On Sunday June 4, 2023, we held a Postcard Fest Zoom Open House. We had 25 attendees and we introduced the new Poetry Postcard Fest Project Board: Ina Roy-Faderman, Sally Hedges-Blanquez, Judy Kleinberg and Zach Charles. Margaret Lee is also on the board but did not attend. The board is forming now and looking for people interested in helping expand the fest and improve how it is administered. Here is the video from the event:
The sense of community generated by the fest, the notion that one person is creating something just for you and the practice of sending bonus cards was discussed along with methods of composition. My thanks to the new PPF project board and to all the attendees. What a joyous occasion it was. Fest registration continues. See:
During the Zoom Open House we talked about Sam Hamill’s essay: “Epistolary Poetry,” and the ambitious September 8, 2023 Day Song exercise. Online workshops with exercises like this one will resume in Mid-Ocotber and will take on a tone influenced by my study of Spiritual Ecology. Details coming in September. Thanks for being part of this community.
Hi Paul , Ross Savage here in Richfield, MN. First, let me say thanks for everything you do to help participants. I’m sure it’s an exhausting process, so thanks so much. I’ve taken part for the last two years and have some thoughts which I’d like to share. I hope they’re useful. When I write, I try to keep the audience in mind. Clarity is an issue for me ; i’d like my poem to be as clear as possible (given poetic license) , so I try to minimize arcane references, uncommon allusions, things a reader would have trouble following. I try to put myself in my reader’s shoes. … and I’d like my reader to have a good experience with my composition. I want it to be fun. So I usually ask myself , as I’m writing , will a person “get” this. Perhaps that interferes with spontaneity of composition too much but I do that. I don’t want these postcard poems to be impossible to understand. I think a poem should challenge readers, make them think outside the box , and be creatively demanding, but not so much they lose comprehension … I’d like to mention the app TouchNote as an electronic source for postcards. I understand that some people would frown on that. Also, ideally I strive to have the Postcard image relate to the writing … and stickers and stamps can contribute to the whole … that’s my two cents worth. … & let me mention postcrossing.com. While not specifically poetry, it’s a venue where one can hone one’s skills writing a postcard to a stranger in a foreign country. BTW – postcrossing is fun too✌️️
OH ➖ I forgot to mention “washi” tape which I sometimes use to contribute to the fun factor ♂️✌️️☮️
Daniel Smith wanted to add this:
Outstanding!!! Some tips I’ve picked up since 2014: do a little research (2015 Facebook search or google maps to include) on recipients to personalize; let local current events provide a subject (2014 Robin Williams’s suicide and Ferguson riots); find a form (2016, alpine sonata in 31 sonnets ) and last year, (2022, theme of the blank card…). I’m not much of an artist but use my photos to print on 4×6 card stock paper not glossy so ink or toner sinks in. Obscurity and technology became the theme one year, resulting in germs or kernels of poems later reworked into my book Incandescence. This year, I bought a new color reservoir inkjet with an adjustable feeder just for my postcards, 56 photos from my 2022 Southeast Asia tour. Because of the PPF I’ve published four volumes of poetry plus a simultaneously published 2nd edition of collected poems. I love footnotes that become part of the poem, too. If you can, take Paul’s Poetics as Cosmology classes on spontaneous composition.
Ross! I re-read this and thought of your comment: “To me, in this fallen world, the question that true literature prompts is never “what does it mean” but rather: what circumstances (what kind of perceived world) have given rise to writing of this kind, which is trying to provoke a different way of “being in the world,” and why? Writing that does not provoke this question, but aims instead at meaning–is entertainment…”
-Richard Foreman