Dear reader, apologies for the delay in this post. I’ve been a bit slammed at work lately and due to some poor planning missed my usual Friday deadline and wasn’t able to get this out until today.
I recently saw an ad on the London Underground for “personalised postcards”, a web site you can send photos to, write messages to, and somebody will send off your postcards to your chosen recipients, all around the globe. The advert said that postage was free, included in the price. From the picture on the advert, it also seemed as if the postcard had the text printed onto it by a machine — it wasn’t written by hand. And the font they’d chosen was one designed to resemble a human script. Which only drew more attention to the fact that it was not handwritten.
This struck me as strange — a postcard is like a polaroid. Part of its charm lies precisely in the fact that it is not personalised; that it has something of the cheap and tawdry and forgettable about it.
I recently made a trip to Lisbon, Portugal, the hometown of my partner. Spotting some postcards in a small shop, I had the idea to pick some up and use them to write poems on. This particular trip was tinged quite heavily with sadness at the disappearance of Lisboa antiga — old Lisbon — beneath the febrile rush of tourists paying visits over the last few years. And so I think the postcard did carry some of that polaroid-sense for me when I was writing the poems in this newsletter: that of a medium of communication that is on the cusp of vanishing from our world (and perhaps, in its “spiritual” sense, already has vanished).
I was interested in the postcard as a formal constraint; what is it like to write poems by hand again (I usually write straight on the machine, at least in the last few years), and in such a small space? Below I have included three of my postcard poems — with photos of the postcards themselves, and the poems transcribed below. In some cases I have taken liberties with the transcription to add line breaks or change the odd word here and there.
“I am drinking in a glass of sun…”
I am drinking in a glass of sun Your mother serves fresh cheese, orange juice sweet heady watermelon & bitter coffee in small china cups. Later on we go out for a walk. We continue to play at being boys. The streets are hazy with afternoon blue. A tua amor me faz mal, I say, teasing but really it is all of your mother's cigarettes.
* A tua amor me faz mal — “your love is hurting me”.
Cobblestones
This postcard has two ‘mini’ poems on it; I have transcribed both of them here, one beneath the other.
In Lisbon the cobblestones expand & shrink — mushrooms on a forest floor. --- It's always a bad sign when the gelato places start to move in.
The Peacock Spreads Its Feathers
We turned a corner & there you were. The cobbled streets like mouths filled with broken teeth. Two Japanese tourists were bent down taking photos of you & making cooing sounds, it was in the old part of the town beneath a castle where kings once lived. But you are a feathered dragon & we'd emblazon you upon our flags. What you know is all beauty & nothing of the fear of monarchs. What you'd invented was a way to outlive them.
The image at the top of this post is a painting by the astonishing Portuguese artist Maria-Helena Vieira da Silva. I’ve visited her archive in Lisbon on a couple of occasions and highly recommend it if you are planning a trip to the city. Many of her paintings are exhibited there. I know that there is also at least one in the Tate Modern gallery on the South Bank in London.