From postcard poet Dr. Amy L. Friedman:

Some time before I knew I’d be coming to Japan I signed up for the 2025 Cascadia Poetics Lab Poetry Postcard Fest. It was founded by poets Paul E. Nelson and Lana Ayers in 2007, and today the Lab runs online writing workshops, podcasts about poetry, and a poetry festival, too. For the postcard thing you send in $15, and come August you get a list of people and you send each one a postcard with a poem. And they do likewise.

I sent mine! “35 stamps, please!” in Japanese is “San-juu-go kitte, kudasai!” and an international postcard stamp costs 100 yen, which is 68 US cents. I sent 35 postcards, each with an original haiku. Because I am in Japan, and haiku are Japanese. Location.

The ethos of this postcard event is that one should try to compose a new poem each day for a new postcard, and send them day by day, all month. It is billed as “An annual 56-day self-guided workshop in spontaneous composition and community-building,” which I think is pretty apt. The main focus is to compose each day and just write that poem down.

Location, for the Poetry Postcard Fest, is in the moment.

Now, I have been seeing each one of my haiku as a sort of meta poem, an investigation into the haiku form (5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables) which I think intentionally raises the question of the role of location in composition: Is my haiku actually more authentic for being composed here in Japan? And what is authenticity, even?

So for me, location with regard to my poetry postcards is about: Location.

My festival postcards from other poets will be drifting in all month and beyond, stacking up back in Fulldelfia with the rest of my many months of mail. I have plans to share these postcards with students when I return. Meanwhile, if this sounds like the best kind of fun ever, as it did to me, you can read about the festival at that link above, and even sign up soon for 2026.

They have statistics about the current festival — 493 poets from 8 countries, not counting me in Japan, 42 US states and 4 Canadian provinces! And there are blog posts about the festival, interviews with writers, and links to poetry-writing exercises and suggestions. It is all very inspiring and I highly recommend a visit.

This is an excerpt from Amy’s blog Where No Mangoes. Amy L. Friedman is an English Professor and Satire Scholar at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. “I did my undergrad work at Bryn Mawr College, and my PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London. (I also lived, worked, and taught in London for 12 years.) At present I am working on my second book on satire; my first is called Postcolonial Satire. I spent a lot of 2024 on a sabbatical, wandering the world with my collapsible bike helmet and ukulele. Now in 2025 I am teaching for two semesters at Temple University Japan’s new Kyoto campus.”

Thank you so much for sharing your postcard experience and for participating while living in Japan, Amy! We’re delighted to see the many ways postcard poets use the fest to engage with the locations and cultures surrounding them.