Poetry Postcard Fest co-founder Paul Nelson interviews Mark Johnson on his experience with the august POetry POstcard festival.
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Alice died today, December 23, 2023 so we are re-posting this interview as Alice heads to postcard heaven. Goodbye...
Throughout the year, we organize events designed to foster a community of like-minded people centered around organic, open-form poetry, and an ecological philosophy that emphasizes a connection to our bioregion, its history and the indigenous people that lived here long, long before colonization. We aim to expose our supporters to ideas about art as an art-of-living practice, inspired by the spiritual practice of understanding the bioregion surrounding us: soil, air, water, flora, fauna, and weather. In 2023, we hosted a successful Poetry Postcard Fest and the 7th Cascadia Poetry Festival, along with launching Watershed Press and publishing our anthology Cascadian Zen Vol. I. This is all thanks to donations from people like you!
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