Postcard trees 10-24 Postcard trees 25-38 Postcard trees 39-51 Postcard trees 52 Postcard trees 53-59 Postcard trees 1-9

I will write another essay with a more full reflection on my recent performance at the Columbia City Theater, in concert with dancer, choreographer, and more Christina Fraij as a part of the PNW Climate Week Variety Show, but the poem and performance look at the issues of climate crisis in a way that complements these poetry postcard trees in an interesting way, so I wanted to bring it up. In the process of working with Christina, we leaned into a slightly creepy vibe. It really landed on the audience, and we got many compliments specifically about the parts that Christina would say in rehearsal were the creepiest.

I have been feeling, lately, a combination of deep offense and overwhelming grief about certain aspects of the world we, homo sapien sapien, are making and that are clearly contributing or simply related to the climate crisis. A small example is that recently I started using bar shampoo and conditioner because I got to a point where I was too pissed off about feeling forced to use plastic to clean myself that I found an alternative (a brand I really like is hiBar). I’m grateful that in this circumstance, there was a relatively simple alternative. But I live in a town that values this kind of thing, so there is a store that sells no-plastic, minimal-waste household goods just a few neighborhoods over. 

A bigger example is this city, which I think is in ways absolutely beautiful, is built on top of what should be an ancient wetland and forest. In the Duwamish Long House on W. Marginal Ave, there is a letter from a white settler back to his family in, if I remember correctly, Michigan, in which he extols that natural bounty of the place. Food, he said, was no longer an issue. There were whales filling the sound, so many salmon in the river that you could walk across them, berries and nuts and so on and so on. The climate is mild, the resources are plentiful, the people are kind and welcoming (well, I don’t think he used those words, forgive me for reading between the lines here and imagining, a little bit, of what I would have said). I, a white person of mostly Eastern European Jewish descent, born in NOLA, raised in Baltimore, moved to Seattle after college, feel an incredibly profound and resonant grief that I don’t get to be a part of that Cascadia, the one Chief Sealth, for whom Seattle was named, was born into. The one he offered to share with the immigrants who arrived at their shores. 

I think the creepiness Christina and I were tapping into was the absurd sensation of living with a grief and terror that is caused in part by shampoo bottles and in part by a dramatic scarring of the earth by human infrastructure. And I think this postcards project is a response to that sensation of creepiness. When I feel assaulted in my own home by advertising for GLP-1 medications and plastic wrapping around or just being so many of my belongings and also by infrastructure that provides me with everything from food to shelter to community…well that’s a creepy feeling. It’s a sort of cosmic or eldritch horror type of feeling. How does one respond to that feeling? I want to live a certain kind of life, and my conditioner is making that difficult for me? That’s fucked up. So, we seek community, and to create something different. That was the point of this project. To do like Fujitaro Kubota, and where others see a wasteland, where we ourselves see cosmic horrors in the shapes of plastic shrink wrapped vegetables and tide pods (another thing my partner and I replaced at the reuse store, Public), put in the hard work to build and care for a beautiful garden. 

There are people in history worth looking to, who’ve dealt with difficult things, huge changes, and give us a good example of how to engage with the challenges of our times. Chief Sealth is one example. When white settlers came he welcomed them with open arms. He provides us with a great example with regard to the global debate on immigration and migration. On a different side of the coin, you have Chief Kamiakin, who ended up fighting the settlers from 1855-1858, for their abuses of treaties, and more importantly, people and land. He provides us with a great example with regard to how we should protect our bioregions. 

There are also people in history worth learning from who had some terrible ideas. Sometimes, they still managed some good ones, or had terrible impacts on the world, like Norman Bel Geddes, who, though he was working for something this project looks to reverse with regard to the expansion of personal cars and the interstates, and though he believed in eugenics, was a visionary who broadened the imagination of the populace with his set designs for Broadway shows and on films and projects like Futurama at the 1939 NYC World’s Fair that imagined an intricate highway system. 

Then, there is Fujitaro Kubota, the main inspiration for this whole project – check out this earlier post for more on that. It is enough, here, to say that where others saw a wasteland, he saw a garden. And he made it his life’s work to realize that garden. 

We need to radically reimagine how cities are built. We need to provide examples to people for how to do that, from plumbing and sewage to electricity. From how we create and disburse medicine and food to art, to including healthy ecosystems (wetlands, rivers, forests, deserts, tundras, etc…) in our infrastructure, to all corners of our life. 

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. 

In the project, the quality of the individual pieces was not the point, rather the point was that, as a collective, they can channel a potent energy. That is not to say the poetry postcards I received were not beautiful. Both the words and artwork were gorgeous. This ethos was inspired by my work as a co-editor with Leopoldo Seguel on Breathe, an e-zine dedicated to social justice (found at breatheeveryone.net). Together, for many reasons, we decided at Breathe that our place was not to “grade” people’s artwork, and only accept A’s or B’s, but to provide a platform for people using art to express some important perception or feeling about the many issues of human and land rights that exist in our world. For just one example, research shows that both experiencing and creating art can help a person become more empathetic. I hope that we, the community that came together to create this project, have channeled energy into the collective imagination that pushes the planetary organism we are all a part of toward a garden.

On my side, for about a year it has been a part of the mission of Cascadia 2050 to engage with people who are working for positive change along the breadth of the polycrisis, with the goal of creating a manifesto that could be a kind of blueprint for change. This project has inspired me to continue to push that idea, and begin to interview people of all different walks of life about their ideas for positive change in their own spheres of the world. 

On a public facing side, I hope people who saw the project felt inspired by the collective effort of all involved to continue or start thinking about the wastelands in their world that could be gardens, from shampoo to logging operations. 

Finally, I hope this project brought together those creative peace and community building aspects of the Poetry Postcard Fest that so many of us love in a way that truly honors the fest itself, all its participants over the years, and those who have been organizing it, including, especially, Paul Nelson, for its 20th edition this year. I truly believe that as the fest grows, our culture becomes more empathetic, creative, and closer to the land.

I have immense gratitude for those who shared in this project. One of the things about sharing the world is that we are forced, sometimes, to interact with each other. Thank you to those who participated for making the choice to take part in community in a positive and creative manner through this project, from my students to my friends and family to my Cascadia Poetics Lab community. A special thanks to students of Jody Adams at Vancouver School of Arts and Academics. Special thanks to Seattle Parks and Tom Diamond for collaborating on a space for the project to be displayed. Thanks to Kubota Garden and Sophia Eicholz for hosting a tour and postcard poetry writing event. Thanks to yəhaw̓ Indigenous Artists Collective for hosting a workshop and a tree. 

I hope this is bioregionalism in action. I’m doing my best.