The Poetry of Postcards…You Gotta Look Hard

For a constrained, even close-mouthed, means of communication, postcards had a pretty good run of it and for a good long length of time too.

They’ve been in steep decline through these recent years though, at a pace that puts a stock market crash to shame. I don’t know when I last got one.

We can think of them as one of those friends about whom it is said that she is a person of few words. There’s little choice in the matter in the case of the post card, but in an age of near non-stop personal expression anything that leans more towards the quiet than the noisy should be a breath of fresh air.

Or they are like one of those modern artists who seeks to use as little paint as possible on each canvas so as to save money on supplies, with the result that you have a tottering stack of pictures with only a few colorful dots here and there upon expanses of white.

In the old days you couldn’t get away from them.

They would show up in the mailbox with regularity, colorful as exotic birds, with images of the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower or the Grand Canyon or the Corn Palace in South Dakota or the World’s Largest Ball of Twine in Kansas taking up the entire front of the card, with a square of blank space on the back for a written message and another for the address back home.

Before the days of cell phones and the computer, their arrival was often the only way you knew the path of the traveler, and then only intermittently, similar to following the path of a firefly on an inky dark night.

You could only tell where someone had been, never where they were going or where they were right then, for they were certain to have moved on by the time you got the card in the mail.

You would watch for which towns and geographies were represented as the cards came in and match them to what you knew of the sender, always instructive.

If you received a string of them from Denver and Dallas and Tombstone and Tucson and other stops along the trail of the frontier spirit, it could mean one thing if they arrive from the motorcycle mechanic down the block.

It might mean another if they came from that librarian who always seemed so meek and unadventurous, the one usually seated behind the Overdue Books Desk. Her choice of geography might be telling us something and the word — the word ‘overdue’ I mean — might have been ringing in her ears for some time.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a good picture on the front of a picture post card, which is strange, considering.

The color was usually off somehow or the image blurred, or the bold lettering played across the attraction was faded, all in all looking like the type of illustration you’d have seen in the first encyclopedias ever to be printed in color.

No matter if the cards had been printed the week before, something about those pictures made it seem as though the attraction featured was current at about the time of the Chicago World Fair at the turn of the last century and had been unearthed in a recent dig.

Maybe it’s part and parcel of the art and science of post card design, not to expend too much energy on the photo side of the house. I doubt that most viewers spent much time there in any event, but quickly flipped it over to see the message thereon, which is where things get interesting.

Well, that’s not quite right, as these messages weren't really all that interesting, but that right there is the interesting part.

There are certain forms of written communications which endear themselves to us not because they’re fascinating, but because they don’t try to be.

The category includes church bulletins, the corkboard there near the front door of your grocer, the ads for local mechanics or lawn care in the back of the local paper, recipes, the owner’s guide to repairs for your car, mailing instructions posted on the wall at the Post Office, signs planted in yards up and down the street – Roofing. Handyman. Wood Rot.

Here, and in a hundred other mundane spots, language retreats to its original purpose, which is simply to tell someone something that they didn’t know before. Basic blocking and tackling. Attending to the fundamentals of subject and verb agreement, punctuation, spelling, and legibility.

This is the cake without the icing, the steak without the sizzle, pure protein unsavored by fat or excess of any kind. Brisk, there’s a word to describe it, with very clear sight lines between the sayer and the hearer. Businesslike.

You’ll search in vain on these corkboards and sides of handymen’s vans for rhymed couplets, iambic pentameter, sonnet structure of either the Shakespearean or Petrarchan variety, world-weariness, or an excess of over-sophistication. Those can wait for other occasions, just now we’re about the business of getting the information across the great divide from one person to another.  

If you were a language, this is what would be called good honest work.  Decent pay, not much chance for advancement, but a lot of job security.

Of the postcards I’ve received anyway, the language is as flat as if the words had been sprayed with starch and a hot iron drawn across them, and this isn’t just for those cut and dried types whose ordinary communications have something of the beef jerky about them, or something of the freeze-dried about them, or something of the vacuum packed about them, but even from those who’s language is apt to soar under other circumstances.

I’ve seen poets, who otherwise never really stop talking, drift down into complete plainness when it comes to postcards.

“Arrived here Thursday. Laundromat down the street. 26 miles to the gallon.”

This from a fellow who came in fifth place in his latest application to the Advancement of Poetical Beauty Institute for a grant to write the definitive treatment of The Role of Mollusks as Metaphor in American Poetry, 1865-1890, all in rhymed verse. I’m talking high end, in other words.

This isn’t to speak of those for whom even a postcard sized square of blank space taxes their descriptive power or their sense that they might have anything to say at all that could be of interest to those back home.

Non-writers by nature, save for filling out forms at the Division of Motor Vehicles or their name at the top of a bingo card, they have no patience for this business, and It is only from a sense of grim duty that they send the postcard at all, habits taught to them from an earlier time, or from an earlier generation, with a terse “Here at San Francisco” or “will call from Tulsa,” the only things they can think to say. You can nearly see them thrust the card into the mailbox like a man flicking water onto a hissing cat, anxious as anything to be done with it.

Put some of it down to travel fatigue, some of it down too to the fact that language rich in descriptive power is one of the things that gets dried up and blown out the window on a long driving trip. Maybe that’s one of the reasons we take such trips.

I think mainly though it must be the blankness there on the back of the post card that gets to them. Like Captain Ahab, who found much to disapprove of in white whales, but saved his particular ire for their eerie blankness, our would-be writers are stymied as how to best fill the limited space allotted to them.

For a true writer, I’d like to think that most postcards are so brief because there is so much to say that there’s really little point in beginning.

Postcards won’t be the first style of writing to gain its strength from being so inadequate to the purpose. The telegraph, the cable, the coded message between spies, the note tied to the carrier pigeon’s leg, the wedding invitation, the obituary, these come to mind.

There the rules are hard and fast, even if unstated, and all place a premium on brevity.

If the novel is one of those fellows at a cocktail party that buttonholes you as you walk through the door and says “pay attention to me, and for a long time,” and if a poem sits shyly in the corner of the same party and suggests that you might consider how pretty she is, the postcard, the best of them anyway, is the honest fellow standing by the cold cuts, patiently explaining to the listener that your front brakes nearly always wear faster than the rears, and that’s why you should have them checked out at the eighteen-month mark.

I do know of one interesting postcard writer, this being Andy Wright there in the home town, or I should say a e wright, as he signed himself that summer, having sworn off capital letters and most punctuation in a fit of poetic fervor and advanced thinking. 

He had sipped too deeply of his older brother’s philosophy books that year and most of his observations had a world-weariness and soul-weariness to them that he delighted in.

That summer he took a vacation with his parents and his postcards home went step-wise through stages of disenchantment with the universe.

What we heard from Colby was ‘Just what you’d expect,” in Hays it was “a dreary numbness grips my senses,” in Limon it was ‘abandon all hope ye who enter here,” past that it was ‘some place or other, does it really matter?” until on the far side of the Rockies we started getting blank post cards from him, blank as the whiteness of Ahab’s whale, as if language itself had failed at conveying how dreary the universe was and how tough it was on a poetical soul like his.