PostCardPoems

Featuring selections from my deceased father’s collection of travel postcards,
with found fragments of language located in a shredded copy of
Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
(Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, 1934)

AfterWord

My father, Dale Lunberry (1927-2012), was a jeweler and watchmaker in a small town in Kansas, the place where I grew up. For decades, when traveling, always with his wife, my mother, Barbara Lunberry (1929-2002), he often purchased travel postcards of the various places visited. These hundreds of postcards (more than 750) were, as far as I know, never sent to anyone through the mail, and were instead collected and later carefully catalogued, as souvenirs, perhaps as a means of remembering the many places he had been.

Rarely is anything written on the backs of these postcards (my father was a man of few words), however, there might occasionally be seen a brief inscription (in my father’s unmistakable handwriting) of the date on which the place on the postcard was visited: “6-26-63,” “Apr. 7, 74,” “8-19-64,” or, at most, for a particular Hawaiian hotel, “Here 3 days Jan 21-24, 83.”

At my father’s death in 2012, 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.
One day during the spring of 2020, with COVID’s arrival, and the consequences of suddenly spending so much time at home (and, importantly, of not traveling), I got the box of travel postcards out of the closet and began casually sorting through them. Picking out those cards that were particularly striking or strange, often oddly beautiful, I was drawn to how so many of the colorful pictures vividly spoke of other times, other places (with, for instance, the characteristic blues of the postcard skies offering a mid-century modern variant of the poeticized French azure).

While those who were anonymously photographed in the postcards (walking on sidewalks, standing on street corners, lounging on a sandy beach…) reminded me of that which, though obvious, is often overlooked—that postcards are indeed photographs. And as photographs (with space, on their opposite sides, intended for written messages), I recalled Susan Sontag’s description of how “…all photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” The (forgotten) photography of the postcard is no exception to that poignant revelation, presenting in the printed picture perhaps its otherwise deferred and unwritten message.

At about the same time that I was rediscovering my father’s postcards, I stumbled upon (largely by accident) ways in which small fragments from a copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (shredded for another project that I was working on) could at times be provocatively placed directly on the postcards, glued into the image. As a kind of poetically clandestine caption, or as a fissuring mark of dislocating intervention, Proust’s broken lines of language were suddenly seen as if commenting upon their estranged new setting, his words of remembrance, now newly remembering, as if onto the postcard’s photographic surface, into its space of things past, “where thinking,” as Walter Benjamin noted of photography, “suddenly stops in a constellation saturated with tensions.”

To my pleasure and surprise, and before I knew it, my postcard project had taken 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 father, and of an engagement with Proustian memory, from my father’s own past, my own present, and of our own time together, and apart.