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 a small town in Kansas, the place where I grew up. For decades, when traveling, he purchased postcards of the places he was visiting. Hundreds of these postcards were collected and later carefully catalogued by him, as souvenirs, as a means of remembering the many places he had been. At my father’s death nine years ago, I inherited his box of postcards, but I was uncertain of what I would ever do with it (though reluctant to throw it away, as so much else had been thrown away). So I held onto the box, placing it in a closet, mostly forgetting about it.
With the arrival of COVID-19, and the extraordinary consequences of spending so much time at home (and, importantly, of not traveling), one day I got the postcards out and began sorting through them, picking out those that were particularly alluring. Largely by accident, I found ways in which fragments from a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (shredded for another project that I was working on) could at times accompany the postcards, offering them a kind of poetically clandestine caption, an aligning point of collaged engagement.
To my pleasure and surprise, and before I knew it, my pandemic project took on a life of its own, offering even a means of imaginative travel (in time, in place), while also allowing a collaboration of sorts with my deceased dad, an engagement with Proustian remembrances, from my father’s own past, my own present, and of our own time together, and apart.
With the arrival of COVID-19, and the extraordinary consequences of spending so much time at home (and, importantly, of not traveling), one day I got the postcards out and began sorting through them, picking out those that were particularly alluring. Largely by accident, I found ways in which fragments from a copy of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (shredded for another project that I was working on) could at times accompany the postcards, offering them a kind of poetically clandestine caption, an aligning point of collaged engagement.
To my pleasure and surprise, and before I knew it, my pandemic project took on a life of its own, offering even a means of imaginative travel (in time, in place), while also allowing a collaboration of sorts with my deceased dad, an engagement with Proustian remembrances, from my father’s 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
Copyright © 2021 All rights reserved.