Cabinet of Curiosities

The following are twenty weathergrams I created for “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a public art project spearheaded by Angie Hinojos. Weathergrams are strips of biodegradable paper tied with string, decorated with a handwritten poetic text. They are intended to be hung outdoors to be read quickly and weathered by nature over time. I first published these poems over a period of about fifteen years, and each one was included in one of my trifolds from 2013 to 2024. In April of 2025, I created eighty of these weathergrams (four copies of each poem), in anticipation of Angie’s “Cabinet of Curiosities” public art giveaway on the Seattle waterfront on 20 and 21 June 2025, for which I was grateful to receive 4Culture grant funding. Here I include a photo of each weathergram, followed by a few photos showing some of my creative steps.

As I’ve written on my “Twelve Weathergrams” page, weathergrams were invented by Lloyd J. Reynolds, a master calligrapher at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, who published a book titled Weathergrams in 1972. Reynolds said that weathergrams are “poems of about ten words or less,” and that they are “generally seasonal.” These poems are calligraphed onto strips of biodegradable paper, often grocery bag paper, with a string added so they can be tied onto something for display in public places. He said they should be “hung on bushes or trees in gardens or along mountain trails” for “three months or longer,” where they can “weather & wither like old leaves.”

For the “Cabinet of Curiosities” project, these poems are to be given away to curious passers-by on the Seattle waterfront, where twenty laminated copies of my “Miniature Poems” are also slated to be given away, with magnifying glasses.