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| All the cards I painted and sent this year. |
How’d it go? This year it was binges and obsessions, and, unexpectedly, I found a new way to do this marathon. It involved a lot of late nights, so I’m not sure it’s sustainable every year. But it worked well this year, and that’s what matters right now.
To Fest or not to Fest
To be honest, I’d been wondering for a couple of years whether I wanted to continue doing this postcard marathon. As writing marathons go, I feel like I get more out of April’s National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo). There’s no line limit to NaPoWriMo, so I use that April marathon every year to woodshed new poetry ideas, dig deep, and write longer forms. In contrast, the August Postcard Fest feels easier (short poems! that only one stranger will read!), and I feel less pressure about the writing. But the Postcard Fest’s one rule—your poem has to fit on a postcard, so a max of about 12 lines—can feel constricting. After a week or two, those little postcard poems feel like I’m writing puzzles. Sometimes I’m in the mood for that, sometimes not.
But the challenge, of course, is to make the Postcard Fest an exercise that actually produces decent short poems, or at least poems that I enjoy writing, or sections of longer poems. I often find that writing postcard poems as series or sequences works well, exploring obsessions or writing several different takes on an experience I’ve recently had, or something that I can’t get out of my mind.*
This year I wrote a series of poems on the Olympics, which was really fun—that’s not something I’d normally try to write a really short poem about, so I had to keep the images and concepts compact and punchy. I wrote most of those around 3am, when I was up watching the Paris events live—so I could see how long the pole vaulters had to wait around for other events to get out of their way on the field; or how the skeet shooters patiently waited in line, one behind the other, watching the person at the front of the line doing their nerve-wracking shooting. I was fascinated by how strangely the table tennis players treat the ball just before they serve it, each with their own ritualistic, slightly kinky relationship with it.
Other frequent flyers through my life showed up in poems: My dermatologist figured into more than one. A friend who recently died, and another who moved away, both crept into many poems unexpectedly. I also wrote a series of poems about punctuation (I do a lot of copyediting in my day job), which were some of my favorites of the month.
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| A clump of cards heading out into the world. |
And since I paint my own cards for the Fest, I also painted in clumps—batches of five or six watercolor cards at a time. There were obsessions here too—for each batch, I tried out two or three colors in different combinations and mixes. I can still see the little sequences in them—oh, there’s that indigo, or that orange-y burnt umber, or that vermilion that seemed so unnatural. I tried lots of different papers and found some I liked (hello, Baohong Academy) and a few that I didn’t (goodbye, fancy-looking handmade paper that said it was for watercolor but actually repelled water). This month I painted mostly landscapes, because I love doing landscapes. I indulged that early and often.
Romancing the mailbox
One thing I love about the Postcard Fest is that it revives my old romantic notions about getting mail. When I was a kid, the mailbox was a magic portal that brought thrilling things: letters from penpals (I belonged to Penfriends International), stamps on approval**, and my grandmother’s (in retrospect, ingenious) spiral letters. Of course now it’s all bills and—gulp—sales flyers from mortuaries.
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| The cards from my Group 5 comrades. |
To the future
This year I decided to write all of the poems on a keyboard into my Notes app, which is my favored poem-writing method these days because I’m much faster on a keyboard than hand writing. Also, my handwriting is getting terrible (arthritis, out of practice, whatever). So I printed out each poem and taped it onto the card to save the reader’s eyes. I liked that system—it eliminated the step of typing handwritten poems into a Word doc for use later; it was already done.
And speaking of using poems later, last year I took a chance and sent a little short poem from the 2022 Postcard Fest (“Umbrella”) to Rattle for their 2023 Poetry Prize—and it ended up one of the 10 finalists, out of something like 10,000 poems they received. At 12 lines, it was one of the shortest poems I’ve ever submitted for publication, and the prize for being a finalist was $500. So per word, that poem made a pretty good wage.
Last things last
Maybe it’s just me, but I always have a hard time writing the last few poems of the Fest. There’s this pressure: Make sure you go out with some really great ones! It’s so silly—there I am, alone, writing on a postcard that will go to someone who doesn’t know me at all. But it’s always that way, the pressure. Every year. Artists often talk about how they leave the first page in a sketchbook blank because they don’t want a crappy drawing/painting there, preserved and taunting them forever. And there I am, thinking Should I just go with a jokey “This is the last poem” poem?
For the record, this year’s last poem was about sitting up at night. Which I was doing to write that poem. Who knows if the poem actually works, but there’s one line in it that I like. And sometimes that’s enough.
* A sequence I haven’t tried yet, but want to: poems about a song I can’t get out of my head***. I routinely have one song stuck in there for weeks at a time, and it would be fun to pick that song apart and write about it from different aspects. But…see…that feels like it wants to have longer sections than postcard-length; it wants to be more like the movements of a symphony, or the sequences of a song medley, or maybe it needs a songlike structure with verses, choruses, and a bridge.
** Stamps on approval was the best thing ever. Some stamp-collector company, like H. E. Harris or Mystic Stamps, would send you a thick package of glassine envelopes, each with a few stamps. You would look through them and choose which little envelopes you wanted to keep; then you’d send the rest back to them with a check for the ones you kept (which might total $1.35 or something; it was all very inexpensive and aimed at young collectors). I built a big part of my early stamp collection this way.
*** Ironically, I recently had “I Can’t Get It Out of My Head” stuck in my head for about two months. It was the Juliana Hatfield cover, not the ELO original. I heard it on some show I was streaming, which I now, also ironically, can’t remember for the life of me. I looked up the song online and listened to it a few times, and then the show was gone but the song remained—pretty much 24 hours a day, for two months. It happens.
After watching the Beatles documentary Get Back, I had “Dig a Pony” stuck in there for probably three months, and let’s just say I don’t love that song. It was maddening. Like, you have no choice about which record gets stuck in the brain’s jukebox. Is there a science to that?
Past PoPoFest wrap-ups: