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 23 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…
Before I post the last poem I sent but whose sender was the first I received – the next eight cards, two at a time, are ones on the list that I sent but didn’t receive from, – given what happened to the 23rd to arrive by way of Trinidad – I have not given up hope – so if you recognise a card you received and you know you sent one – please let me know in the comments and we shall presume it travelling still, the backwaters of the postal system…
Dear Lisanne
Like so many places in America
I knew the name of Berkeley
but I had to look at the map
to know exactly where it was.
Can you see the Pacific
framed by the Golden Gate Bridge
do waves cross the bay
to wash up on a Berkeley beach?
I first saw Dianne Arbus’ work
in a Sunday supplement
and I had my own Dianne Arbus moment
on the beach at Clacton
this lady pushing not
a baby in a pram
but a poodle…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Dear Rodda
I will not say Wish You Were Here
since this moment in time
was frozen digitally
a good few years ago
pre-Covid, pre-Trump, pre-War
and if we could have stood there
then it was a wet and windy day
not like the sunshine
eternally associated in the
imagination as shining down
on Stearns Pier, your pier.
Of course I know the Pacific
is not always peaceful
any more than the North Sea
splashing Blackpool is always stormy…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023