The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Caren
No street photographer I no Cartier-Bresson but I do sometimes seize a moment as with this elderly couple reviewing their garden and a lifetime of closeness I imagine – in Upwhey where the River Whey comes up before plunging its short course down to Weymouth with my late mother I snapped them…
As you can see from Caren’s postcard to me, which from the relative dates, I calculate means she had received my card to her and has responded in kind with a painting of trees and a poem to match (which I wish I could show you).
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Robi
“The graves a fine and private place But none I think do there embrace” wrote Andrew Marvell – marvellous metaphysical poet but I like to think that in this graveyard at the back of my house young lovers or even old do venture into the dark to woo – as Marvell’s poem’s subject would do creating fonder memories than the daytime dog walkers or even those visiting the quiet residents do…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Toni
A solitary crow does not a murder make I like to think I am not even sinister unlike the direction sign I sit upon I will not even defend my perch if a bigger bird takes a notion to supplant me, in a blink I will fly away to keep the peace. You thought different? We crows get a bad press but I don’t care a jot…
The circular ticket hall of Piccadilly Circus London Underground sees in the evening the contraflow of two disparate populations theatre-goers flow down to the tube line lines below digging deep to drop coins in the pint-size paper cups of the beggars at their feet or not… the tide of supplicants washes in to catch the beneficent potential of culture sated happiness or not… One group headed homeward to cosy homes in the suburbs the other homeless unless you call a cardboard mattress in a shop doorway home and if these homeless are also addicts then what is an addict if not someone who also wants to be transported elsewhere counting the fare to their next fix perhaps they too want to go home or perhaps to get as far away from home as possible and anywhere but here and now watching still purposeful feet pass by this Ticket Hall is home to no one a place of transit and temporary contraflows Earlier in the day commuters on the way to work hurried past less generous with the urgency of earning a buck and when their tide turns at clocking off time they flow against the stream of theatre-goers bubbling up from underground and both streams bypass the static beggars arranged like rocks around the confluential hall That is the way it seemed to me when years ago I sometimes navigated the waters when working in London but maybe the government has forced the Tube to sweep away the detrital evidence of years of draining austerity clashing with personal derailment on the rocky journey through life But places exist in time as well as space and I suspect these tidal flows of rich and poor effaced still meet for an exchange of generosity and relief somewhere out on the streets of London People, like water will find a way to go a time and place to contraflow…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Katie
From the ashes of what fire did the family name of Phoenix flutter forth, what history sired it and does your clan live up to its name re-emerging from whatever disaster the times heap on your homes – challenge your lives with to be reborn and renewed tempered by the flames? These bonfires fed with prunings from the olive grove in Crete likewise strengthen the tree for a more fruitful future…
This photograph was my favourite of all the ones I took in Crete during lockdown in the Winter of 2020. Katie’s card (below) was all about Summer and making the most of it…
Westward a bunch of flowers adorns the table in the living room upstairs sent by kind neighbours after person(s) unknown threw an empty bottle through a downstairs bedroom window
Northly I sit in the yard garden smiling wearing a new shirt and waistcoat bought by my love finally getting a photo I like for all my online avatars
A Buddha sits on the window sill South view over his shoulder sheltered beneath a tree size avocado final success after countless failures to grow from a pit
A Buddha head sits among plants on a garden shelf, contemplating fossils garnered on English beaches and brought East by our son from Mexico but not from its yellow hills
Clematis blooms pink against the impossible blue of the May sky fluffed with clouds each year the Montana climbs to such height
Photos call us home in a sixth dimension of the heart
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Shari
Each stranger’s name and address is like a mini detective challenge I follow police protocol and locate you on a map so I know you are in Seattle home to the PoPo Fest Beyond that your name gives me nothing but for no better reason than that you are one “O” short of a monsoon I picked this picture of Indian shoes some years past at the Leeds Asian Festival so blinging I couldn’t resist…
Shari was quick out of the blocks, her postcard poem being my fourth to arrive – which means she had no more idea about me than I had about her… Her card was beautiful, her poem short and sweet…
The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. Organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, who organise the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my first year and hearing about it just in time to register, I was on List 15. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your missives – to date I have received 20 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent and the cards but not the poems you received. I will share these in the order of sending and I will miss out those which I have not yet received in case they arrive soon… Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…
Dear Amy
Do you believe in coincidence because what are the odd of two Millers at 6 and 7 in the chart? Could you be related even brother and sister, wife and ex just plain friends joined by matching nomenclature calling to remind that sign-up is beckoning for the Poetry Postcard Festival and leaping into un-poet like action – registering almost simultaneously like quantum entangled pairs I choose not to believe in coincidence…
The three poems by dead poets I have chosen to read for last night’s Dead Poets Society challenge by kim881 in Poetics, Uncategorized over at the dVerse Poets Pub are all from poets I studied at school and have continued to love all my life – great teachers have a lot to answer for…
Andrew Marvell 1621–1678
Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress‘ is surely one of the most famous poems of attempted seduction ever written. I live within a day-out’s journey from Marvell’s birthplace, Hull where the muddy tide of Humber is about as wide as the Ganges and I wonder whether sailor’s tales informed Marvell’s poem. The last time I visited Hull, I met two young lovers sitting on the plinth of Andrew Marvell’s lifesize statue and acquainted them with the poem…
WB Yeats was also a favourite at school and later, when I moved to Sligo in the west of Ireland and Yeats’ home town, I was commissioned to paint a mural of the poet and his work and you can see a much younger me from 1995 being interviewed on television whilst up a ladder painting the mural. Searching for a poem suitable for this challenge, I came across The Mask, an unusual (for Yeats) Question and Response format with an ABABA rhyme scheme
Hughes in 1986. PHOTO: NILS JORGENSEN/REX SHUTTERSTOCK
Lastly, I chose ‘A Grin‘ from Ted Hughes’ wonderful collection of poems ‘Crow’ although this is not one of the poems referencing the scurrilous Crow. If I had to keep one volume of poetry it would be this…
Having read these three dead poets, I’m afraid I could not write a poem based on just one of them and so my offering below channels all three, Yeats for the form, Ted Hughes for the title and theme and Marvell for the intimations of mortality and perhaps the poetic shot at immortality…
A Grin
‘Centre stage on the birthing bed Did you grin for your role through the pain?’ ‘I thought how easily I could end up dead And grinned to think you’d never touch me again Don’t fucking touch me! I shouted!
‘Did you grin at the banality of death by car crash You who imagined yourself great and with longevity?’ ‘I thought of my wife who always thought me rash And my secretary always seasoning work with levity Urging me to slow down – but I had to dash…’
‘I watched your grin, my eyes open, yours closed And wondered, coming together, if we really were?’ ‘You were so deep the thought never arose That we were two, a separate him and her I never thought at all as into me you flowed…’
‘Whatever before death caused your rictus grin Will be replaced in time by the skull’s secret smile’ ‘What tales within my skull locked in Now deliquescing, bodily integrity defiled In the game of Life, none of us can win.’
‘Your poetic attempt at seduction Already lived three hundred and fifty years Is poetry the way – immortality to win?’ ‘I never won that girl nor any like her But it makes me grin – the onward admiration…’
P.S. I realise now that we were supposed to write based on one of Kim’s chosen three poems but when I saw the challenge last night, my Covid head was stuffed with cotton wool and it is only this morning that I was feeling better sufficiently to write something and by then, the idea that we choose our own three poems had settled in… Sorry Kim! And so below is a response to one of your poem choices Dylan Thomas’ ‘Once It Was the Colour of Saying’.
Once It Was the Colour of Saying
Once a year at least, I listen to Under Milkwood by Dylan Thomas and steep myself in the poetry of his play the play of his poetry as he carries us around the small Welsh town of his imagination borne into the night and through the waking day revisiting the cast of characters until we love their foibled ways and wish like the Reverend Eli Jenkins in his poem within a poem “To stroll among our trees and stray In Goosegog Lane, on Donkey Down, And hear the Dewi sing all day, And never, never leave the town.”
