Stow-away poetry is getting wings. I’m on a business trip to D.C. and I’m taking stow-away poems with me.
Making postcards is a hobby of mine, and I thought it would be fun to make several postcards with poems on them and leave them for people to find. I’ll put one in the seat pocket in front of me. Who knows how long that one will take to get discovered. Others will find homes as I go along–one left on the seat of the Metro, one left in a drawer in the hotel room.
Here’s one of the cards before I did anything with it. Alcohol-ink postcards are fun for me to make, and now I can use them for stow-away poems.
Noon in the canyon. © Quinn McDonald, 2016. All rights reserved.
Since I’m flying East, I thought I’d do a number of desert landscapes.
Scrub brush. © Quinn McDonald, alcohol ink on Yupo, 2016
When I lived back East, I could not really imagine these colors that have become so familiar to me.
Here’s what they look like with poems on them. The top one is a poem on the back of the postcard, ready to be addressed. The bottom is the poem written with white ink on the surface of the alcohol ink. The top poem is by my friend and classmate, Barbara London.
Poems
They are the way they are.
The people I know
and my responses to them.
The poems I write
and my responses to them.
My poems have their own life.
I like the way they take off and do
what they want to.
People can be more complicated.
— © Barbara London, 2016. All rights reserved.
Here’s the envelope I made for them.
It explains that the poems are original and the reader can go to Facebook, to Stow-Away Poetry, and tell us where the poem was found. You can join Stow-Away Poetry, too, whether you want to leave poems or just watch and join us.
—Quinn McDonald is a writer who teaches writing. And poetry.
Leave a Reply