It's Post Card Poetry Tuesday again for me. Today I'll script another poem on post card and drop it in the mail (yes snail mail) to Ivy who is across the Atlantic in Wales.
This experience (writing a post card poem and exchanging it with another poet on a weekly basis) has been a good one for several reasons. It provides a incentive to set down on a specific day and create a new work under a bit of pressure. By mailing it that day, you don't have the ability to tinker with it a lot. I certainly believe in rewrites. And rewrites and rewrites... (you get the point) but there is something to be said as well for letting your creativity work in this sententious period of time and become what it will and nothing more. Sometimes you can overthink something and that can actually kill the creative process.
There is not illusion here. I don't believe I am writing a defining opus on these postcards, but I was quite pleased for example with the second Tuesday's work. In fact it was the center of a lot of attention when I shared it at one of my writing groups after the fact.
It is also exciting to see the work in the poets own script. Admittedly Ivy can write quite small and it at times has taken on an experience not unlike translation. [chuckle] I have had on one occasion to actually rewrite one of Ivy's in my own longhand and work a bit to finally determine two words. I suspect my own writing is perhaps just as challenging to read. At any rate, we are each getting a poem in the poet's own handwriting. Which is kind of cool.
This is the fourth and final Tuesday of the month... which is kind of sad I guess. I am hoping as I put my mind to work on this later today that I will indeed come up with something I am satisfied with as it falls into the mail box out of my reach. For when that happens, there are no take-backs.
There is this international factor as well. Of course two people in the same city could be exchanging poems but in this instance, the exchange is truly international.
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