Poetry Postcard Fest co-founder Paul Nelson interviews Mark Johnson on his experience with the august POetry POstcard festival.
Reflection on Poetry Postcard Trees (& Photos!)
We need to learn from Fujitaro and see the gardens that can grow from our wastelands, from the Pacific trash heap to the City of Seattle dump to the logged former forestland to the filled in estuaries of rivers like the Duwamish that make the Port of Seattle or Marshlands that make Baltimore’s inner harbor to the sprawl of LA and suburbs around all cities in this country to the merciless businesses of insurance and pharmaceuticals and lobbying and media (social, in particular) and AI and bottled water and so on.
Awesome interview. I took away a lot of ideas … Mark’s discussing the
epistolary poem, // a verse letter // letter poem being a poem in the form of an epistle or letter.
( thank you google )
was the part that I forgot that was suggested sometime when I started PoPo.
.
I would often forget to put the salutation on the postcard … or not leave room for it when I started.
The first year, I realize now …thanks to Mark and Paul’s conversation, is that I was worried about
using an informal first name.
Foolish me, I got myself tied up in calling people by their first names. Of course, that was meant back
when I was young, the proper way to address an older person or a title they had earned.
My takeaway besides the epistolary style … I have to admit that I am probably a lot older than most of
the people that are on the list. I AM that older person that I thought I was writing to.
.
My only negative-ish comment to Mark is about the “not being hand written means not spontaneous”…
for me, anyway, what I type is more spontaneous than hand written …
and the fact that hand writing for many people may be illegible or painful.
Thanks for a delightful interview. 🙂 <3