Recently, I received a postcard from a friend I have not seen for
five years. The poscard message was in the form of a short poem. A
postcard has a perfect little square for a poem. You probably have read epistolary poems in the form of letters. Edward Hirsch defines the form:
"The letter poem is addressed to a specific person and written from a
specific place, which locates it in time and space. It imitates the
colloquial familiarity of a letter, though sometimes in elaborate forms. A few well-known letter poems are Ezra Pound’s adaptation of Li Po,
“The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter” (1915) and Auden’s “Letter to Lord
Byron” (1937). These poems are not like actual letters because they are
not addressed to just its recipient; but are always
meant to be overheard by a future reader."
Although a postcard poem is similar to the letter form, it is both shorter and written in a different style.The poem "Postcard from the Heartbreak Hotel" by John Brehm opens with a play on a classic postcard meme:
"Wish you were here instead of me."
Though not a poem, a postcard from the poet Seamus Heaney
briefly and humorously rejects a request to be a judge for one of the
Academy of American Poets poetry competitions. Though he did not use
intentional line breaks, the margin of the card created breaks - much
like a prose poem. I am taking the liberty of giving his message line
breaks.
“Since Purgatory has disappeared
as a concept —
a place or state of temporal punishment -
mankind has been attempting to replace it,
and judging poetry competitions
comes high on the list of substitutions.”
Since this month's call for submissions is not about a topic but about a
form, I chose a poem that would fit a postcard, but it also seems like
it would work as a postcard message. In "Solstice in Truro" by
https://amzn.to/4fSW92I Joshua Weiner,
my teacher-student mind connects solstices to school years and
semesters. The summer solstice in June was sometimes the last day of
school for me in my K-12 years. Summer vacation! The winter solstice was
the end of a marking period or the end of a college semester. A short
break and then into the new year and a new term.
Weiner says
it is a June solstice, but it could easily be the December solstice
starting winter. Truro is a Cape Cod town near where I had stayed for
several week-long poetry workshops in Provincetown on the Cape's tip. I
can imagine the tides and restless sand. A summer solstice is the
longest day of the year when the Sun "pauses" for a moment before
shifting direction. But then there is the sudden entry of his
grandfather into the poem. Those two final lines in this 2023 poem, hit me when I read
them with today's news reports from the war in Ukraine and the sad
winter prospects for that country.
Your task this month is to write a poem that can fit on a postcard.
It should address someone specific, living or dead. If we would
recognize the person's name (a historical figure, a celebrity, maybe a
famous poet), you might mention it, but it might also just suggest the
recipient. Very often postcard messages also mention or suggest the place
where the sender is writing. The shortness of the postcard as a form
encourages us to write down only the most vivid and essential details of
what we are trying to say -- which makes the writing of postcards
rather akin to the writing of poems.
Born
in Boston in 1963, Josh Weiner grew up in Lawrenceville, New Jersey.
He graduated from Northwestern University in 1985, and then entered UC
Berkeley, and received a PhD in 1998. Along the way, he served as the
Writing Coordinator for three years at the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown, MA.
Of this poem, he has said,"‘Solstice in Truro’ is one of those poems
that just slips out and finds its final form very quickly, in an attempt
to respond to my immediate world of sensation. One line led to another,
pretty much in the order in which they appear. The emergence of my
grandfather in the final lines, and the war in Ukraine, too, was a
discovery I wasn’t looking for. I had been reading a lot of Sung and Tang Dynasty poems,
classical poems, over the previous few years, mostly in Red Pine’s
translations. I think you can hear the influences of line and image in
what I wrote.”
Josh lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the novelist Sarah
Blake, and two sons, and teaches literature and poetry workshops at
University of Maryland, College Park, where he is Professor of English.
His website is joshuaweiner.com
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