Poetry is the ultimate inner refuge
August – two postcards per day: art making and poems – there were no “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do” fainting couch dramas. Two poets, every day for 31 days, expected to get an intentional postcard from me. I sent them. Most days I chose a quote from a poem by a poet connected closely (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Denise Levertov), temporally (William Stafford, Naomi Shihab Nye, Linda Hogan), or because they were poets (Emily Dickenson, Walt Whitman, Issa.) A couple of times the poetry quote was from a poem the poet I was writing had written from another year. Several times I began a poem with a line from the receiving poet. Not only was I busy reading poets in books, I was reading poets on cards. Woven into the month’s process with over 500 others from all over the US and two from B.C., Canada. The ultimate inner refuge met the outer community of poets in the same pursuit. I have 62 artifacts of my own making, slightly fewer received postcards – this year I am most pleased with the visual art I made.