Poetry Postcard Fest 2024: The Obsessions

All the cards I painted and sent this year. 

Another August Poetry Postcard Fest is done and in the books. This was my 12th year doing the Fest, a 31-day marathon where you write a poem on a postcard each day in August and send it to someone else participating in the Fest. 

    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.

One a day? Not so much.

A clump of cards heading out into the world.

This year I practiced extreme clumping: I wrote lots of poems on the weekends (including nine in one day, which I think is a new record), but almost none on the weekdays. My day job was intense all month, and I had no energy left on weekday evenings. So I decided to just blaze through a bunch of poems on the weekends. Weirdly, that turned out to be fine—I liked the wacky spa-weekend feeling of writing a bunch on Saturday and Sunday, at all hours, and I still ended up with 31 poems.

    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. 

The cards from my Group 5 comrades.

    But during August, my boring mail is sprinkled with joyful, artful, wildly differing cards and poems from the other people participating in the Fest who are all tangling with their own obsessions. And a lot of those people were also hanging out in the Fest’s very active Facebook group, encouraging and cajoling each other. This year there were 18 groups with 32+ people each, for more than 500 participants. For a relatively quiet pursuit—sending one postcard to one person every day—the Postcard Fest has an amazingly loud, boisterous, big-dog-friendly social media presence. I love that aspect of it. Like, you put in your time at the gym, and then you party with everybody afterward.

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:

Postcard Fest 2019: Fresh Horses

Postcard Fest 2018: Smokin’ August

Postcard Fest 2016 Wrap-Up

Postcard Fest 2015: The Long and Short of Postcard Poems

Poetry Postcard Fest 2021: Both Sides Now

All the postcards I received this year,
plus a bonus Buckley.

The poems are written, the cards are mailed: The 2021 Poetry Postcard Fest is a wrap.
        This year, the annual August writing marathon attracted more than 500 participants from 13 different countries. My group (go, Group 8!) had 33 people in it, and I ended up writing 33 poems—32 to the other people in the group, and an extra card to someone else.

Side 1: The poems

Those 33 poems meant that I wrote a little more than one poem per day, but this year I didn’t even try to write one every day; I almost always wrote them in clumps of three or four and then took a few days off between writing sessions. I’ve done this in the past, too; it makes the “poem-a-day” thing less of a chore for me. And as I’ve said in past PoPo recaps, writing several poems in one sitting sometimes makes them more interesting; often I'll riff on the subject of one poem and expand it into others. This time I had a series of poems about eavesdropping, since I seemed to be overhearing a lot of conversations and was fascinated by the relationship between the loud talker and the unwilling listener, and the incompleteness of the information you overhear—Is that person always like that? Did that person bring this problem on himself? How reliable is the narrator of this story? I also had a few poems about painting (more on that below), and lots of small scenes from around my town of Ashland, Oregon, which was plagued by hazardous wildfire smoke all through August.

        Looking back through the poems, I can see a few that seem like keepers, like something I might end up getting published if some editor likes them. A few fizzled. My favorite one is about my bathrobe, which had nothing to do with eavesdropping or smoke and just sort of flew in on its own, as the best poems sometimes do. 

        Thinking about which poems I might send out to journals made me go back just now through poems from past PoPo Fests (this was my 9th year), and I see that fewer of them have been published than I thought*. None at all from last year. And in fact I rarely send those postcard poems out to journals at all. I suspect that some part of my mercenary brain thinks that short poems—and especially short abstract poems—are less “publishable” out there in the mean world. In April, during NaPoWriMo, I put a lot of pressure on myself to write longer, more “serious” poems, whatever that means. April is sort of a poetry crucible, when I think hard about a lot of things and try to write deeply into them. In contrast, the August Postcard Fest is more of a lark; I have fun with these shorter poems, and I feel pretty much zero pressure. Hence I think I tend to take them less seriously. Or perhaps they really are “slight.” I need to think about that more.


Side 2: The postcards
This year, I took a totally new approach with the actual postcards: I hand-painted all of them. In past years I’ve used giveaway postcards from restaurants, touristy ones I picked up at the drugstore, and ones I got printed at Vistaprint with my own photos on them. But I’ve been doing a lot of watercolor painting this past year, and I was intrigued by the idea of painting each one individually. In retrospect, that sounds kind of nuts—paint 33 individual paintings?—but I was already thinking of it back in April or May, so I started painting them then. I tried out lots of different paper—postcards made for watercolor by Daniel Smith, Hahnemühle, Schmincke, and Strathmore, and also 4x6-ish pieces of heavy watercolor paper by all sorts of companies. Pretty much anything I ran across the past few months that seemed like it would hold up in the mail. I ended up putting a few in envelopes, especially if the paper was 100% cotton; it seemed too soft not to get torn in the canceling machines. 

        I painted them in batches of 4 or 5; I’d do a bunch of skies in slightly different colors and styles, and then some kind of land or trees or whatever. I tried really hard not to overthink them. I did a few others with markers. And it was an absolute blast—serious fun, and again, with no pressure at all. I was surprised at what a useful process it was to paint so many little 4x6 paintings; I kept a bunch of them because I want to do larger versions of them, and I was constantly experimenting and coming up with techniques and color combinations that I didn’t expect to find. Just totally screwing around with paint. It wasn’t hard, it was joyful, and I would do it again in a heartbeat. I ended up painting about 50 postcards total because I kept painting ones that I liked enough that I didn’t want to send them away.


Bonus track: The community
Once again, the PoPo Fest’s Facebook group was really fun to keep up with all through August. People take such different approaches to the postcards; some do collages, one person used grocery cartons (she sent me one made from a Kleenex box). Some found vintage postcards; one woman in Alabama sent me an old postcard featuring a building in my town in Oregon, which amazed me. And many, many others didn’t really care about the postcards; for them, it was all about the poems. I’ve done it lots of ways over the years, and they’re all good; the PoPo Fest is flexible enough to accommodate pretty much any way you want to do it.




* Here are a couple of PoPo poems that did get published:

Speaking of smoke,
this one was in Crab Creek Review, 2019.

In Right Hand Pointing, 2021.

Past PoPo Fest Recaps:

2019: Fresh Horses

2018: Smokin'

2016: "I finished on time"

2015: Slacker Moments

August Postcard Poetry Fest 2016 wrap-up

The dust has settled on this year’s August Postcard Poetry Fest. This is the fourth year I’ve done this month-long writing marathon, invented by poets Lana Hechtman Ayers and Paul Nelson, where more than 200 poets around the world write a poem on a postcard each day in August and mail it to another participant. This year I managed to write the full complement of 31 poems/postcards, and I mailed them all before the end of August. I think this is the first time I’ve written a full 31 and sent them on time; in the past I’ve usually had a flakeout or three during the month, or sent 10 cards on September 6th or whenever in a mad rush to catch up. This year I received 32 postcards from writers all over the U.S., and one in the U.K., a vivid array of artwork and poems that lifted my mailbox out of its usual gloom of bills and ads for laser surgery and window-blind cleaning.

Parties vs. poopers

This year the Postcard Fest had a Facebook group. I’m starting to think every project in the world should have one of these; it’s a great way to bond with other people who are doing whatever you’re doing. Even before the postcarding got underway, the Facebook group was buzzing with people posting about how they were gathering their postcards, buying cool stamps*, getting acquainted, and just checking in with daily details of life. This made me feel much more connected to the project than in years past, and as August dawned and the writing and postcard-sending began, I felt more motivated than usual to keep writing poems and mailing them. It was like I knew these people now, and I didn’t want to let them down. It was also like there was this great party going on, and I didn’t want to be the pooper. Keep the party going!, the Facebook group seemed to be saying. Don’t bring down the room.

De-cluttering the card

This year I made my own postcards. Now, when I say that in the context of this Fest, it’s like saying I built my own house, and then showing you a cardboard box with some holes I punched in it. People in the Postcard Fest set the bar high—there are some real artists in this group, for whom the postcard itself is at least as important as the poem they write on it. Some of them construct elaborate works of art, everything from collages to hand-drawn sketches to prints of their own paintings, write poems on the back, and mail them out. I’m not that much of a visual artist; the postcard, for me, is really just a poem-delivery system. In past years I bought touristy cards at local shops; one year, I got a big stack of them from a brewery. But I was often frustrated by how little room there was on them for a poem; with all the photo-captioning and copyright gobbledygook, there was only about a three-inch-square space to write in, sometimes less. This real-estate issue is part of the Postcard Fest challenge, but to me, it was annoying.

So this year I decided to just make my own damn postcards—that way, I could leave a consistently generous space for poem-writing. And I’d just been looking at the Vistaprint site, pricing out some business cards, and I saw they print (among a zillion other things**) postcards at a really good price. I didn’t overthink it; I just found a few photos that I took last summer of various artsy/natural things, and I chose one with a hornet nest that I always liked. I made a PDF of the photo in Photoshop, laid out the back side of the postcard in InDesign and made a PDF out of that (with a big white space for poems), uploaded it, and ordered 50 of them for about $15. The whole process took maybe a half-hour. The package of postcards arrived a few days later, and they looked great—glossy and professional quality, pretty much like what you’d buy in a gift shop. And there was enough room to write about a 14-line poem on the back.

Baking by the batch

Another thing I did differently this year—and this broke the rules a little—was that I wrote the poems in batches. The guidelines for the Fest encourage people to write a poem every day…because it’s, you know, a poem-a-day marathon. And that’s usually great—I love the discipline of this and other marathons like NaPoWriMo and Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, and I rely on them to generate a lot of new poems in a short time. But during this Fest I discovered something interesting: I seemed to write better poems when I wrote them in batches.

I stumbled across this by accident, right at the start. The guidelines suggested that we write three poems a few days before August 1st and send them out so our first few recipients would start receiving poems at the beginning of August. So I sat down on about July 27th to write three poems and get things started. The first poem—cold start, sputter, cough—took a long time to form in my head, and it came out a little wooden. It wasn’t really a keeper, but that’s OK—the Fest is all about generating first drafts. But the second poem, to my surprise, was better; my poetry engine was warmed up, and the poem slipped out easily and was a lot more interesting. And so was poem #3—it ranged farther off leash and had more natural energy to it than that first, stage-frightened poem. Okay, I thought…maybe writing only one is not the best way to do this. And because postcard poems have to be short enough to fit on the card, writing a batch of them didn’t seem too daunting.

So all through the month, I wrote poems about every three days instead of every day, always in batches. The jury’s out on whether these poems are any better than in years past; I haven’t typed them all up yet (I made photocopies of all the cards I sent), and I’m not even sure what I’ve got there. But I know that I felt excited about some of them, perhaps more than usual. And the “batching” definitely made this marathon feel easier than it usually does—I never got that grumbly-teenager feeling of not wanting to sit down and write. Or if I did, I just didn’t write that night, and wrote an extra poem the next time around. And I had a lot of fun with these poems; somehow, writing batches of them took the pressure off each one. If a couple were duds, maybe others in the batch would come out better. And then I had a couple days off to recharge.

Unexpected conversations

This year I tried to write some poems with a common theme, mixing mythology with cars I’ve known and owned, along with found poems that mashed up car-related public documents in a sort of word blender. I don’t know yet if those poems will ever amount to anything; I have to think more about the structure of that sequence.

But you never know how a series of poems will end up playing off each other, or off other poems that don’t seem related. Last year I wrote a bunch of postcard poems with images of the Rogue River, based on a rafting trip I took when the Rogue Valley was choked with forest-fire smoke. Later I wove several of those poems together with another sequence of poems I’d been working on, and found that they spoke to each other in a way I hadn’t expected, different voices in a conversation I didn’t know my subconscious was having. I made them into a chapbook manuscript called I Am on a River and Cannot Answer, which the wonderful BOAAT Press will be publishing next month as a downloadable PDF book. More on that in a future post.

To find out more about the August Postcard Poetry Fest, visit its web page here.

           

           

* One day, yes, I will blog about being a lifelong stamp collector. For now, I’ll just mention that on an episode of The Simpsons, the family’s house was about to burn down, and Lisa went running back to it, yelling “My stamp collection!” The rest of the family stood in silence for a moment, then they all burst out laughing, even Homer. Philatelists—our coolness has not been discovered yet.

** Including phone cases, coffee mugs and…pillows?

The Long and Short of Postcard Poems

This month's haul, as of

August 28th. Go, Group 3!

The August Poetry Postcard Fest is coming to a close. This is the third year I’ve done this month-long marathon where you write a poem every day, jot it down on a postcard, and send it off to someone else who’s doing the project. I had more than my share of slacker moments this year; one day I had to write seven poems to get caught up, and I spaced out badly last week and had to write four yesterday and two today. So my postcard recipients are getting a motley, ill-timed bunch of poems from me. But the reverse is also true; some days I get a fistful of postcards, and then for days and days my mailbox goes dark. So a lot of us seem to be, shall we say, sporadic. But I’ll end up writing 31 poems, one way or another. I have yet to break out the “emergency haiku.”

Groupness

This year more than 200 people signed up to do the Fest, and the structure was a little different than in past years, thanks to organizer extraordinaire Paul Nelson. This time he divided the big list into subgroups of 32 people so that each group could send postcards to just the people in their group, creating a tidy loop we haven’t had before—now you get postcards from the same people you’re sending postcards to, instead of sending them off into the ether to someone you’ll probably never hear from. I actually liked that ether-sending of yesteryear; there was a freeing, anonymous quality to it that pushed the Postcard Fest into a more intimate part of the spectrum than, say, the much more public Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project, or even our local NaPoWriMo group. The act of sending that postcard off to some unknown person always felt a bit like whispering in a stranger’s ear. But this year, I’m enjoying getting poems back from the people I’ve written them to. They’re not answers, or even responses, to the poems I send out; they’re more like pings coming back on the radar. Hello, poet—I am here too.

        Paul also put together a Facebook group for the participants, which I’m starting to think every project in the world should have. People post about the challenges of writing a poem a day, intriguing postcards they’ve received, other news in their lives, and the books they’re reading. The past few days we’ve been posting links to our own books. Again, it’s a mix of anonymity/randomness and camaraderie/intimacy. Here are all these strangers participating in the same project, all these people at this virtual cocktail party, and some of them are smart and damn funny.

Dear Stranger

This year Paul suggested that we all write epistolary poems—poems written in the form of letters. I don’t know if that was the suggested form in years past; honestly, I tend to skip right over rules and suggestions about what to write in these things and do whatever the hell I want. But I got stuck for ideas early in the month, and those first few poems were painful. Then I thought, “Epistolary, hmm...,” and wrote “Dear _______” as a title, and a poem popped out very easily. Since then, I’ve structured almost all of the poems as letters. Most of them don’t have titles, only the “Dear _______” part. That proved to be very, very fertile ground. Intimacy again, I guess; the feeling of writing a missive to one person gives me less stage fright than trying to “write a poem,” and the month’s output has taken on the air of a dreamy conversation. And now I’ve got this odd little collection of letter-poems, many with river images from a recent rafting trip on the Rogue—dismantled dams, abandoned power stations, salmon leaping out of the dark waters, the lazy bends and chaotic, crushing rapids. The collection feels more cohesive, like more of a project unto themselves, than my August postcards usually feel. So my hat’s off to Paul for that suggestion.

Shorts get the short end

Every year when I do this postcard project—a marathon in which each poem can’t be more than about 12 lines because, again, you have to squeeze it onto a dinky postcard—I always wonder if these shorties will ever get published anywhere. I’m gratified to see that some journals favor the short form—Right Hand Pointing* comes to mind, among others. Still, I can’t help feeling that an unspoken length-ism prevails in the literary world: The longer poems get most of the love and win most of the prizes. So in a way, it feels especially good to invest a whole month in short poems. Maybe someday short poems will walk alongside their tall cousins, respected at last. In the meantime, somebody’s got to do some captive breeding to keep their numbers up. Postcard Fest to the rescue.

*Right Hand Pointing’s sister site, White Knuckle Press, has a series of fantastic online chapbooks, all consisting of short prose poems. I just got the good news that they’ll be publishing my chapbook Rough House early next year. Their whole list of chapbooks is worth exploring—strong poetry, striking designs—and here are a couple that I especially love:

Greeting Cards for Every Occasion by R. Bergman

The Russian Hat by Claudia Serea