Marcia and I are at it again, and we're dragging other people along with us. I was going to blog about this at Long Meg's Production Blog, but it more properly belongs here, because it's coming out through Another GridKid Production, not from Long Meg, which is never gonna publish any of my stuff, no sirree. We're doing a set of 12 postcards.
The text is taken from my "Postcards from Home," one of which was published several years ago in a journal (I suspect now defunct), called Live Poets (no relation to the Live Poets Society, or LivePoets.com). I wrote the poems not too long after I first moved here, so they're most about learning to live in New York City, and how strange and new and wonderful and sometimes distressing everything seemed then. I was working for Matthew Bender Company at the time, first in Midtown and then in their new headquarters at 11 Penn Plaza, near Penn Station, at the low point of the Homeless Years in the late 80's. I hated working there, hated the area despite its proximity to Macy's, and it's interesting to see how much it's transformed itself in the intervening years. I was also getting to know the East and West Villages at the same time, because I was going to NYU too, and that and Soho were my favorite parts of town. The East Village still is, though Soho mostly bores me now, and even the West Village isn't as interesting as it once was, unless you go quite far west.
There's a bit of homesickness and quite a lot of loneliness in them too. It wasn't so much that I missed Michigan as that I missed my many grad school pals and that community we'd made. It was my first time out on my own without the ready-made community of students, and I discovered it was a lot harder to make friends outside of the hallowed halls. I didn't have a lot of friends at the time, and I'd never had such a hard time making them as I did in New York. Most of the people I met at Bender, with the exception of Jen, Nick, and Steve were not my crowd, but they were pretty much all I had at the time. Jen and I didn't find each other until November of '86, when she moved here (I arrived in July), and it took us a while to warm up to each other, mostly because she didn't much care for the crowd I was hanging with any more than I did, except for Nick and Steve.
And I was missing Phil, with whom I'd had a flash-in-the-pan almost-affair that gave us both third degree burns. So that's who they're written to. He's the eponymous "Mac" in the poems. (Future literary scholars, take note.) Another thing to note is that they're one of my few stabs at prose poems, which I mostly don't believe in, like I don't believe in the Tooth Fairy.
So there's one postcard for each month, themed to various places in the city that fascinated me or seemed relevant to the poems. Marcia and I are going to take photos of each of them and pick the best ones (I have a feeling we'll be using more of hers than mine), which means I have to buy a digital camera soon. What's a little sad is that at least one of the places used as a reference point, The Village Gate, is now closed and utterly erased, and another mentioned in one of the poems, The Zig Zag Bar and Grill, has morphed several times since, though I think it's still a restaurant. The Tombs are no longer what they were, either (from jail to condo—now there's a transformation), and the USO Headquarters in Times Square has been utterly transformed too. Not least of all, the skyline of lower manhattan is now missing a couple of significant buildings.
This is a project I should have done years ago, and should have taken the pictures, at least, when I first wrote the poems. Unfortunately, in the middle of writing them, I was broken into for the first time and had my great little Pentax SLR and extra lenses stolen. I haven't had a camera since then. I'm sure we'll cope somehow.
We're going to make the postcards all different sizes and kinds, with deckled edges and without, and all different kinds of layouts onthe front, then punch them all with grommets or eyelets or whatever, string them on some kind of jump ring, make up fake stamps for them, "cancel" them with fake postmarks, and put charms and old tokens on the jump rings too. We're using a handwriting font on the back and will print those in different colored inks to look like different pens.
This is all from our second production meeting last night, which we held at the usual place: Waterfront, on 2nd & 30th. We were joined by Jennifer DeMerritt, who we somehow sucked into coming up with pick-up lines or snatches of conversation overheard in bars that we're going to print either on a set of cocktail napkins or beer coasters. We haven't decided which, yet. I think that'll be hilarious, given JD's sense of humor and her collection of friends and characters.
Keep you posted, probably with pictures.
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