Guest Postcard Fanatic: Charles Rammelkamp

I am working on five hours of sleep today. What kept me up until after midnight?

Purple Fever!

I predicted a Ravens
Championship months ago.

What woke me up at five this morning? Stupid body clock. 

While I recover from the anxiety of watching that down-to-the-last-second nail biter, author Charles Rammelkamp is taking over blogging duties.

I met Charles at the Lit & Art reading a couple of weekends ago. I read some poems from the 44 Postcard Project. The next day, I received a message from Charles.

"I LOVE POSTCARDS! My twin brother in Los Angeles and I send each other a postcard every day."

I had to know more. Today, Charles is visiting Author Amok to tell us about this tradition.

Charles' brother fills each card with details about his day.

My twin brother Robert and I exchange postcards maybe 5 or 6 days a week. He lives in Los Angeles, and I live in Baltimore. In the past twenty years we have actually seen each other only three times: in 1994 at our father’s funeral in Michigan, in 2005 at our older brother’s funeral in Albuquerque, and this past August, 2012, at our mother’s funeral in Michigan. We’re the last survivors clinging to the life-raft of the nuclear family. We sign our cards with the names of the ghosts of the past from our little Michigan town. “Love, Roger Marshall,” Bob might sign and I might respond with a card signed “Love, Sequanda Watts.” Totemic figures from our long-ago childhood, people we haven’t seen in almost half a century.

Queen of National Hot Dog Week from
Beauty Queens of the '40s and '50s
2729 Pomegranate Communications, Inc.

Though we haven’t spent much time together, we’re never out of touch – phone calls, letters, e-mails, and, most conspicuously, postcards. And as twins –fraternal, not identical – we figure prominently in the novels of each other’s lives. If Facebook is e-mail with lipstick, postcards are the haiku of correspondence, vital little messages there for anybody to read, private conversation that’s nevertheless like graffiti on the sides of buildings.

Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros
By William Adlophe Bouguereau
The J. Paul Getty Museum

Postcards come in many varieties, some purchased at tourist shops during vacations, some from art museum gift shops; many are freebies picked up at random from restaurants and stores, promotional “Go Cards” that advertise different businesses.

My brother has always been a traveler, spent many years in Mexico and Latin America; he met his wife, Lourdes, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, her hometown. Since resuming life in the United States, he has settled in Los Angeles, about two decades there now, by my reckoning, where he translates for Spanish speakers in the LA County court system. But he still takes interesting trips to places where he collects postcards to send me – Tahiti, Tunisia, Turkey, Panama, Cuba.

I love the postcard books published by Pomegranate in California: Black Fives: African-American Basketball Teams, 1904-1950 Book of Postcards, The Reading Woman Book of Postcards, Adolphe-William Bouguereau Book of Postcards, No More! A Gallery of Protests and Demonstrations Book of Postcards, Beauty Queens of the 40’s and 50’s….

I also pick up cards from the yoga studio, restaurants, poetry readings, art galleries, service areas on the turnpike. They arrive in the mail from literary magazines, animal rescue outfits, philanthropic organizations, travel promos: artifacts of American civilization, fodder for time capsules.

Charles Rammelkamp lives in Baltimore. His latest book, Fusen Bakudan (“Balloon Bombs” in Japanese), was published in 2012 by Time Being Books. It’s a collection of monologues involving missionaries in a leper colony in Vietnam during the war. Charles edits an online literary journal called The Potomac -http://thepotomacjournal.com/. He is also a fiction editor for The Pedestal –http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com. Check out his fiction feature in issue #70, stories about a character named Mark Nipple. http://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gallery.php?item=22473

Order at www.timebeing.com. Use coupon code CHARLES for a discount.

“Postcards are the haiku of correspondence” is a phrase that spoke to me. They provide windows, brief glimpses into the lives of the writer.

Thanks, Charles, for sharing your postcard story today.

The next postcard/poem is #22. Interesting numerology, as we are talking about twins. It is also the halfway point of the project. I will post that poem, which I had to talk out of its burning desire to be a sonnet, tomorrow.

(Charles and all – Postcard #22 is also from a book published by Pomegranate, 30 Contemporary Women Artists.)

Groundhog's Day

Edgar Allan Poe wishes you a happy February 2. The Raven and his crew are storming New Orleans tomorrow. 

If we do have six more weeks of winter, let's hope our ebony birds will beguile our sad fancies into smiling on Sunday night.

Do I have a postcard for the occasion? But of course.

Poetry Postcard 16

Has this ever happened to you? You're given (or give yourself) a writing prompt. You sit with it. Nothing clicks. You get frustrated. Still, nothing. You fume at the prompt. Finally, you find a way to alter or massage the writing assignment so that you can write about what was on your mind the whole time.

That is the story of Poetry Postcard 16. It was January 12. I asked my husband to pick (eyes closed) the next postcard for a poem. And he picked:

Front: “1010:--Sunken Garden, Forest Park, St. Louis, Mo.”

Back: Beacon Series

Remember when postcards were one cent? Me either.

I tried some of my usual "ways in." First, I researched the Sunken Garden in Missouri. It was part of the World's Fair. You know, the one in the Judy Garland movie.



(I could have written about the World's Fair. After all, my parents met at the '64 World's Fair in New York.)

Forest Park is still there (check out the website Forest Park Forever), but I couldn't find any modern reference to the Sunken Garden online. Sigh.

My next attempt at a hook for writing was the card's visual elements. But I couldn't find anything exciting to write about.

Still, this was January 12, which was nearly a significant date in our family's history. I found a way to write about that, and connect it -- circumspectly -- to the image on the postcard. 

What I ended up with is a sort of meta-cognitive poem, one that owns up to the fact that this whole project is a literary conceit.

January, Julia

I asked my husband to pick a card
any card for January 12, which was --
in the year 2000 -- our daughter's
due date, though we did  not know
yet that she was she.
He closed his eyes and pulled
"Sunken Garden, Forest Park,
St. Louis, Mo." a noble promenade
past flower beds, every strolling
visitor in suit and hat, fit to be seen
as I wished to be -- my hair cut
and styled, fingertips tulip red --
when this child arrived, just
four days late, who (randomly
it seemed) became our daughter.

by Laura Shovan

Our daughter turned thirteen last week. Thanks to all of you who sent birthday wishes. She didn't love this poem. Her exact words were, "Are you saying I'm random?"

I stammered through an explanation of how, during pregnancy, we don't know who our child will be. There's only a suggestion of personality in the growing baby's movements. Then, when the child is born, she could be no one else. 

My husband's birthday is next week. Then my son, the dog, and me -- all in quick succession. Throw in a long list of friends and relatives born in Jan/Feb and you have Shovan Birthday Season. You know what would make this year's birthday even more magical? A Super Bowl win.

Yes, my hair is more purple than usual,
but it could be worse...

I could be this guy,

or my mom could dress me in a
doggie Ravens jersey. Embarrassing.

Poetry Friday: Poetry Postcard 12

Highway and Byways, by Paul Klee
wikipaintings.org

The 44 Postcard Project is finally tripping the light ekphrastic -- getting all artsy. (Poets.org defines ekphrasis as "poetry confronting art." So there.)

One of the lovely ladies who donated old postcards for my project sent an art card with this painting by abstract expressionist Paul Klee.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klee

The painting resembles an oddly pieced quilt. Or a step-pyramid. Or a poem by Baltimorean Chris Toll.

Let's start with Chris Toll. The poet, who was active in the local literary scene, died unexpectedly this fall. I'd never met him, but we were Facebook friends. 

I was at a reading a few months after he passed away and glanced at one of Toll's books of poetry. There was a poem that ran down the page in several ... I wouldn't call them columns. The words were arranged on the page as if they were sprays of water coming down from four separate shower heads. 

It was the tumbling down the page quality of Toll's poem that connected, for me, with Klee's painting.

Toll was known for his experimentation with form
and playfulness with language.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get my hands on a book of Toll's work quickly. I moved and did some research on the painting.

Klee painted Highway and Byways after a trip to Egypt, December 1929/January 1930. Some critics say that the horizontal blue and gray area at the top is supposed to be the Nile, Egypt's great highway. The verticals are fields, or roads and paths leading to the Nile or -- there are all sorts of interpretations.

www.globalresearch.ca

First draft: some weird combination of

1) my memory of Toll's poetic form

2) sketchy details from post-college trip to Egypt

3) facts about the painting's history.

Each of these elements had its own skinny-pyramid-like stanza running down the page. Clumsy.

Eventually, I ended up with this poem (very experimental, for me), combining pieces of all three first-draft stanzas, with a dash of stylistic playfulness a la Chris Toll:

Swimming in the Nile, Age 21,

with My Grandmother

After Highways and Byways, Paul Klee (1929)

The/re is in

Klee’s parallels so-

me stickiness,

something of

gran(ny)te layers,

storeys high-

roglyhpics faded

as a girl’s thighs

viewed two feet

be neat/h the

mur(dar)k surf

face. The river

never tips

its palm, re

veals no drown(ed)

& out god,

no ancient sun/

ken byways, no

sun-kissed

virgin’s bliss

full fortune.

by Laura Shovan

In other 44 Postcard Project news, I have written 21 poems. That's nearly halfway.

It is also the equivalent of that moment in a marathon (disclaimer: I have never run a marathon) where you say "I can't do this -- I'm terrible at running. I should try flower arranging instead."

Me running. Not a pretty sight.

The last three things I have written for the project: poetic lightweights, devoid of meaning. Fluff.

The recent poems include rebellious facial moles, angry chickadees and hot-pink evening gloves (I swear, this will make sense when you see postcards 19, 20 and 21).

My brain is screaming like a sprained hamstring. "I have been stretched to my limit," it says. It wimps out. It whimpers, "How about a limerick today? They're easy."

I'm getting a little punch drunk on the project. Maybe this weekend, I'll turn the corner.

Some info on the stash of postcards I discovered (in my own basement -- sheesh):

It's not "Where's Waldo?" but "Have you seen Hawthorne?"

From my 1989 summer at the University of London, I have:

2 from the National Portrait Gallery

1 from the British Library

1 from the Victoria & Albert Museum

2 miscellaneous art-photography cards.

Somewhere, there is a photo of these postcards tacked to the wall of my London dorm room.

From my BFA at New York University and various visits to Manhattan, I have:

2 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

1 from the Museum of American Folk Art (lesser known, awesome)

1 from the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.

And then a bunch from books of postcards that my mother -- and possibly others -- gave me as stocking stuffer/ birthday gift fillers over the years.

5 Great Authors (Library of Congress)

16 30 Contemporary Women Artists (Pomegranate)

5 Matisse: A Postcard Book (Running Book Press)

1 Women Who Dared (LOC) -- I'm pretty sure I have more of these tucked away somewhere --

and 4 random cards from author/illustrators. Revealing to me that this obsession with postcards is not new.

You can still sign up for a poetry postcard. I'd love to poem-bomb your mailbox. Leave a comment and we'll connect by email.

Wishing you a happy Purple Poetry Friday. GO RAVENS! I will take it as a sign from the universe that VIOLET Nesdoly is hosting today.

Full postcard information:

PAUL KLEE (1879-1940)

Hauptweg un Nebenwere, 1929, R 10 (90)

Chemin principal et chemins secondaires
Mainway and sideways
Gemälde, Oelfarben auf Leinwarnd,

Keilrahmen, 83/67 cm, signiert rechts unten
Museum Ludwig Köln

VD 208 – Vontobel, Feldmeilen/Zurich – Printed in Switzerland
©1985, Copyright by COSMOPRESS, Geneva

The one and only NFL team named for a work of literature.

Poetry Friday: Thankful for Words

Happy post-Thanksgiving, everyone! Today, I am thankful for my Friday morning yoga class. That combination of movement and stillness sounds like the perfect thing after the rush of preparing a meal (I’m sous chef to my husband) and a lot of couch-time watching football.

Yesterday, my son’s high school participated in the 93^rd annual Turkey Bowl. It’s a famous Baltimore-region high school football rivalry. Reportedly, 15,000 fans showed up at Ravens football stadium to watch the game. My teen is in the marching band. It was so much fun to see them perform their halftime show on my favorite football team’s field.

My teen is in there somewhere!

Giving thanks for my favorite team, #1 in their division.

I was driving to pick up my son and some band-mates after the game, and heard the radio program “GivingThanks.” The show included a conversation with the poet Dana Gioia. He headed the NEA under president Bush2. 

(I once heard two poets arguing about how to pronounce Gioia's name. It's Joy-a.)

Gioia read two poems, the one below and “Prayer at Winter Solstice.” The images in this poem struck me, though I’m still thinking about why it fits the theme of “Thanksgiving.”

Words

By Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

Read the rest of the poem at the Academy of American Poets.

If you have time today, after packing up all your leftovers, I recommend listening to the full radio broadcast of Giving Thanks here. And a review of Gioia’s latest book, Pity the Beautiful, is at the Weekly Standard.

Another thing I am thankful for is having time with my children this weekend. No school. No games. No competitions. Just time to get caught up and be together. 

Thanks to Mary Lee at A Year of Reading for hosting today's Poetry Friday Roundup. Click through to find more poetry posts.

 

The Ravens

You may not know this, but I am a die-hard Ravens fan.

It started in quarterback Joe Flacco's rookie year, when they made it to the playoffs. I became slightly obsessed. I started listening to sports talk radio. At first it was just during the playoffs, then it was all season long.

I have a Ravens jersey and Ravens earrings (both gifts). A Ravens stocking for the holidays and a wreath on the door with snowmen dressed in Ravens tees. On game day, I make the dog wear his Ravens jersey (he hates it).

Sam mopes every time we put him in his jersey.

The Ravens have been in the playoffs for four straight years, but have not been in the Superbowl since they won in 2000. Not coincidentally, we moved to Baltimore just a few months prior to that game.

When the Ravens lost tonight, I thought, we may be the only NFL team named after a work of literature, but maybe we should have picked a different work of literature. Something uplifting. Something you can get behind. Something with a more "We're going to kick butt" line than the opening of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven":

"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,"

It's not exactly the poetry of champions.

While I am not proposing a new poem and name for Baltimore's football team, I did need to work out my feelings of anger, disappointment and overall nausea after the loss. To the Patriots. On a flubbed 32-yard field goal attempt.

Ravens are purple and black -- to represent the dark circles under Poe's eyes?

Naturally, I turned to  poetry. I give you my version of Poe's poem, with apologies to its original author.

The Ravens

by Laura Shovan

Once upon a Sunday dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over a decision to run for a conversion on down four --

While I cried, instead of clapping, suddenly there came a snapping,

As of dying wings a-flapping, flapping on the stadium floor--

"'Tis some dream," I muttered, "a figment flapping on the stadium floor--

               Not the Ravens, I implore!"

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak of winter;

And each hopeful ember dying in our hearts, now sore.

Eagerly I wished for spring; -- another team with the Superbowl Ring

And Charm City past the sting — the sting as we lost and swore--

For the rare and glorious trophy which escapes our grasp once more--

               Nameless here for evermore.

And with players sad and humbler, the gleam off of each purple number

They almost thrilled me— but flubbed a tie with errors never seen before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating,

"Not the Patriots, I’m entreating, celebrating on the stadium floor--

My eyes deceived me, the kick went through, of that I am sure;--

               A bad camera angle, nothing more."

Presently my dread grew stronger; I could avoid fate no longer,

"Kids," said I, "Don’t bug your mother right now, I implore;

“The fact is I was hoping we would win and now I’m moping,

To see my Ravens choking. They were knocking on the Patriots’ door!

That I scarce can believe I heard the correct score;

               It was a dream and nothing more.”

Deep into this darkness peering, long I sat there staring, fearing,

Doubting, cursing dreams a Ravens fan could have no more;

Hope is gone, our will is broken, on the team bus, no words spoken,

A deathly pall, no one dares whisper, “But we had a chance to score.”

The clock ran out. An echo murmurs through the streets of Baltimore --

               Another year of Nevermore.

Read the original poem, "The Raven," at the Poetry Foundation. 

Feel free to share this with anyone who is feeling my pain.