Sketches & Secrets
‘… stick secrets under stamps, conceal
guilt with ink and hand-scrawl love…’
Lines from my ‘Decadence’ poem, realised in Karen’s latest letter to me – a secret written under the envelope seal:
Secret message - will it survive?
It was very difficult to open it without destroying the secret, but finally I found the right way of tearing the paper. I won’t share the message here, because it is, after all, a secret.
Today I’ve been reading about the world of Mail Art. Some say Mail Art was started by Cleopatra, when she sent herself to Caesar in a rolled up carpet. According to mail-art.de, Mail Art is about ‘sending something artful’ – exactly what every letter from Karen is to me.
I also found some poems by Bruce Snider about letters, post and postmen. Here’s an excerpt from ‘Nostalgia’, from his collection The Year We Studied Women:
There are no letters,
just flyers for cheap washing machines,
ethernet lines surging with e-mail,
telephones crackling
like hot grease. Outside,
the postman wonders
past junk shops and paper
stores, listening to the old postcards
hum quietly their messages:
having a great time, Dear Mary,
why don’t you write anymore?
-
There are also poems called ‘Letter to an Imagined Lover’ and ‘True, My Father is a Postman’ in the collection. I had no idea the book touched on letter writing when I ordered it on Amazon. I feel the ideas in ‘Nostalgia’ are similar to those in ‘Decadence’, which still needs to be reworked…
Open Notebooks has inspired me to make my own notebooks more exciting. I’ve bought some soft pencils and have started sketching again after years. Here are some sketches from the Museum of Art and History in Geneva:
Jeune fille trayant une vache (after Karel Dujardin) and other sketches
Messy page with horse, pistol and plate pattern
La charité romaine profile
My sketches are also influenced by my correspondence with Karen:
Lakeside swan
I’m writing, but not always the poems I think I’ll write or the ones I plan to write. Instead they are more like sketches, arriving when I’m walking and something – a thought or an object – catches my attention and I take it home for my notebook. I love this website by Jane Campion, the director of Bright Star. It’s basically an open scrapbook: www.brightstarthemovie.com. Oops! Karen don’t look yet. It follows my next letter…
Tags: Bright Star, Bruce Snider, Jane Campion, Karen and Miriam correspond, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Mail Art, Miriam Nash, Nostalgia, Swan