Thanks for the Postcards received for the August Poetry Postcard fest 2016

August Poetry Postcard Fest 2016 cards received

And here are the postcards which have made their way across the Atlantic... all 27 of them. I think there are more en route for those who have carried the fest on into September.

In the mean time my thanks to Linda Malnack, Mary Beth Frezon, Rachel Barber, Pat Mirza, Lucia Lemieux, Sara Jameson, Rita Chapman, Karen York, H.V. Cramond, Amy Miller, Laura Snyder, Peggy Miller, L Lisa Lawrence, Gay Guard-Chamberlain, Gail Eisenhart, Christine Irving, Carla Shafer,Will Reger, Linda Barnes, Courtney LeBlanc, Rich, Roberta Feins, Jessie Lyle, Danita Smead, Marcela Villar M, Marc Thompson and the person from the UK who sent the M.C Escher card and a backwards poem.

Most of all thanks to Paul Nelson and Lana Hechtman Avers whodreamed up the whole enterprise.It's become part of my summer.

August Poetry Postcard fest 2016

The poetry postcards from fellow poets continued to arrive until recently. So now it's time to look back on August and a month of writing and receiving poetry postcards.

Collage cards made by Caroline Davies

I was far better prepared this year with more than enough cards to allow me to write 31 poems to send to the other members of group 4. They are all based in the USA and I'm in the UK so I knew not to wait until the postal service started delivering cards before I got going. Some people who have taken part before are highly organised, but I just had a stack of cards to work from and began with the first card and first poem written about the Himalyan blue poppy on the card. Later in the month gorgeous hand-made cards arrived on my doorstep. These and a trip to East Anglia inspired me to get out scissors and glue to make some of my own cards - see above for the set of Snape Maltings cards. I only hope that they got through the post OK as they went out without envelopes.One of the participants Terry Holzman had the good sense to use envelopes.

I didn't write poems every single day. Some days I wrote several cards as the poems seemed to come in a rush. I made the happy discovery in my stash of a set of postcards of Greek art and artefacts from the British Museum which made me want to revisit Greece but which provided lots of inspiration and some of my multi-card days.
There were other days when we were busy with school holidays that I knew I wasn't going to get a chance to write and that was fine so long as I caught up at the end of the week.
Later on in the month I was able to write response cards to the poems I'd received which was good too.

So now I'm going back through my fuzzy snapshots to type up the poems and to decide which to submit for the anthology being produced to celebrate ten years of August poetry postcarding.

August Poetry Postcard Fest 2016 - ten years of postcards

It's time to register for the annual jamboree of poetry postcards organised by Paul Nelson and Lana Ayers. The countdown clock shows there's only a few days to go before registrations close. Once you've signed up you'll receive a list of the other 31 members of your group and it will be time to start writing cards to them.

This will be my third year of taking part and it brings such joy to August. I'm usually the lone UK participant in my group and sometimes have a little bit of a wait before the postcards start arriving from the USA.

This year I am much better prepared and already have more than enough postcards to allow me to write a postcard a day. I learned from my experience of the first year that only having just enough cards meant that I kept putting the less inspiring cards to the bottom of the heap. Since then I have been collectiong (stockpiling?) cards during the year so I have plenty. Heck this year thanks to Amy Souza I even have some hand-made cards.