What happens when we stop texting, emailing and instant messaging and pick up a pen and paper? Led by poet Miriam Nash, the Snail Mail workshop explores letter writing as a form of creative writing, opening new and unexpected doors to creativity.
Saturday 28 November 11am – 1pm
Foyles bookshop, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London, WC2H 0EB
Price: £10/£6
Elegy for a Postman
Who rowed out between islands one evening
Before Christmas, with a white mist censing
The clunk of the boat, the guttural oars
And noise of children playing round the shores.
Silent, lumpy as a berg, the mailbag
Lay at his feet. Under the swatching fog
Perhaps he is content to drift a while:
Those scattered homesteads won’t expect his call.
He seals quietly on the lough. The lamps
Are desultory markers as he gazes.
A child’s called in. The opened door blazes
On to the water. His old head nods. He dozes.
At one in the morning the lough was black.
Fathers awoke to far shouts, the crack
Of an oar on ice and calling of their names
By a late postman, locked out from all their homes.
His voice wailed out the roll-call of his beat.
The water would not open to his knock.
They reached him the next day by ten o’clock
Clad in hard frost, the bag stiff at his feet.
O, how I want to be able to look inside this book by Tucker Nichols! I can’t but when I can I shall jump for postcard joy.
Meanwhile, if you have a dream about your dad being turned into a tray of things – and he wants to push himself off the table because he doesn’t want to be a tray of things anymore – or if you have any such dream that wakes you up and makes you cry!, I think the best idea is to write someone a postcard about it. A dreamy postcard! When we go on holiday we send postcards, so why not when we go on dream? Perhaps there should be a Postcard Dreams service – a national deposit for all our night posts.
The luscious Tucker Nichols has created a project that we approve of very much here at Post Letters! We love Tucker’s work, so please visit his site too.
Go see Anonymous Postcard – a project that enables you to communicate via a third party
I am finding it really hard to write letters at the moment, as well as posts for this blog, and all the while the London postal workers are on strike . Perhaps there’s a huge vortex of entropic postal anti-energy swirling around.
When I do send letters, I feel great. I know they won’t arrive just yet (so there’s that time between sending and receiving when you can be happy knowing someone will receive something they didn’t know they would get) and I know when they will arrive, they will be a surprise. A disturbance of the day. Something to remember! To Hold In Your Hands!
So it’s about a feeling, then. But if we know what makes us feel great (sending post to people), why are we so stalled writing letters at the moment? Why are our postal workers on strike but no one’s reporting it in the press? Why do they have to strike in the first place? I think it’s something to do with value. How we value a way of feeling, the nature of surprises.
O, there is such sadness at the heart of Post currently!
Joseph Beuys is back (he’s always back). Showing at the De La Warr Pavilion, the UK’s eat-up-able seaside art space on the south coast, this new exhibition will bring this eccentric German artist to new people. However, I’m mostly excited that you can buy his Filzpostkarte (or an unlimited edition of it) for £10. I shall rush out of the city and head for the sea!
Jonathan Jones at the Guardian wrote this – which has some lovely references to post:
What does not always come across in Beuys’s large sculptures is his humour. Bits and Pieces nicely leavens our sense of Beuys. There is a joyous poem-letter about his favourite foods, reminiscent of Günter Grass’s novel The Flounder in its celebration of earthy pleasure. There are postcards made out of wood, and evidence of Beuys’s fandom of the bank robber John Dillinger. Bits and Pieces is a loving archive of one of the 20th century’s great artists, and we are lucky to have it.
Visit Jeremy’s photography – and many thanks to Jeremy for allowing us to present Self-Sealing Envelope.
From the Guardian Thursday 25th June 2009
Rubber bands dropped by postal workers collected by public
More than 13,000 discarded red rubber bands will be sent back to the Royal Mail by an anti-litter campaign after being scooped off the streets by members of the public.
In one of the biggest exercises of its kind, people throughout the UK collected the bands – dropped by postmen on pavements and in doorways – after a national campaign by Keep Britain Tidy.
In April the organisation warned postal workers they could face on-the-spot fines of up to £80 (rising to £2,500 if a case went to court) if they were caught dropping the familiar red bands, which are used to hold bundles of letters. It asked people to collect any bands found on pavements and driveways and the charity is now set to bounce them back to Royal Mail in a giant see-through envelope.
Dickie Felton of Keep Britain Tidy said: “We were amazed that our campaign caused such a commotion. We received hundreds of letters stuffed with red rubber bands from across the country. Clearly people are fed-up with posties carelessly throwing these bands on the floor. We accept that dropping an elastic band is hardly the worst littering offence in the world, but nonetheless it is litter.”
Felton said the bands were an eyesore when strewn on the ground, but also posed a serious choking danger to pets and wildflife.
Keep Britain Tidy is now set to return all 13,000 rubber bands to Royal Mail in a giant envelope to highlight the scale of the problem and allow them to be reused. Royal Mail currently spends an estimated £1m every year replacing rubber bands.
Felton added: “We are pleased that Royal Mail has acknowledged that this is a problem. Our campaign was covered in Royal Mail’s internal newspaper Courier and we hope that Royal Mail continues to communicate to employees that dropping rubber bands is unacceptable.”
Keep Britain Tidy has also today written to Royal Mail's chief executive with the offer of a meeting to further discuss the problem and ways to tackle it.
There is a concern, of course, that encouraging the posting of letters is, in the long term, bad for the environment. But Post Letters!’s philosophy is simple. Only 10% of current post sent through the UK is for anything personal. The rest is direct, or junk, mail. So we think direct mail should be cut down and personal letter writing increased to meet the gap (so as not to make any more job losses for our friends the postmen and women). That way everyone’s happier, postpeople are still in jobs and we all get more post!
Read comment on the UK’s postal service crisis.
And rest at ease with this slide show of postcards.
Write a letter to the man in the corner shop.
Write a letter to the postman.
Write a letter to an abstract concept.
Write a letter to someone you will make friends with but haven’t met yet.
Write a letter to the popcorn machine at the cinema.
Write a letter to your first memory.
Write a letter in aid of charity or to save someone’s life.
Write a letter for the sheer loving hell of it.
Write a letter to your firstborn, or to someone else’s firstborn.
Write a letter in the style of a new dance craze.
Write a letter that adds up to a hundred.
Write a letter on a bus.
Write a letter to Miranda July (PO Box 26596, Los Angeles, CA 90026 USA)
Write a letter to the kitchen sink.
Write a letter sitting in the kitchen sink (name that book).
Write a letter to the moon.
Write a letter to grandma!
A delicious new exhibition has opened at 198 – Contemporary Arts and Learning in Brixton. Here’s some of the blurb:
Collages from this same series are the detritus of letter writing. In these, anxiety is represented by images of dogs or monkeys. Yellowed endpapers, the fragmentary marks of handwriting, stamps and postmarks are all signs of absence.
The first ever Post Letters! mail party was held – we delivered about 50 pieces of new post to eager receivers of mail. In many, we simply sang in to the envelope – and told you so. If you received yours, please do what one lovely mailee did – and write on it, in turn, and send it on to someone else. Or, if not that, be encouraged by your newfound piece of post, and send something of your own on to someone else – someone you’ve not written to in a long while.
Stephen Fry wrote a letter to his 16 year old self. It starts,
I hope you are well. I know you are not.
And his letter has begun a whole raft of readers’ letters to their past selves. It seems like a savvy thing to do – a way to bring a Proust-y kind of remembrance in to your every day life. Why not have a go yourself?
One thing I did once was write to my Self a year later. I hid the letter in an envelope between some old books. It truly was a surprise when I came across the letter one whole year later (it was a letter for later), as planned. In it, I said things like: “You don’t like this and this and this – so change.” And – strangely – the things had changed.
The next day, my ceiling fell in.
Thanks to Andy, from My Real Wall, who has been in touch. Countering Facebook (he says he closed his account down), Andy has begun a project to photograph his wall. Each day a new thing is pinned up – and the whole wall documented. You can send things too! It’s as if Facebook came after this – but it didn’t. i.e. postmodernism is over. What’s next?
Following the article poet David Morley wrote for Post Letters, we begin our quest to archive Letters and Poems. Here, Robert Lowell uses a technique he developed over many years – of “lifting” phrases from letters sent directly to him for his poems. You can read more about the making of this poem in Colm Toibin’s recent and, as ever, brilliant (in the true meaning) article for the London Review of Books.
For Elizabeth Bishop 3. Letter with Poems for Letter with Poems
“You are right to worry, only please DON’T,
though I’m pretty worried myself. I’ve somehow got
into the worst situation I’ve ever
had to cope with. I can’t see the way out.
Cal, have you ever gone through caves?
I did in Mexico, and hated them.
I haven’t done the famous one near here…
Finally after hours of stumbling along,
you see daylight ahead, a faint blue glimmer;
air never looked so beautiful before.
That is what I feel I’m waiting for:
a faintest glimmer I am going to get out
somehow alive from this. Your last letter helped,
like being mailed a lantern or a spiked stick.
We’ve just come across an amazing find on UbuWeb – a letter that swirls and shifts and re-orientates itself. This is no joke! Watch the letter and read what UbuWeb have to say about Eduardo Kac’s unstable letter:
A navigational poem that presents the viewer with the image of a three-dimensional spiral jetting off the center of a two-dimensional spiral. Both spirals are made exclusively of text. The reader is able to grab and spin this cosmic verbal image in all directions. Thus, reading becomes a process of probing the virtual object from all possible angles. The reader is also able to fly through and around the object, thus expanding reading possibilities. In “Letter” a spiraling cone made of words can be interpreted as both converging to or diverging from the flat one. Together they may evoke the creation or destruction of a star. All texts are created as if they were fragments of letters written to the same person. However, in order to convey a particular emotional sphere, the author conflated the subject positions of grandmother, mother, and daughter into one addressee. It is not possible to distinguish to whom each fragment is addressed. The poem makes reference to moments of death and birth in the poet’s family. Letter is presented here as video documentation of an interactive reading experience.
As part of Recognition Day on May 4th, you can receive a beautiful box of postcards to send to anyone you like!
Post Letters! invited top poet David Morley to write a letter about letters. In the letter back, David writes how “to paraphrase Ben Jonson, language most shows a person, and a letter in which language and attention possess linked force creates a document that asks the reader or recipient to raise their own level of being”.
David continues to link writing letters – and the defiant act of writing letters – as being part of the broader Slow Movement. Having himself created “new forms of ecological media for poetry in nature spaces” – called “slow poetry” – David thinks the slow movement should adopt our campaign for letter writing. After all, writing and sending letters is all about “local sourcing, paying close attention, taking your time and enjoying yourself”.
David’s letter finishes with a new poetic form which he introduces: verse letters. He admits it’s “neither entirely true nor untrue, and a bit Poohish”, but Post Letters! is chuffed to bits with this first commission of a verse letter, or a letter poem. And we like very much the lines and thoughts behind “but language evolves/ for language is rich./ It’s not what we say/ but the means by which”.
Margaret Oakley is a busy and avid letter writer! Be inspired to write letters for five hours a week.
How to write a letter for Amnesty International (which could improve your normal post).
Tom Paulin on letters:
What we demand of a letter is writing rather than the written, speaking not the spoken, the mind in action not the mind at rest.
Lakshmi Pratury talks to us about the lost art of letter writing (and death).
It’s been a good week for Post and Letters, and Post Letters! We’re busy planning an action camp for a festival later this year (watch this space). We met with the Royal Academy to discuss their forthcoming exhibition about Van Gogh and his letters (it’s the first show since 1968 to bring so many of his letters to London, and the curatorial team are going to show us how his letters relate, correlate and correspond to his art). We corresponded with the amazing poet, David Morley (whose poetry books we all urge you to read), about the possibility of some writing from him (will say no more for now, but it’s very exciting). And after work today, Philip is meeting with Jonah at the British Library to discuss an e-learning project they’re doing with secondary school kids on how to campaign using letters. So it’s Post A-go-go. Keep writing your letters. We need to fill the hands of our postmen and women with beautiful, loving, complex letters and objects.
A collection? A gossip? A huddle? A city? A babel? Comment with your own collective noun!
Post Letters! is about making the objects that post carriers deliver more beautiful or more interesting. So why not sign up now for the Royal Mail’s new Matter. It’s free post in a box. OK – so it’s a glamourised way of advertising – but it ticks all the postal boxes. Better than Matter, perhaps, but not free, is The Thing Quarterly – the periodical that is a four-yearly object sent to your door. I love the Thing and I want Post Letters! to set up the UK version. I wonder if Thing would be interested?
Of more postal weight, the letter as campaigning device is cropping up more and more. Look at Ken Lawrence’s collection of postal memorabilia (if that’s the right word) from the Concentration Camps. To counter Holocaust deniers’ claims, Lawrence painstakingly built a collection of letters, postcards, postal documents, leaflets and other materials over a 30 year period. It “includes rare letters from concentration camp inmates, postal documents illustrating Nazi activities and a Hebrew scripture re-used by a German soldier as a parcel wrapper” (pictured).
A replica of the postal bags used in the United States over 100 years ago.
Wandering around London, I sometimes come across post in art or the art of posting. Like this picture by Peter Doig at Tate’s recent retrospective. Called Hitch Hiker and painted at the end of the eighties, the label describes its medium as “Oil on Postal Bags” and up-close you can see them too. Gorgeousness.
Then there’s Oswald by Gerhard Richter (on at the National Portrait Gallery at the moment). I don’t think it’s meant to be of a postman delivering a letter, but it looks like it could be. (In fact, the Oswald could refer to Lee Harvey Oswald – but ambiguity is something Richter cherishes.)
There are many ways to write a letter, many places to write letters in. There are a good number of projects set up by enthusiastic people trying to promote the letter. Post Letters! knows the irony of its birth. (Yes, we just added the exclamation mark. We think it’s appropriate.) Post Letters! is both a description of our times and a call to action, using web 2.0 technology to promote pre-web activity. In many ways, the internet is post. iPhones are really just iPost. Even as I type, I can see to my left a button that says New Post. Email programmes have been singing You’ve Got Mail for years. In many ways, we’re Peri Letters! Always in between. A letter certainly is. A letter exists best when it’s just been sealed and is about to be opened.
Anyway, in other news – Post Letters! is looking for at least three real-life postmen or women who want to write about being postpeople. Email us. Also, we’ve just fallen in love again. This time – with the Letter Writers’ Alliance. Plus, you can download your own envelope.
I’m reading Julian Barnes’s Book of Death (Nothing To Be Frightened Of). In it he remembers clearing out his parents’ bungalow.
I found a small stack of postcards dating from the 1930s to the 1980s All had been sent from abroad; clearly those posted from within Britain, however flavourful the message, had at some point been culled. Here is my father writing to his mother in the thirties (“Warm greetings from cold Brussels”; “Austria calling!”); my father in Germany to my mother in France (“I’m wondering whether you got all the letters I wrote from England. Did you?”); my father to his small sons at home (“I hope you are doing your duty and listening to the Test Match”), announcing his acquisition of stamps for me and matchboxes for my brother.
The best postal moment comes only two pages later when Barnes stumbles across a circular leather pouffe from his youth. It had been brought back from Allahabad or Madras not full or fat but empty – and ready to stuff.
They stuffed it with the letters of their courtship and early married years. I was an idealistic adolescent, who swerved easily into cynicism when confronted with life’s realities; this was one such moment. How could they have taken their love letters (doubtless kept in ribboned bundles), torn them into tiny pieces, and then watched other people’s fat arses hunker down on top?
… In company, I would now lower myself gently onto the pouffe; alone, I would drop heavily, so that an exhalation might jet out a scrap of blue airmail paper bearing one or other of my parents’ youthful hands.
Joe Brainard was influenced by Joseph Cornell. I read his book, I Remember, last night. It’s full of postal moments.
Thanks to brilliant writer Julia Bell (if you haven’t read Dirty Work, I demand you purchase it this instant!) for linking to Post Letters from her blog, Culture Cringe. And thanks to lots of you for writing in to Post Letters and leaving your name and address for free post! We will write back to you, we promise. (And you can be Posted anywhere in the world.)
Meanwhile, this weekend, I visited Raven Row’s new exhibition of Ray Johnson’s mail art. Ray Johnson founded the mail art movement – which involved asking his recipients to add to his work and return through the post. He set up the New York Correspondence School – a conflation of the New York Schools of art and poetry in the 60s and Correspondence Schools. Hush for now, but there will be more on the brilliant Raven Row soon from a Post Letters reviewer.
The exhibition reminded me of my love for all things Joseph Cornell, though – as he’s clearly an influence on Ray Johnson. (Here’s a letter Ray sent Joseph, rather lovely – hints at another letter, in which he enclosed white feathers.) Cornell produced his boxes almost like love letters for people. He famously sent one to Audrey Hepburn, but she promptly sent it back. I’d forgotten, but I once wrote a paper for a Joseph Cornell conference about his letters to Marianne Moore. It didn’t feature, though, (rightly so) in the final book. It was a bit too woolly – but I was captivated by a letter Cornell sent to Moore in which he enclosed blank sheets of Japan Paper Company writing paper. It seems such a great thing to do – send someone the means to write letters.
Meanwhile, why not send your old love letters to The Leaving and the Left?
O there’s lots of books to read! And lots with post people and letters in too. Try Charles Bukowski’s Post Office. Or the new translation of Stefan Zweig’s The Post Office Girl. Or you might want a bit of Post Theory – so go for Jacques Derrida’s The Post Card or Relays: Literature as An Epoch of the Postal System by Bernhard Seigart. For a lighthearted, more child-like mail moment, try The Jolly Postman (Or Other People’s Letters) – by the Great Ahlbergs. And if you need a break from reading, watch a film – Michael Radford’s Il Postino, for example, with the charming postman Mario Ruoppolo who delivers letters to Pablo Neruda. All this sitting down though – you’ll need a walk. If you’re in or near London, pop down to Victoria area and wander over Artwise’s new curated piece, Fragile. According to the blurb, Fragile “celebrates the tradition of postal communication and considers the nature of letter writing and the permanence of the written word, all of which is examined in these films through the depiction of letters and packages being treated and handled in different ways – at times abstractly, at others literally”. It does this very successfully.
James Abrams tested a loophole in the legislation regarding what can and what can’t be posted. Human remains are banned – we might say, quite rightly. But what about a living human? Can you post a person? To raise money for charity, Abrams posted himself to 60 post offices around the UK, dressed as a parcel. Seven weeks he was bundled into Royal Mail vans and on to motorbikes! (Note also: you can post bees, you can’t post loose Christmas crackers.)
In other news, I’m still so excited about the Douceurs project – which allows you to send post to your future. What I particularly like about this project, is how it is grounded in community and letter writers as people. Do have a good look at the research work undertaken by Lauren Currie – there’s everything from working with older letter writers in Dundee to letting go red balloons in Edinburgh.
More ideas for Post Letters in the future – I’d like to hold a salon-style get-together of like-minded posties. It would probably be in London to begin with – request to receive free post and say if you’re keen to come along. I’d also like to collate Poems in the Post – an ongoing series of poems that feature postmen, letters and all things stamp. There’s plenty out there, but I’m keen to get permission from the poets to feature them – so this may take a while. I have dreams of a post sculpture – a room, a vast room!, full of translucent thread falling from the ceiling with envelopes attached to them. Get people to write letters and fill the envelopes. I don’t know why that image is so compelling for me. If you’d like a piece of free post, I’m taking names and addresses.
I don’t know why, but Post makes me very happy. I have this sneaky suspicion that it could make society happier in general, too. (So why not send post to yourself?)
At the end of the 19th century, you could buy printed cards for every situation that might conceivably require a printed letter. You simply filled in the blanks! Why not make your own blank letters for friends to fill in. Here’s an example of a letter with blanks from the 1880s. I actually can’t work out how you’d fill the blanks in – have a try!
Today I am thinking about mail boxes and mail slots in doors.
On the night of January 10 1840 – when the uniform Penny Post came into being - 112,000 letters were written by our forefather letter writers in the UK, each eager to test and use the new communication network. Imagine! But having a slot in your door to receive post was still very new, unheard of – post having been the privilege of the poets and the Members of Parliament. So a mass door cutting exercise must have taken place! Here’s 19th century writer Harriet Martineau from her autobiography:
We are all putting our letter-boxes on our hall-doors with great glee, anticipating the hearing from brothers and sisters, – a line or two almost every day. The slips in the doors are to save the postmen’s time… So all who wish well to the plan are having slips in their doors. It is proved that poor people do write, or get letters written, wherever a franking privilege exists. When January comes round, do give your sympathy to all the poor pastors’ and tradesmen’s and artisans’ families, who can at last write to one another as if they were all M.P.’s.
The sheer technological advance of having a hole in your door must have been a revolution in itself. Imagine the time saved by the postman! Here’s Rowland Hill in his pamphlet which radicalised the British postal system, setting in place his plans for the universal Penny Post in 1837:
There would not only be no stopping to collect the postage, but probably it would soon be unnecessary even to await the opening of the door, as every house might be provided with a letter box into which the Letter Carrier would drop the letters, and, having knocked, he would pass on as fast as he could walk.
Even to this day, of course, it seems our Letter Carriers can’t walk fast enough (sic).
To overcome the rising loss of the postal service, Douceurs is a service solution enabling people to send letters to their future. This poetic service encompasses the beauty, simplicity and personal touch of traditional communication methods. Discover more about this post-Post idea
The curlew is the postbird. “Curlew” – c.1340, from O.Fr. courlieus (13c.), said to be imitative of the bird’s cry but apparently assimilated with corliu “runner, messenger,” from corre “to run.” The bird is a good runner. Curlew and courier (the bespoke postman) share the same etymology. The curlew could be the symbol bird of the Post Letters movement.
Writing a letter to someone means you’re touching them from a distance. And if you don’t touch them, you almost do. You both hold on to a piece of material culture that has particular pertinence. It’s not just that a letter is much more work than, say, a telephone call, an email or – remember them? – a fax. It’s that a letter is, always already, an act of touch from afar. The hard work does, itself, a lot of hard work.
It’s a different kind of touch, though. A mediated touch, purloined by the middle man (or woman). Holding hands handled by another. Do we appreciate the touch-work our Post People undertake every day? Do we even know their name?
Keeping in touch, then, is about keeping in with touch. Post a letter today – touch out!
For more on this, try Pamela Thurschwell’s book on Technology, Literature and Magical Thinking where the idea of “intimacy from a distance” is developed and thought through at greater length.
Post Letters is a UK-based, worldwide movement to encourage, promote and take delight in the activity of writing letters and sending post. Both a call to action and a description of our time, Post Letters needs your help.
No wonder Royal Mail is in such a pickle. Only 10% of all post sent is personal, the rest is junk. Email has taken over and hundreds of Post Offices are shutting down every year. We need to give our Post People more interesting things to send – more love letters, more mail art, more strange and peculiar objects! Did you know it’s perfectly legal and safe to send bees through the post?
Post Letters brings people together to think about Post in the Twenty First Century, organises letter readings and writings, presents you with new ideas for your post, commissions artists and writers to produce new mail art, produces Post Events and much more besides. Watch this space.
But don’t worry, you can get involved right now. The first thing you need to do is – write someone a letter…
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