{"id":4049,"date":"2013-09-30T17:04:44","date_gmt":"2013-09-30T17:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/?p=4049"},"modified":"2013-09-30T17:04:44","modified_gmt":"2013-09-30T17:04:44","slug":"postcard-poems-in-the-archives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/2013\/09\/30\/postcard-poems-in-the-archives\/","title":{"rendered":"Postcard Poems in the Archives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephanie Anderson is a\u00a0PhD\u00a0candidate in English at the University of Chicago and the recipient of a 2013 Strochlitz Travel Grant.\u00a0Travel grants are\u00a0awarded bi-annually to scholars\u00a0and students to support their travel to and research\u00a0in the Dodd Research Center’s Archives and Special Collections.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

These days, when I\u2019m thinking of a friend, I usually toss off a quick text or email.\u00a0 But a few weeks ago I stumbled upon a postcard image of Robert Burns\u2019s cottage, and I had to send it to my mother, a Burns fan.\u00a0 The simple act of addressing and sending the postcard reminded me what a joy postcards can be; my mother would know right away why I had sent the card.\u00a0 Postcards anticipate some sort of response, even if it\u2019s not a written one. In that regard, they are like poems \u2013 often understated, yet capable of signifying a great deal; sometimes intended for a particular addressee yet also circulating, exposed, in public. And like poems, their text is not their only means of signifying; it is generally only one component of the entire \u201cmessage.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The postcard\u2019s other marks of distance \u2013 foreign stamps, the obtrusive postmark, the image on the front (which, as with the postcard to my mother, may be more \u201cprivate\u201d than the text on the back, as it can represent a mental placement of the addressee in the sender\u2019s position or thoughts for reasons that an over-hearer\/reader may not be able to intuit) \u2013 can be just as weighty. In other words, often it is the entire object <\/i>or one of its components that signifies more than the epistolary text. As Derrida says, \u201cWhat I prefer, about post cards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso. Nor what is the most important, the picture or the text, and in the text, the message or the caption, or the address.\u201d[1]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The postcard tracks the movement of the sender, and confirms the fact that the other is still in the world.<\/p>\n

Members of the group of poets known as the \u201cSecond Generation New York School\u201d (active from about 1960 to the present) used postcards as a primary form of communication. The cards were printed en masse to advertise readings; they were handwritten en masse as invites to parties and celebrations. Presses printed individual poems on them to advertise books. For the artist Joe Brainard as well as others, they suited his interest in assemblage and his reclamation of kitsch. He tirelessly sent vast numbers of postcards, such that their saturation became, for their recipients, a form of articulating presence \u2013 and as evidenced in a letter from Bill Berkson, Brainard even considered starting a postcard company.[2]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> We can assume that for the group, the exchange of postcards can be seen as a form of playful conversation.<\/p>\n

At the Dodd Research Center’s Archives and Special Collections\u00a0this summer, I had the \"berkson_notleycard1\"<\/a>pleasure of looking through archives of several \u201cSecond Generation New York School\u201d participants, including Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, and Larry Fagin. A chapter of my dissertation examines the epistolarity of Ted Berrigan\u2019s The Sonnets<\/i>, and so I was very excited to come upon letters and postcards throughout these archives.<\/p>\n

Berrigan wasn\u2019t a prolific letter writer, but he did like postcards quite a lot; at the time of his death in 1983 he was working on a series of poems written on postcards. The poet and Berrigan\u2019s widow Alice Notley reports that though these blank postcards were printed by the Alternative Press, they were 4\u00bd by 7 inches, distributed in groups of 500, and given to other artists and writers as well.[3]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> The appeal of the postcard, Notley suggests, is its materiality; it is a \u201cblock\u201d-like unit.[4]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a> She explains how Berrigan used the postcard:<\/p>\n

The postcard poem was a form dominated by the size of the card, though a relatively longer poem could be written on a card if Ted shrank his handwriting. Ted immediately used semi-collaboration as a way into the poems, inducing everyone he knew to write a line or draw an image on a postcard. He later eliminated the names of the \u201cfacilitators,\u201d except for the occasional dedication. The poems are often epigrammatic, but are just as likely to be longer; they chronicle, not so explicitly, a difficult year\u2026[5]<\/sup><\/sup><\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Bill Berkson papers contain one beautiful example of such a collaborative postcard, which has a \u201ctrillium\u201d in the background painted by Notley (the back is empty). According to a note in his papers, Berkson\u00a0received the postcard in 1983, after Berrigan’s death. \"berkson_notleycard2re\"<\/a> The smooth and luscious lines of Notley\u2019s watercolor flower provide an interesting contrast to the card\u2019s text, which begins (after listing the address to situate the card\u2019s production) \u201cI stand in the dock in judgement \/ literally already condemned, but am \/ here to be informed\u2026\u201d The second slash is actually present in the text, insinuating that Berrigan conceived of the lines as poetry but perhaps a poetry still in a nascent or draft state.<\/p>\n

The remainder of the text goes on to question groupings such as the \u201cSecond Generation New York School\u201d tag that I employed above.\u00a0 Berrigan was at this point seen as central to the \u201cgroup,\u201d and here he name-drops other artists (Lorenzo Thomas and Kathy Acker) to poke fun at his placement vis-\u00e0-vis the public perception of the \u201cgroup,\u201d suggesting that aligning his own work with that of Lorenzo Thomas and Kathy Acker is a mistake. One aspect of their work\u2019s reception, he says, is its ability to \u201cprovoke angry \/ exchanges + bloody fist fights,\u201d an end his work cannot accomplish. He will, instead, simply attempt to communicate: \u201c\u2026so, what I am \/ going to do is talk, which is what I do plus read \/ my poems.\u201d His \u201cone word of advice\u201d to Berkson, scrawled almost illegibly in the upper right-hand corner, is \u201cDuck,\u201d perhaps partially intended to pun on predictability. The image of the flower contains an upward trajectory in its lines, some of which guide the eye toward this right-hand corner, but semantics of the word hiding there suggest the opposite movement. \u201cDuck,\u201d as a verb: keep your head down, keep moving, don\u2019t get hit by the incoming \u201cbloody fist[s].\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t take this statement to be apolitical, or against aesthetic provocation; I read it instead as a wariness of generalizing about groups and group labels. It is desirable to be included \u2013 or to have others included with you \u2013 in such grouping, even with the tongue-in-cheek tone (\u201cI am pleased and flattered \/ to be joined in such noble \/ company,\u201d he writes). But as in a boxing match, one can only avoid being knocked out (critically pigeon-holed and labeled, we might say) by remaining unpredictable, both in aesthetics and in perceived group affiliations. Hand-delivered to Berkson, it has a specific addressee, yet the suggestions Berrigan makes about aesthetic groupings seems directed toward a larger audience. Of course, he couldn\u2019t have anticipated that 30 years later, a budding scholar would be thumbing through his correspondence looking for clues about his work and milieu \u2013 yet the postcard felt like it was intended to be overread by a recipient exactly like myself, in order to complicate and nuance conceptions of poetic form and coterie labeling<\/p>\n

– Stephanie Anderson<\/p>\n
\n
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[1]<\/a> The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond<\/i> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[2]<\/a> \u201cUnited Artists Papers,\u201d Archive (UCSD, n.d.), Box 1 Folder 9, MSS 0012, Mandeville Special Collections Library, UCSD.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[3]<\/a> The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan<\/i> (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 12\u201313.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[4]<\/a> \u201cIt\u2019s a very graspable, manageable unit.\u201d (See the introduction to A Certain Slant of Sunlight<\/i> (Oakland, CA: O Books, 1988), n.p.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[5]<\/a> The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan<\/i>, 13.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephanie Anderson is a\u00a0PhD\u00a0candidate in English at the University of Chicago and the recipient of a 2013 Strochlitz Travel Grant.\u00a0Travel grants are\u00a0awarded bi-annually to scholars\u00a0and students to support their travel to and research\u00a0in the Dodd Research Center’s Archives and Special … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9NKyO-13j","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4049"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4049"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4057,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4049\/revisions\/4057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}