One of my favourite things about letters is envelopes. I recently received a very exciting one from Karen:

On the back

1) Write a poem where each line begins with a word beginning with ‘O’

2) Write a poem where each line ends with a word ending in ‘O’

3) Write a 10 line poem that takes place at night

4) Write a haiku before opening this letter that anticipates its contents

5) Write a haiku after opening this letter than summarises its contents

It took a whole morning and a large dose of self-restraint to complete the tasks before opening Karen’s letter. Here’s the haiku I wrote just before opening it, anticipating its contents:

Before

One revolution,
a bird, swimming or flying.
Winter, a secret.

When I opened it, I discovered where all the ‘O’s came from:

This wise, old gentleman is neither swimming nor flying.

Our correspondence helps me to play, to not take writing too seriously and to worry less about whether what I write is ‘good’. Here are two of the poems from Karen’s tasks, just for fun:

1) Write a poem where each line begins with a word beginning with ‘O’

Bromo Erupting

On every slope and furrow, it settles,
Ominous thick black ash.
Only the shoots of the green peeking
Onions survive, their smell pressing
Over the landscape, the bikers, the peeling blue vans.
Only the billowing mountain-cloud
Owns its own choices
Out in the flat, marbled lands.
Omniscient
Opulent
Older than ancestors
Open now
Ogled at
Omen.

I recently visited Java, Indonesia, where I stood in front of an erupting Mount Bromo. See my last post.

The word that sparked this poem was actually ‘Onions’. The smell crept into everything.

3) Write a 10 line poem that takes place at night

Last year, I wrote a letter to Karen about the night market in Malacca, Malaysia. This task prompted me to write it into a poem:

Night Market, Malacca

Who will buy the latest suction gadget
from Korea, the magic wallet with no seams
or a potato swirled to a tornado
on a stick? A custard tart, a sweet green blob
of stickiness, a toy Toyota, six pairs
of pink and yellow earrings shaped like keys.
The night breaks out in fairy lights and neon,
boom boxes and kids. Who will try the potion
concocted by the kung fu master
who splits the shells of coconuts with just one finger?

Potato Tornado

I don’t know if Karen has received these poems yet, but she is offline on retreat, so hopefully she will only discover them in the post…

Travel photos by Hristo

A letter for Karen will be dropped into the silver Singaporean postbox later today, but I too have an un-posted postcard.

I just came back from nine days in Java, Indonesia, where I was very pleased with myself for buying stamps at the post office in Yogyakarta, only to arrive at the edge of an erupting Mount Bromo to find no postcards. I suspect I might have found one if the mist hadn’t been so thick, the windows hadn’t rattled and the trembling of the earth hadn’t made me unsteady on my feet.

So in reply, here is my postcard to Karen, complete with stamps:

5.30am, the mist began to clear.

With much love x

A portion of it may even arrive in the post!

It’s been many months since Karen and I blogged about our letters, but offline, our correspondence is alive and in the post. We’ve now been writing to each other for over a year, and these letters, with their free-flow of thoughts, pictures, poems, birds and colourful envelopes have become an essential part of my writing process and my life.

It’s been a year of new places and a whole assortment of post boxes…

I started the year in Geneva, with its famous yellow postboxes

Then back to London, where our letters become more local

... And finally to Singapore, where some colourful postboxes can be found, as well as plain silver ones.

On a trip to Melaka in Malaysia, I also discovered these beauties:

Letterbox at no. 89

Chinese letterbox

Living so far from home, I’ve been surprised to find that my best news from the UK comes by post. Skype, email and facebook would be hard to live without, but they rarely include as much of another person as an eight-page letter. When I’m writing my letters, I feel as if I’m spending some time with Karen, sharing a little piece of my life with her.

Karen and I have noticed that when we were blogging about our letter writing and how it fed into our writing process, our correspondence had a stronger visual element. We sent each other more pictures, collected photographs for the blog of things we were writing about and developed ideas for poems through images as well as words. We’ve decided to try bringing our correspondence back online, to see what happens.

I’ll sign off with some large Indian civets, who often accompany my letters…

This is my first edit of ‘Decadence’. I can almost see the next draft in my mind, so I’m posting this version quickly before it disappears into the waste paper bin – or, more realistically, the stack of lonely files at the back of my hard drive.

I begin all my poems by hand, and I pretty much have to hide my laptop from myself until I’m ready to edit. I’m far too eager to type up a new poem before it’s fully formed and start editing it before it’s even learned to crawl. Then the poem ends up with one leg on the ceiling and the other in the fridge. Not a good look. A keyboard and screen bring out the critic in me. Pen and paper make me more lenient and I can allow myself to write freely. But my laptop is essential when it comes to editing. Here’s the draft:

DECADENCE
Geneva, January 2010

The city’s post boxes are yellow.
Colour of decadence,

of the book that stirs young Dorian Gray
to taste forbidden dreams.

Yellow as Van Gogh’s chair,
as flowers that follow sun or look too long.

While other click and send
I lick and bend brown envelopes,

stick secrets under stamps, conceal
guilt with ink and hand-scrawl love.

What text contains a wet stain
of regret or drop of rain?

Instant messaging can’t hold
the weight of the unsaid.

I revel in the faded; bananas
at the point of turning, old tobaccoed hands.

At the yellow box, I squeeze my letter
once for luck, then let it drop.

I hope it reaches her this week.
My cheeks glow evening suns

as I imagine hands,
the sharp edge of a butter knife,

fingers touching paper,
touching my fingers where I have touched.

And because editing can sometimes lack colour, here’s some yellow I discovered, looking through old photos:

Spring gorse in Findhorn Village, Scotland

Singaporean postbox

The poem hasn’t changed dramatically yet. I’ve played around with the form and put it in couplets (it seems to fit nicely), I’ve tightened up some lines and moved ‘Geneva’ to the subtitle to try and avoid a clunky first line. One subtle change was suggested by Raymond Antrobus – ‘white triangle lids’ has become ‘brown envelopes’. Concrete and definitely better. And how did Raymond come to have a hand in editing this poem? We’re both members of the Vineyard.

The Vineyard is an international, online community of poets, led by Jacob Sam-La Rose. Emerging and established poets share their work, give and receive feedback and discuss anything and everything to do with poetry. Our styles and methods are diverse, but we all share a commitment to working our craft, hard. The ‘yard (as we usually call is) is an essential part of my writing process. If a poem stays in my notebook or on my computer, it usually never makes it out of the house. Sharing my work on the ‘yard gives me the confidence to change it, improve it and eventually share it publicly. Here, you’re getting a peak into the early life of a poem. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t call this ‘ready’.

Miriam sent me an origami Valentine. It was very exciting to receive in the post and I would have posted more on it sooner, but I was ‘between printers’ and have only just got my new scanner up and running. I decided to use it as a base for a freewrite. I’ve never posted a freewrite before. Or written one knowing that it would be public. So here it is: unedited. Cliches and all.

The post has been sneaky. On Thursday I opened my letterbox to find one of my letters to Karen returned by Monsieur La Poste – the address label must have peeled off in the cold interior of the postbox. On the same day, my forward-mail from London arrived, including a card sent by Karen on 17th December… part of our correspondence making a late entrance. In some ways this is apt. Because it takes a while for our letters to travel from Geneva to London and back, they often overlap – I’m not always sure which letter Karen is responding to, but I like the guessing, the calculating, the chance arrivals…

Here is a post-van I caught speeding away in the Old Town:

I don’t think letter writing is dying, but escaping, changing into something else, speeding down the road in a yellow van. I wrote a lot of letters this week, including one to my Godmother, who I had lost contact with for about seven years, and who found me again through my blog. We used to keep a ‘letter book’ – a small book we sent between the UK and the US, writing new entries to each other over time. It was a bit like a secret blog between two people, or a shared notebook.

My 'letter-workshop' from my week of letters

Before I read Karen’s ‘Wing’ on the blog, I received it on the back on a yellow bird. I do think sending a poem in a letter can give it the secrecy to breathe and come alive as Karen quotes below. Secrecy brings excitement, an impulse to continue or take the poem elsewhere. It makes it more like a curious object, that can be looked at from several angles and appear different. It moves it outside of the person who wrote it.

The 'Wing' I received

The yellow messenger

Is Karen is one step ahead of this blog post? Has she received my latest letter? Partners in crime La Poste and Royal Mail keep this a secret…

‘… 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…

Here’s what inspired my first letter-poem to Karen:

Decadence

In Geneva, post boxes are yellow

colour of decadence, of the book

that stirs young Dorian Gray

to taste forbidden dreams.

Yellow as Van Gogh’s chair

as flowers that follow sun

or look too long. While others

click and send, I lick and bend

white triangle lids, stick secrets

under stamps, conceal guilt with ink

and hand-scrawl love.

What text contains a wet stain

of regret or drop of rain?

Instant messaging can’t hold

the weight of the unsaid.

I write and revel in the faded;

bananas at the point turning,

old tobaccoed hands.

At the yellow box, I squeeze my letter

once for luck, then let it drop.

I hope it reaches her this week.

My cheeks glow secret suns

as I imagine hands, the sharp edge

of a butter knife, slitting open.

Fingers touching paper, touching

my fingers where I have touched.

I’ve played with the line-breaks a bit, but it still looks very messy – my early drafts usually do. I’ll be posting subsequent drafts here – perhaps with some help from Karen. The envelope I sent contained only the poem and some yellow pencil shavings. Karen responded with her own letter-poem:

Karen may post her own version too, as I don’t have a scanner.

I’ll end with a picture for Karen:

More to follow…x

Here is the beautiful letter poem Miriam wrote to me. I don’t like to use adjectives like ‘beautiful’ much as they become meaningless in their ubiquity, but it really is exquisite.

Notice how the paper is yellowed. Miriam hand-coloured it.

Writing letters does feel decadent somehow. Not the act of writing itself, the scratch of pen on paper, which feels more like an act of devotion, but the luxury of time and quiet. I know e-readers will allow us to travel light, but every tweet takes me further away from birds, feathers, wings, breeze, currents and pockets of air. Things webby do facilitate photos, spontaneity, sharing and blogging but i-phones, crackberries et al are also talismans of fear. Twitching, or compulsive clicking, needs firm management. I’ll be fine once I get some time in the library (no wi-fi, bliss!).

And here is a picture that precedes my next letter to Miriam..

"I will push my nail/into her neck and make/a lovely necklace out of her green bones" from Alice Oswald's poem Daisy.

Today I nipped out for a walk, and what should be waiting in the pink post-it marked letter box, but an envelope that could only be from Karen! I always know, because she writes little messages on the backs of her envelopes. This one said:

I’m looking forward to it…

Although Karen and I have known each other for a while, I feel I know her best through our letters, each time a little more. Letters are intimate. Like Karen said in hers, once you write something it can’t be deleted. You have to start again or let it stay, even if it just popped out of your pen for no apparent reason. In a way, letters are a form of free-write, but addressed to someone. New ideas come out from nowhere, sneak round the edges of the page.

In her letter, Karen wrote about finding a mouth for a three-tiered snowman on Christmas Eve. This made me think of Herbert, the snowman I helped build in the Parc des Bastions, here in Geneva. He was an explorer snowman, with an ‘I’m a little tea-pot’ posture. Here he is, looking proud of himself:

Herbert, freshly built

The next day I went back to see if he was still there. He was, but he looked pretty disheveled:

'He'd obviously been out on the town'

These sketches are from my smaller notebook, which I take with me whenever I go out. I’m always collecting little snippets of things (sights, sounds), often saving them for letters to Karen. Recently, when I write notes, I even feel like I’m writing ‘to’ Karen in my notebook. It’s something about getting into the habit of writing to her – when I write freely, my hand/brain must have her in mind. This is a sketch of the cat on the card Karen sent me, and the notes that seemed to write themselves to her…

Sketch of Rousseau's cat

Karen and I both plan to write some poems from our correspondence, but, she says in her letter, it’s still early days and it’ll happen. I like the idea of giving our poems time to arrive, like our letters… Without saying much more, here’s a hint of the next thing destined for Karen’s mailbox:

A bientot x