PoPoFest

My 2025 Poetry Postcard Festival Exhibition…

humanist55

There are two major blogging challenges that occupy my year, Te A to Z Challenge and PoPoFest and each year of each Challenge/Festival, I seem to heap ever higher expectations on my particpation, and this year has been no exception! For the postcards, I like to make my own and so in 2023, I used favourite photographs I had taken, in 2024, AI generated images that hadn’t made the final selection for particular projects but which were good in their own right, and for 2025, I decided to revive my very intermittent painting skills.

I have painted since my teenage years, which you can read about in this year’s A to Z here. However, whi;st I spent much of my life in applied arts, signwriting, graphic design and the like, pure painting languished – how many times did I take my paints on holiday only to bring them home unused – so making at least 31 postcard-sized paintings (in the end I did more for bonus cards sent to me on the International List) was a challenge. I produced about 4 on most weekends through July and August, sometimes working on 2 at a time as each dried. Many were watercolour, many acrylics, some mixed, and one pencil drawing.

I’ve decided to post them in a single Exhibition post (Exhibit if you’re American) together with their handwritten (excuse the writing, please) poems, which according to the aims of PoPoFest, are to spontaneously write an epistolary poem to a stranger, preferably one which references the image on the postcard. I blew up photographs from years past, which I had hoped would make paintings and in particular, pictures from Crete where we spent 6 months during lockdown in 2020 – enjoy…

The sky here is watercolour, the rest acrylic, but even in this scan, it’s possible to see the greater luminosity of watercolour…
Watercolour, which enables the “tunnel” to glow with reflected light
Watercolour
Watercolour – the subtelties of the sky didn’t scan well…
Watercolour
Watercolour
Watercolour. The link is https://www.rte.ie/archives/2016/0729/805794-yeats-summer-school/ where you can see me painting a mural of WB Yeats
Watercolour and gouache on yellow, Elephant dung paper (I like its absorbency)…
Watercolour on buff, Elephant dung paper (this colour paper was a little too absorbent – too grabby)…
Watercolour with masking fluid. There should only have been 3 rails but I painted along the horizon line by mistake!
Watercolour
Pencil
Acrylic and watercolour on yellow, Elephant dung paper.
Acrylic and watercolour on yellow, Elephant dung paper.
Watercolour. The challenge here was to give the headland 3 3-dimensional form and not just make a flat cliff…
Watercolour
Watercolour
Acrylic
Watercolour
Acrylic
Watercolour
Pencil, Watercolour, Acrylic.
Watercolour
Acrylic
Watercolour
Watercolour
Acrylic. This allowed the nearly dry brush technique to create the reflections on the water.
Watercolour
Watercolour
Acrylic
Watercolour
This is the same subject as the previous painting but done in acrylic.
Top left is the photograph from which I made 3 different paintings…

Destruction and Redemption

humanist55

Poetry Postcard Festival 2025 Received Postcard Cento

I: Destruction

People are waking in the night
hearts racing, blood pounding
dreams, fantasies, deceptions, escape
The future is – unexplainable
I try not to disturb them
when I slowly reach my hand toward
the culture that informed my values…
Cruel and crude, greedy old man
— shouting, destroying
the Bad King who demands from him,
the Good Kingdom
his world has become much smaller
a pretty close second
Puppets! Who is pulling the strings?
Like my heart, they did not weep
another missed connection, warped, failed
shouting colour into gray
streets where no one listens
the beauty of the Badlands

We know so little – despite knowing so much
Consumption society has chewed up
spit out this vast and beautiful continent.
transported in cardboard boxes
to lockers at Hub Food
discouraged now as our progress is torn down,
a government being dismantled
thinking then it can’t happen here. But it does
I’m not sure there is enough of me today
bobbing movement of nature
you are missed daily
somewhere unknown,
another world away;
it was there
….no more
what if I told you
still, I hope for forgiveness…
the suggestion of brokenness
the promise of wholeness
we are all a part of everything
– I can’t help hoping

II: Redemption
if humans could fly,
would we ever walk?
around my imagination
whatever you want’s okay!
I close my eyes
and breathe in fireweed
your magic encapsulates me
waiting for the perfect day
that clear blue sky
is here year round
stairway to heaven
sun drops sparkle air
to reach, always, for the light
someone is thinking of me
remembering gratitude’s
call to learn what
was above and
below
today’s sun reluctantly begins
to set…

Poets and lines:-
Penelope Moffet 1-2, Jerrold Narland 3, Kerfe Roig 4, Susan Montgomery 5-6, Lawrence Pevec 7, Nancy R. Parr 8-9, Emily Bernhardt 10-11, Anon. 12, Grant Swados 13, Margie Ripperger 14, Anon. 15, Akua Lezli Hope 16, Jeannine Jordan 17-18, , Mary Mueller 19, Cassandra Bissel 20, Suzanne Harris 21-22, Karen Keltz 23-24, Ruth Vanklstine 25-26, Laura Gamache 27, Anon. 28, Lulu 29,  Dava Wharton 30, Margaret Roncone 31-32, Rebecca 33-34, Muriel Karrr 35, Lisa Humphrey 36, Anon. 37-38, Nitya Prema 39, Karen Loeb 40, Amy Leonard 41-42, Donita Ries 43, Sandra Gadjewski 44, Diana Kolpak 45-46, Margaret Hill-Daniels 47, Cathy Wetter 48, Mary Skeen 49-50, Lynn Caldwell 51, Susan Vespoli 52, Julie Naslund 53, Angela Marie Ebba 54, Lula 55, P. O’Neill 56-58,Pence 59.

Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in OpenLinkNight invites us to submit a poem of our choice…

This cento poem takes lines from all the postcard poems I received during the July-August Poetry Postcard Festival (POPoFest) run by Cascadia Poetics LAB out of Seattle, USA. Most of the participants are American but it seems that many want to send a postcard to poets elsewhere and so all the no-US poets are sent out on a separate list – so that I, as a UK resident, was lucky enough to receive 24 from my Group 4 list and 19 “bonus ” cards from the International list.

Taking a line from each, two poems emerged, which I have chosen to present as Parts 1 & 2 since the bleakness of the first needs amelioration by the optimism of the second…

Serendipitously, Björn’s optional prompt on this occasion was the writing of letters and the idea of the POPoFest, is to write Epistolary poems to the recipient that reference the image on the postcard, to write spontaneously without editing. I chose to reclaim my painting skills this year and sent 31 original paintings out, one of which is shown below…

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 2024 #9 & 10

humanist55

Dear Francoise
A little peek on Google Maps
shows me that Hedgesville
is the most charming of small towns
deep in W. Virginia’s Appalachians
and I picked this card because
it seemed “homespun”
though in truth it is the creation
of Artificial intelligence
if I may call it that…
I guess there are a lot of pictures
of the work of crafters for
an A. I. to learn from and oblige me
though in truth I can knit,
crochet, sew and embroider
as well as any man I know
but these little hearts could do
as ideas for “real-world” art
Much Love
Andrew

I sent a card but cannot match it to the picture on the front of the card and so #9 is my poem only…
If Emily Darby of Group 10 would care to DM me I would be most obliged…

Dear Emily
They say we
never really lose a memory
but if the mind is a palace
ever-expanding as we age
then for sure, we forget
how to find our way
through the labyrinth of corridors
where in places, ceilings have collapsed
and should we revisit darker passages
we should trail a long string
so we may retrace our steps
and not get lost for good.
But with each exploration
we may map the past
– define our own archaeology…

Thank you for your lovely
card of Mont Blanc, whose style
I adore… Much Love – Andrew

Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 2024 #1

humanist55

Dear Chastity
I write to you seated
at a boulangerie in Boulogne
on the last day of a roadtrip
holiday around northern France.
You are my first PoPoFest
card this year and I must
once again choose a card
for an unknown correspondent
so for this magical moment
I have chosen a Witches Cat
a la mode ‘Steam Punk’
and I hope it finds you well
and equally looking forward
to 31 poems à un étranger…

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 second year and I was on List 10. 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 16 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent.
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…