IT'S POSTCARD POEM TIME AGAIN! COME PLAY!

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I have a stack of postcards that have been following me around for several weeks now. Since May, actually, when I agreed (with myself) to draw something on blank cards. Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson was doing a prompt a day event called "Big Draw" so I sort of followed that.

I am no artist. I remember Mr. Brown's Art Class in Junior High, how I'd watch enviously as one or other of my classmates would produce something gorgeous. A tree that looked like a tree. A mountain scene. A familiar street with houses that looked right (I must have been daydreaming when he discussed perspective.) Something abstract with fabulous colours. Watercolours that didn't run into each other. 

Writing classes, however, were different. Oh, they weren't just writing classes. "Compostion" was lumped in with English classes which were divided, in the earlier grades at least, into English Grammar and English Literature. I enjoyed both, particularly when we got to "write" something and even more particularly when we were studying poetry. In Grade 12 I actually had my father for English 91, as it was called then. It was the only A I got that year. (He made a point of assigning all the marking in that class to another teacher so he couldn't be accused of bias.)

So, back to postcards. It's almost time for August Postcard Poeming again! I've been doing this every summer since 2007. And this year, for the first time ever, I'm sending all orginals, as in both sides by me!

I still don't "get" perspective and I'm not sure Mr. Brown would approve of this hodgepodge of stuff, but by golly I had fun! And that's the main thing the Postcard Poem Fest is about; getting your inner-editor off your back and going for it.

The idea is to dash off a poem directly onto the card. It took me several years of the fest before I was actually able to do this so if you have to write out a first draft on a notepad who am I to tell you not to? You write a poem a day during the month of August—once you've got your list of 32 names including your own, feel free to start. Some days, to be honest, I don't get to it. Other days I might write two or three.

This year's fest is dedicated to the memories of Beat poets Michael McClure and Diane di Prima, both of whom died in 2020. In one of the first years di Prima participated in the postcard fest. Here's the card I got from her. See how she summarizes what the fest is about in just a few lines.

just like the RULES SAID

some of them respond

to a card, or picture

some of them

are a vision in my head

some walk into or out of 

the fog

or someone's dream

                                                                            Diane di Prima

If you want to play along, here are a few relevant links:

The blog for the fest is here: https://popo.cards 

Sign up via Submittable here. The $15 entry fee goes to support Seattle Poetry Lab and all it does for poetry. DEADLINE: JULY 18th, 2021

A workshop handout for the poetry postcard writing exercise by Paul Nelson who started this whole adventure is here: 

And finally, pay attention to postal rates. In Canada it costs 

$1.07 cents to mail a card within Canada (.92 if you buy in bulk) 

$1.30 to send one to the States 

$2.71 International destinations 

Not an inexpensive exercise, but I think of it as a nice dinner out.

If you're not in Canada (and most postcarders are not), PLEASE check with your own post office for your out-of-country rates. 

Here, mostly for my own records, are some of the posts I've made where I talked about postcard poems:

2021  2019 2019 again  2017  2017 again  2016  2014  2007  2007 again

Sisu just came in, saw the cards on the floor, and decided to make a statement. I think he's saying, "Not this again!" 

'Fraid so!

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Incantation

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NaPoWriMo 2021 Day 3

I am so stoked about this challenge!

"Today, I’d like to challenge you to make a “Personal Universal Deck,” and then to write a poem using it. The idea of the “Personal Universal Deck” originated with the poet and playwright Michael McClure, who gave the project of creating such decks to his students in a 1976 lecture at Naropa University. Basically, you will need 50 index cards or small pieces of paper, and on them, you will write 100 words (one on the front and one on the back of each card/paper) using the rules found here."

Would you believe I just happen to have one? Earlier this year I took an online poetry course with Paul Nelson who is linked in the "here" above and one of the things he had us do was to make a Personal Universe Deck! Mine lives in its own box.

True to form for me, I did it my way in that I wrote the two words on the same side of each card, so what I do is shuffle, draw three cards, and use the word that's right-side-up when I put them down. (Unless I'm feeling ornery, in which case I use the word that's up-side-down.)

Tonight I ended up with incense, stab, and woods.

Incantation

If you take a flower      and place it on a fire

heat from the blaze  s p r e a d s

 

       until it finds another      in need of warmth.

 

The night you came back

we burned the incense

 

       I had saved      for such an occasion. 

 

You took a stab at writing a poem

I pretended to like

 

       with its burnt out rhymes      and tumbledown clichés.

 

I put Billy Joel on the stereo

and we danced a little

 

       bottle of red      bottle of white.

 

We carried what was left of us

into the woods in search of solace 

 

       but only one of us      returned.

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POEMS AND POSTCARDS AND NaPoWriMo STARTS AGAIN IN APRIL!

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It's almost April and I have a full month of poetry ahead. Once again I've signed up with the lovely Maureen Thorson at NaPoWriMo. She orchestrates the daily prompts and I'll attempt to do that along with reading and writing poetry around the two online workshops I've signed up for. 

One of those is with Paul E. Nelson and it's the third one he's offered that examines seriality in poetry. The first two were fascinating as I'm sure the next one will be. It's called A Sequence of Energies and we'll be delving into work by Robin Blaser, among others. I believe there are still one or two spaces so should you be interested here's the link.  

The other course is with Susan Andrews Grace and through Oxygen Art Centre in Nelson, B.C. This one is called Reading and Writing Rilke. Rilke is a poet I know next to nothing about save his Letters to a Young Poet so I'm looking forward to this one, too.

Yesterday I picked up the mail for the first time in several days and there were a couple of poetry chapbooks waiting for me. 

Minimize Considered from Finishing Line Press in Kentucky is by Nina Murray. I heard about her through POPO, formerly known as the August Postcard Poem Fest (that I've written about here and here and here and here) when Paul interviewed her as he's done several of us now. (His interview with me is here.) I was so taken with her description of her chapbook I ordered it and it finally arrived and is just as delightful as I thought it would be. Originally from Lviv in the Western Ukraine, Murray works in the U.S. Department of State and has been posted to several different places, including Toronto. Her poems often mention the city in which they are set and I loved finding her in Montreal, a city I lived in for four years back in the seventies that she immediately brought me back to 

smoking a cigar

     down by the Vieux Port

     the carriage horses end their shift

     and we stop to let them pass

     two dusty

     muscled

     gray Percherons

     they break into a trot 

     going home

     strike sparks from the stones

                                (from December)

Nina Murray possesses a fine eye for observation and a deft hand for writing it down. Take the first part of her poem Departures:

I

Boarding a train such a different undertaking

from flying—still free from the technocratic

teleology of gates and chutes,

the platform—mythically two-faced—

tantalizing in its promise of error

of the possibility to choose the wrong side,

board the wrong train,

turn one's back on oneself and depart

in the opposite direction.

Also in the mail was a totally unexpected gift from Richard Osler who I met at the first Patrick Lane workshop I attended at Glenairley on Vancouver Island in 2007. It's a collection of forty-seven postcard poems he wrote last year when Covid-19 was locking us all down and he received an email from California poet Allegra Brucker asking if he wanted to participate in a postcard poem project. (They're everywhere! Truly!) 

His postcards are reproduced, larger than life, and his poems work beautifully with the images. Take, for example, this one which is written on the back of a card depicting

Dürer's Rhinoceros

Not a conjured-up monster.

But covered in armour plates

and chain mail who couldn't say:

monstrous; couldn't say: this

armoured vehicle on four legs and the truth,

stranger, the subject of Dürer's masterpiece,

seen by him in a sketch

not in the flesh, this Indian rhino

brought to Lisbon in 1515

then chained and shackled on the deck

of a ship wrecked on its way to Rome,

the rhino a gift for the Pope. Chained 

and shackled, unable to swim,

it drowned. The carcass saved, some say

and the rough skin stuffed with straw,

taxidermy of the dispossessed,

sent on anyway to Rome and sometime

after lost and forgotten unlike Dürer's

rhino, here, pictured on a postcard, and true,

there be monsters but not this rhino, not

this creature, drowned alone, wrecked.

 I'm drowning a little myself, but in things to read so it's a good drowning. See you in April if not before!

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POSTCARD POEM MONTH 2017 COMES TO AN END

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2017 Postcard Poems Received

plus this one (Ted just came in with today's mail)

2017 marks eleven years I've been writing poems on cards to strangers. Strangers who have become less (and yes, occasionally more) strange because at the same time I'm on the receiving end. The idea is to write directly onto the card, which I now do without giving it much of a thought. While I'm rarely pleased with the resulting blurt, of the thirty-plus cards I write usually one or two have something worth salvaging. 

I keep track of all these cards, both incoming and outgoing so I know for a fact this is the best year yet for receiving cards from almost everyone on the list—twenty-eight—out of thirty (all but two of which were signed) plus seven or eight  "bonus" cards from people I've been exchanging cards with for years now as well as some of the folk I interact with online (of course there's a Facebook group). 

This year I had to scrounge a bit to find cards to send. I knew for a fact I had hundreds—yes, it's come to that—as I have friends who give me cards and I stop in at The Postcard Place on Granville Island in Vancouver every chance I get (that's where I found the box of Nancy Drew covers I used in 2011 and one of my poems wound up in an anthology) 

and I culled scores of them from my late aunt's photo albums after she died (she used to both take photos and buy cards when she traveled, and boy, did she travel). But do you think I could find the damn things when August rolled around? Nope. So I drew one



and collaged a couple

and even painstakingly coloured one, which was a lot of fun but took forever, although as my friend and fellow August PoPo person, Judy Wapp (Group 4), pointed out, I could just mail those ones and let the recipient colour them if they wished.

 I bought half-a-dozen or so new ones from Cartolina, a nifty little paper and stuff store in Nelson, BC and the rest I had lying around. 

No sooner had September rolled around when I found my big stash, including more stamps and last-year's list, so I'm definitely all set for next year. 

If you sign up you might get one of these next year!

Soon, very very soon, there's going to be a tenth anniversary anthology of postcard poems called 56 Days of August. Soon as I get my hands on my copy I'll be posting about it here.

Huge, heartfelt thanks to all you wonderful poets in Group 2 and to those who sent bonus cards and to Paul Nelson and Lana Hechtman Ayers for starting this movement. Once again, you made my August!

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AUGUST IS ALMOST UPON US! ROUND UP YOUR POSTCARDS, GET ON THE POEM LIST

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Hi, y'all! I know, it's been almost a year since I posted anything. I simply didn't feel like it.

But hey, it's nearly August and if you're interested in a month of creativity that involves scribing a poem on a postcard, it's time to sign up.

I've written about this event before. And before that too! This is the eleventh year of the fest. Soon, there'll be a brand new anthology of poems written by some of the participants last year.

Meanwhile, here's one of the made-by-me cards I sent last year.

Deadline to sign up is July 18th. That's next Tuesday. It'll cost you ten bucks (well, more like thirteen for us Canucks), plus the cost of stamps (when mailing from Canada, a card to the US is $1.20 and if anyone on your list is more international than that it's $2.50, with .85 for cards sent within Canada)

Official call is here.

I'll try to be a better blogger. Or at least a more frequent one.

"MASK"

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POSTCARD POEMS, YEAR TEN

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Please note, this year the cut-off for joining is July 17th at midnight. If this sounds like something you'd like to try, sign up now.  

The other day I received an email from Judy Kleinberg who is working on a blog post of tips for poets interested in participating in the 10th Annual August Postcard Fest and wanted to know if I had any suggestions as to how to organize/manage/write postcard poems. To celebrate a decade of this poetry-writing frenzy there's going to be an anthology published next year and Judy's one of the editors. Judy produces wonderful found poems like this one:

The Condition — found poem by Judy Kleinberg

I've been doing this since 2007, the year Paul E. Nelson and Lana Hechtman Ayers, two Seattle-area poets, came up with the idea. For the paltry sum of USD$10 you sign up, get a list of 31 names and addresses, find yourself a bunch of postcards and stamps (mostly US; the majority of participants are from the States), and get writing.

Paul posted a comprehensive list of instructions here. The idea is to write your poem directly onto the card (ie. no practice drafts!). I don't think I was able to do that for the first three or four years, but now I find the process to be exceptionally liberating. Combing through old blog posts to do with August postcards, I found the following: 

For the first few years I found this (writing directly onto the card) to be well nigh impossible. What if I got going and ran out of room? What if I got the line breaks wrong? What if it was too bad to send? What if I thought of a better subject to write about? Well, honestly, after a few years of sketching the poems in a notebook first, I came to realize that I could write directly on the cards and the world would't end. Now I love the process. I love surprising myself with what comes out of my pen. And there's something very satisfying about the physical act of mailing the card to someone — most often a stranger, and it's both amazing and gratifying that many of those strangers have become "friends" through Facebook. Many of us send the requisite number of cards to the assigned people plus several others to folk we've exchanged with in the past. 

It just so happens that I've been busy cleaning up my basement studio so Judy's tip request couldn't have come at a better time. 

As far as organizing goes, I live for file folders. 

I take photos, front and back, of every card I send. Mind you, with changes to hardware over the past decade I would be hard-pressed to find the earlier ones, but I can locate them from 2011 on. I use keywords: postcards/postcard images (for when I just want to see the pix, as in the attached)/the year, and thus can find them pretty fast. 

Once written, I transcribe the poem into a Word doc with the name of the person who will receive it. (For some reason, 2010 has gone AWOL, but I'm sure it's around somewhere!)

I've prodded myself with various prompt devices over the years. There's a fabulous postcard store on Granville Island in Vancouver where I've picked up several cards. In 2011 I went with a box of Nancy Drew cover images. In 2013 I used  epigraphs culled from poems in that year's Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology.  

I've even started making some of my own cards, sometimes using coloured pencils, sometimes pasting together a collage from off-cuts of paper I use for the books I make. These are my favourites now, and for someone who felt like she failed any art class she was ever in, this is huge! 

I used one of my collage images as the cover for a chapbook I did for Ottawa-area poet Carol A. Stephen. 

Another became the cover for one of Jan de Bruyn's novels. (Jan, who's 98 now, is still writing novels "to keep his mind fresh". He gets me to publish six copies of each, for himself and his children. Jan was an English professor at UBC for many years and is responsible for starting Prism International, the university's lit mag). 

Five of my postcard poems appeared in the fall 2014 issue of the New Orphic Review.

Proceeds from this year's postcard exchange will go to support the 4th Annual Cascadia Poetry Festival to be held in Seattle November 3–6, 2016. 


If you want to exercise your poetry muscles, this is a great way to go about it.

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AN INCIDENT THAT INVOLVES FOOD: MEXICO

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Today I'm to "write a poem about food. This could be a poem about a particular food, or about your relationship to food in general. Or it could simply be a poem relating an incident that involves food".

I've decided to do something a little different and write a bunch of American Sentences about an incident that involves food known as being in La Manzanilla. 

The American Sentence is a haiku-like form of poetry first created by Allen Ginsberg and one that my friend Paul Nelson uses on a daily basis. They're snapshots of life as seen through 17 syllables. And because it's fun, I'm illustrating mine today with pictures. 

After dark, street vendors beckon—
churros, flan, très leches cake to go.

No more strings of darkness;
deveining shrimp a newly acquired skill.

Even a famous poet can't resist a tasty coco loco!

Chico's famous, fabulous fish burger
found at Pedro's, won't last long.

Caesar salad while you watch him,
Martin's hands blur anchovies and oil.

Margaritas, camarones, huachinango caught today—oh yum!

Hors d'oeuvres by Rico and Denicio
hot enough to make you weep. 

Garlic delivery system perfection, pulpo lounges on platter.

Every morning Ted gets up and brings me coffee in bed.
No bullshit!

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ET MAINTENANT — STRINGS TO HAUL FROM YOUR HEART

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Et maintenant... today's Found Poetry Review prompt, courtesy one Sarah Blake: "Ok, here’s the prompt: pick a song that you find dynamic. Track its moves. Try to replicate that movement with a poem."

Because I've been working on poetry-related stuff (actually, a submission) ALL DAY, including my very silly NaPoWriMo effort, I wanted a song that is somehow...I don't know, easy. I didn't want to have to think about it much.

So I'm using the inimitable Gilbert Bécaud's Et Maintenant, a song that seared itself into my psyche when I was in Grade 8 at Trafalgar Junior High in Nelson, BC and we were given half a year of Latin (yes! imagine!) and half a year of French, then got to decide which one we wanted to continue with. Mr. Abbott, the French teacher, would haul out a record player and play us a song at the end of class. Just one song. And one day, it was this. And my life changed, just like that. I lived in Montéeal for four years. I have had a great love and admiration for French popular music ever since, and yes, I went on with French and no, I don't speak it very well, but I still remember, after my friend Susan found a copy of Monsieur 100,000 Volts, playing Et Maintenant over and over and over again so I could write down the words as I heard them so I could attempt to sing along. You people who have only known life with the Internet have no idea what a struggle it was to figure out song lyrics in a foreign language, back in the day.  Approximately 2.5 seconds of searching produced this, just now. 

The song enjoyed life in English as well when it was translated as What Now My Love and covered by, oh, just about everybody — Sinatra, Bassey, Presley, Herb Alpert, to name but a few.

And now, my poem (I've taken to writing them directly onto my blog; thank you, Paul Nelson, for showing me how to get the hell out of my own way!):

STRINGS TO HAUL FROM YOUR HEART

Tap
tap tapping —
flicker on apple tree come spring
or bongos, first time you try them
tap tapping 

tap
deeper, then, 
strings to haul from your heart
every moment's passion
known, imagined,
tap tapping

tap
joy  pain  laughter, 
yes 
until the grand finale,
yes
flaunting sky
where sea should be
yes
tap tapping

tap
longing —
the killed  the maimed
the whole the hungry
tap tapping

tap
brass-ring love 
reached for, fumbled 
tap tapping

tap
across the road
the chrysalis that is 
Dona Chuy's house
expands each day
— she's lived there fifty years,
watched Ozymandias 
rise around her 
bane, delight
tap tapping

tap
and when it ends —
(it doesn't, of course)
ne me quitte pas
la nuit
toujours la nuit
tap tapping

tap
tap tapping

and...just minutes till midnight!
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(PSST!) IT'S ALMOST AUGUST. WANNA PLAY POSTCARDS?

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(Links to related sites and how to participate are at the end of this post)

Every August since 2007 I've written 31 short poems, put them on postcards and sent them off to persons known to me only by the fact that their names appeared on a list. 

Just for fun (for me, anyway), I thought I'd take a look back at some of the previous years.  Here, for example, is my very first postcard poem:

CONFLUENCE

Let it begin with a river,

one that passes gracefully

between two countries as different as planets,

Let it be decorated with dams,

alive with rapids,

Let it slake the thirst of all creatures

that find their way to its edge,

Let it flow like words

finding their way to fertile ground,

Let it begin with a river.

Washington poet Brendan McBreen was on my list in 2007. This year (and last) he took over the immense job of organizing the list of poet participants. It keeps getting longer  and will easily break the 200 mark this year. 

Here's the odd little poem he got from me:

My mother would say 'Brendan?
He’s Irish, then,' this last not

a question, but pure, irrefutable 

fact. To her. I was nine

the first time she made me so mad

I wanted to hit her, but she

was pregnant, see, and besides,

we really didn’t hit in my family.

Now she gazes out from under

Paul Nelson’s hat—I have no idea 

how that came to be—and I

send the picture to my sisters,

with whom she was pregnant

the time I was angry

when I was nine.

In past years the list we received contained about 31 names, but this year Brendan's decided to send out one long list. You only have to respond to the 31 names below yours (if you're near the end of the list you go back to the beginning).

Now, between Brendan and Paul Nelson, who, with Lana Hechtman Ayers, dreamed up this event in the first place, there are certain things you should attempt to do whilst writing your poems.

From Brendan, this year: 

"The August Poetry Postcard Project is an exercise in responding to other poets. You write a poem a day for the month of August, write it on a postcard and send it to the next name on your list. When you receive a postcard poem from someone, the idea is that the next poem you send out will be a response to the poem you just received, even though it will be sent to a different person. Ideally you will write 31 new poems and receive 31 postcard poems from all over the place."

Paul would have you write the poem directly onto the card. This means no editing, and I can see some of you screwing up your little faces at that. Indeed, I confess again (as I have confessed before, and to Paul) that I didn't do that the first year. Or, I think, the second. But then I tried it and it wasn't all that scary. God knows, it's quicker. Most of the time. There are pros and cons to editing. Paul has a few things to say about the subject here, and Nanaimo poet Kim Goldberg who is firmly in the no editing camp has this to say. 

Personally, I tweak a lot. One of my poems is plastered onto a wall somewhere in Nelson this month, in honour of Art Walk. (I'm going to try to find it tomorrow). I wrote it quite a few years ago and sent in whatever version it had morphed into, so that's what's on the wall, but a couple of weeks ago when I was making a chapbook for the Elephant Mountain Lit Fest reading, I changed it a little. Well, quite a bit, actually. Moved stuff around. Excised. Added to. You know, edited it. And I would hate to try to exist without my wonderful poetry group. Four of us meet and discuss each other's work and make suggestions as to how a particular poem might be improved/clarified/tightened/whatever. We all find this kind of input to be helpful. Sometimes we follow up on the suggestions and sometimes we don't. 

Getting back to postcard poems,  Paul has more suggestions for writing. I like his idea of working off another poet's words, finding a poet you'd like to "spend more time with", as he puts it. Actually, Paul has tons of good ideas so why don't I just give you the link and you can see for yourself. 

And me? I tend to write to the picture on the card. Sometimes I respond to one I've received, but all too often three or four days go by with no cards in the mailbox and then I get several at once. One year I went through a box of cards that depicted the first 30 covers of Nancy Drew novels. I wrote as Nancy or to Nancy or about Nancy, working from the images on the cards. 

In 2009 Ted and I drove to Newfoundland. Some of my cards were written there as well as en route, and some were mailed late, but I still did 31.

Sometimes (not often enough, but that's August for you; always a busy month) I made my own cards, like this one:

Found some of those stickers you put on the back of a 4"x6" photo and it turns into a postcard. This is a picture of a bowl Ted turned out of a birch at my sister's place. The birch here all seem to be dying.

One by one they sicken,
drop widow-maker branches
the way they used to shake off leaves,
old birch that grew for decades
now wracked with a thirst 
they cannot quench 
while we, custodians of the land, 
whine about pine beetle kill 
and who’s going to get our water, 
as if it’s really ours to give.
Perhaps the bowl remembers.

The quality of the poems is, obviously, a subjective thing. Sometimes I really like what I've written, other times I feel like the biggest sham poet on the planet. But versions of some of my postcard poems have gone on to be published, and one of them became the title of my third chapbook.

GENERATION DANCE

My father lost his mind
but not his hair.
His father was bald as a fire-ravished
hillside, but his mind was sharp, precise.

My hair has thinned a little,
I forget things, these days my son’s
hair looks more like mine than
my own.

Look into a mirror—
they’re all there,
their heads, at least,
unruly
looking for their owners.

Want to play this year? Here's how. To participate, send Brendan your name, mailing address, and email to stripedwaterpoets@gmail.com  
Include the word “postcard” in the subject line. 
Do it soon, as Brendan is sending out the final list on the 30th of July.

Some neat poetry postcard links (from Paul):

The blog for the fest is here: https://popo.cards 

A workshop handout for the poetry postcard writing exercise is here: http://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Postcard-Exercise.pdf

David Sherwin’s article from a couple of years ago is worth reading:http://changeorder.typepad.com/weblog/2010/08/sending-postcards-to-strangers.html 

And finally, pay attention to postal rates.* In Canada it costs 63 cents to mail a card within Canada and $1.10 to send one to the States. International destinations are $1.34.

*Post was written in 2013. Updated rates when sending from Canada in 2020: $1.07 (but .92 if you buy stamps in bulk). To the USA it's $1.30 and International is $2.71. (Wow! More than doubled in 7 years!)

Just be warned. Poetry postcarding can be addictive. My friend Judy Wapp tried it for a month a couple of years ago. Now she sends out cards to some lucky recipients all year round. 

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