AROUND MOUNTAINS

Around Mountains is a project comprised of photographs taken during circumambulations of mountains that have been the subjects of poems, with the aim of lyrically documenting landscapes while placing photography and poetry in conversation. The first, foundational part takes as its subject Mount Rainier, where I worked as a park ranger for two years after college and where I started my life as a poet. I hiked the 93-mile Wonderland Trail around the mountain in six days and took six images each day. Marianne Moore wrote a great poem about Rainier, called “An Octopus,” which contains the line: “Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!”

I hope to eventually document trips around Scafell Pike (which Dorothy Wordsworth wrote about ascending in 1818), Mont Blanc (subject of Percy Bysshe Shelley's eponymous ode), Mount Fuji (which Kusano Shinpei came back to time and time again), Jing Ting Mountain (subject of more than a thousand poems), and elsewhere.

SELECTED PHOTOGRAPHS TAKEN AROUND MOUNT RAINIER DURING A COUNTERCLOCKWISE HIKE OF THE WONDERLAND TRAIL