Work in Progress: Postcard Poems

I have been remiss in posting new work in progress as I have been putting quite a bit of effort into the Model Consumer photo contest (www.KurtColeEidsvig.com/contest). This is turning out to be extremely exciting and will provide lots of great fuel for my next series.

I have also had lots of questions lately on my poetry— what is going on with it? Am I writing? Etc.

It is going. Yes I am writing. I have no idea how to answer the question “etc.”

From time to time I write postcard poems to my friend and the amazing poet, Martin Cockroft. This is a knock-off of the New York School poets who used to do this sort of thing quite a bit, and as Martin and I have collaborated on poems, etc., he tends to be the target of my experiments.

The postcards are a good way to control poem size and form as they only give you so much space. Left to my own devices my poems get pretty long and wordy so constraining them is a great exercise for me.

The pictures above are of the first 2 sections of a series of postcard poems. I am playing with rhyme and narrative-ish style. The form is 18 lines— kind of a sonnet plus 4. There is a set rhyme pattern and form. Each ends with a couplet.

I’d bought this box of postcards a while back— the 20th Century Art Box— with just this in mind. As you can tell, I like using postcards for my work— as with the painting “Precious Gems” as well.

This type of poetry (narrative, rhyme, formal) is so alien to my typical style it forces me to come up with some different stuff. Not sure what I think of these or the series but at the very least it is a good effort.

I’d thought I would write quite a few of these in Westport last week and I was completely wrong. But wanted to share some of my work here. I have hopes that the series will go on for a while, and I also have some other poems and revisions I am working on.

I plan on revising 2 manuscripts for submission for September as well and have just started thinking about that a bit more seriously again— which poems to use, revise, write into, how to order things, etc.