We are very happy to announce a collaboration with London Review of Books to publish our first poetry commission, with Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota Nation).

Layli Long Soldier was invited by the Foundation to create a poem about the weather, as a part of the World Weather Network. Long Soldier’s companion series Night Poems and Day Poems reflect on the reciprocal relationship we humans have with the changing climate around us. The poems are published today on the London Review of Books YouTube channel on the autumn equinox in northern hemisphere—the moment when the days become shorter than the nights. In this collaboration, Long Soldier reads her poems alongside her rising and falling words mapping the move between day and night, and light and shadow.

Writing was an important part of both Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson’s artistic practices: Holt’s first artworks were concrete poems, and Smithson’s earliest writings included poetry. Holt/Smithson Foundation develops the creative legacies of Holt and Smithson, and artist’s writings are an important part of our programs.

Long Soldier, like our Foundation, is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She holds a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, an MFA from Bard College, and is a mentor in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Her published works include Chromosomory (Q Ave Press, 2010) and Whereas (Graywolf, 2017),and her poems have appeared in  POETRY Magazine, The New York Times, The American Poet, The American Reader, The Kenyon Review, BOMB and elsewhere. Long Soldier is the recipient of an NACF National Artist Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award. She has also received the 2018 PEN/Jean Stein Award, the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award, a 2021 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and the 2021 Michael Murphy Memorial Poetry Prize in the UK. This year her sculpture Day Poem: Sun Mirrors is on show at Tinworks Art in Bozeman, Montana.

Long Soldier’s commission is part of the World Weather Network, a constellation of twenty-eight “weather stations” located across the world in oceans, deserts, mountains, farmland, rainforests, observatories, lighthouses, and cities. In this yearlong project artists and writers share ‘weather reports’ in the form of observations, stories, images, and imaginings about their local weather and our shared climate, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints.