PostCardPoems
Featuring my deceased father's bequeathed collection of postcards, with retrieved fragments of language found in a shredded copy of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (Vol. 1), as translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Recent PostCardPoems
New York
France
Italy
Sweden
Amsterdam and London and Copenhagen and Berne
Roads & Trails
Kansas
Airports
Hotels & Motels
Beaches
Lakes, Rivers & Streams
Bridges
Niagara Falls
Boats & Ships
Mountains & Hills
Rooms
Miscellaneous
AfterWord
My father, Dale Lunberry (1927-2012), was a jeweler and watchmaker for many years in Phillipsburg, Kansas. For decades, when traveling, always with his wife, my mother, Barbara Lunberry (1929-2002), he often purchased postcards of the places that they were visiting. Hundreds and hundreds of these were collected and carefully catalogued by him, no doubt intended as souvenirs, as a means of remembering the many places where they had been. On the backs of the postcards, along with the official captions identifying the locations, my father would often write a very brief inscription of the dates of their visits (these are indicated, above, in parenthesis). At my father's death, I found this box of postcards among his many belongings and, reluctant simply to throw it away (as I had so many other of my father's possessions), I was left uncertain of what I would ever do with it. And so, put away inside of a closet, the box and its many postcards were largely forgotten about.
However, with the arrival of COVID-19, and the extraordinary consequences of spending so much time at home, and, importantly, of not traveling, I found ways in which fragments from a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (shredded for another project that I was working upon) could be made to accompany the post cards, offering them a kind of poetically clandestine caption.
To my pleasure and surprise, and before I knew it, my pandemic project had taken on a life of its own, offering me even a means of imaginative travel (in time, in place), while also allowing a collaboration of sorts with my deceased dad, an engagement with remembrances from his own past, my own present, and of our own time together, and apart.
However, with the arrival of COVID-19, and the extraordinary consequences of spending so much time at home, and, importantly, of not traveling, I found ways in which fragments from a copy of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (shredded for another project that I was working upon) could be made to accompany the post cards, offering them a kind of poetically clandestine caption.
To my pleasure and surprise, and before I knew it, my pandemic project had taken on a life of its own, offering me even a means of imaginative travel (in time, in place), while also allowing a collaboration of sorts with my deceased dad, an engagement with remembrances from his own past, my own present, and of our own time together, and apart.
Elsewhere & Otherwise
UnReading Aristotle's On Man in the Universe and Marcus Aurelias' Meditations
UnReading the Newspaper
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