI, is committed to freedom of expression and as such rejects, on principle, boycotts of individuals based on their opinion or identity (such as citizenship, race, gender, or religion). Learn more at bdsmovement.net/pacbi.