Never in my 19 years of being involved with the Poetry Postcard Fest would I have have thought someone would take the time to lash out at a postcard recipient with a hateful message, but here we are in 2025 and the culture is being bombarded by intensities from every angle. The purpose of the Poetry Postcard Fest is twofold: 1) Participate in and create a community of poets and 2) Develop an affinity for spontaneous composition, which is one way to get past what Charles Olson called: “the lyrical interference of the individual as ego.”

To sift through someone’s life and work online and to use that information in a poem that is an attack is NEVER acceptable. To refuse to discuss the incident when asked about it shows a cowardice that is all too easy in this age of keyboard war. In 2025 we had this hate incident, only recently revealed, as well the use of A.I. which, for now, has been resolved in a good way. That poetry should be written by humans and not machines should be obvious and this issue should be the least of our worries as the world’s most powerful country slips into authoritarianism. We need you at your best now.

I find it ironic that in the material in our latest workshop, Robert Duncan’s H.D Book: The Roots of Modernism, Robert Duncan gives a history lesson on how the Imagist movement was corrupted by the forces of commerce, or ego, or superficiality, which is all too common in our culture and in our poetry culture. In Chapter 1 of the H.D Book Duncan writes:

Pound’s Imagism had been conceived as a cult of the elect in art. But with the Imagist anthologies of 1915, 1916, and 1917, edited by Amy Lowell, H.D., and [Richard] Aldington, the Imagist movement became generalized and popularized. The ideas of image, composition by musical phrase, and verbal economy were let go into the lowest common denominators of impressionism, vers libre, and everyday speech. By 1937, twenty-five years after the birth of Imagism, all reference to the word image, once defined as presenting an intellectual and emotional complex, had been dissipated, and the term had come to indicate whatever in a poem brought a picture to the mind of the reader. It was not only in “Amygism,” as Pound dubbed the heretical popularization, that the first character of the Image as epiphany was lost, for Pound himself was to take as his project the work of small m modernists whose use of the image was profoundly anti-Imagist. For T. E. Hulme, whose work had already been published by Pound at the end of the volume Ripostes in 1912, and often in Eliot’s poems, the image had not been the nexus of an experience but the opportunity of an expression, of a striking figure in the author’s rhetoric. Whatever else they were, the images — in Hulme’s poem “Autumn,” the ruddy moon that may be like a red-faced farmer peering over a hedge, or in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the evening that may be like a patient etherized upon a table — are not mythopoeic in their operation or intent, not deepening our sense of the reality of moon or of evening, but present extension of their author’s wit, personal conceits.

It was too easy to dumb this notion down 100 years ago and that has affected North American poetry for over 100 years as William Carlos Williams predicted in his autobiography.

In a talk at the Wave Books headquarters here in Seattle, Dale Martin Smith and Hoa Nguyen talked about their love of Joanne Kyger’s work and her notion of poetry, exemplified by the statement: “I don’t care what you think or feel. Tell me what’s HAPPENING.” Rhetoric is too easy. Making a good poem is difficult. And no one wants your hate delivered to their mailbox. Shame on anyone who does not understand this. There is no place for haters in this work. to this particular hater, I wish you deep and immediate self-knowledge.