postcard poems

This is Rolf Parker and Eric Blomquist. After our reading, we (Tara Gorvine included) went to Flat Street Brew Pub for drinks and dinner. I'd tried taking video, but it didn't come out too well, especially since the battery on the camera blitzed out shortly after I started taking photos.

Other news: I've been asked to teach a couple of poetry workshops for an extra-cirricular series focusing on creative writing, for middle schoolers. I'm excited about it. That's happening on November.

Projects: Throughout September, some friends and I participated in a postcard poetry exchange. Meaning, each day we wrote a poem on the back of a postcard and sent it to the next person down the list of participants. It was really fun. And though I started late, I was able to get all but one sent out before the end of the month.

My method: creating them on my computer and laying them out in postcard-sized boxes and printing four at a time. There were some days I wrote 8 or 12 small poems, just so I could catch up. Surprizingly, the work wasn't that hard. I had plenty of material to work with. And though many of the poems were predictable (to me at least), I liked them, for their readability, their music, and my relationship to them. Most of them I was proud to send off to my friends, unedited as they were. It was a great reminder to me that I liked writing poetry and that I have a natural talent for it.

The best part of this whole exchange,though, was receiving a steady stream of poems in the mail. Each of them speaking, as if to me personally, of flowers and monkeys and mermaids and conviction. It was awesome. And this most of all, helped to fuel my writing.