Comments on: Dead Letter Office

By: Don Share

Don Share — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 01:32:43 +0000

I wonder if younger writers may also return to the epistle as a verse form. Just think of the poets who engaged in it: Horace, Ovid, Samuel Daniel, Petrarch, Ariosto, Pope, Auden, MacNeice, and Richard Hugo, to name a few. I suppose it has all but vanished because it is a victim not only of technology, but of the backlash against the “confessional” and “sentimental.” We may have to start a thread on endangered species of verse forms!
Dear Mary,
I sometimes answer Harriet’s mail, and let me thank you, on her behalf, for the lovely tribute to the blog and to Alicia.
Looking forward to more of your own thoughts here, and with all best,
Don

By: Mary Meriam

Mary Meriam — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:24:27 +0000

Dear Harriet,
Thanks for starting your blog! How smart of you to give Poetry’s stars a forum to shmooze, kvetch, kvell, shine, and otherwise educate and entertain this outsider from the hinterlands, who is free to post (whenever she can summon the balls) the thoughts she had in the kitchen while making a broccoli-noodle casserole. Frankly, I was blogless until you, perhaps even a bit blog bored. Then I found there was a certain frisson in hobnobbing with the most feared, respected, and well-endowed literary journal in the world. Of course, I wouldn’t have dared utter a word if I hadn’t already become distantly acquainted with Alicia in another sphere. Now I understand Alicia’s days are numbered with you, Harriet. What a pity! I wish she could stay.
Sincerely,
Mary

By: Alicia (AE)

Alicia (AE) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 10:56:30 +0000

Daisy, I’m with you on typing being faster–though I enjoy writing also. It is prose I would find hard to do enitrely longhand these days. I often do a first draft of a poem longhand, but I like to quickly shift to the computer for revision.
Emily, yes, I think the letter is increasingly reserved for pivotal moments such as letters of condolence, for which e-mails will not suffice. Although the author of the article as special concerns for the letter as artefact, I think his concern for whether e-mails are being saved, pinted out and archived is an important one. I absolutely agree that e-mails are real records, real epistles–but more subject than a handwritten note to deleting or oblivion. Hmmm.
It may too be a curious anomoly. Younger writers may actually return to the letter, as e-mail is something they associate with their parents and teachers, and brief messages are more easily dealt with by texting. I have friends who have lived and taught on the island of Paros for over 30 years. They teach American students there, and have watched these shifts in technology preferences from afar, as it were. After years and years of noting the increasing use of computers for communication with friends and family back home, they have suddenly started seeing a resurgence of letters and handwritten notes.
And let’s not forget–maybe e-mail was actually a return to the written communication. For years and years letters were supposed to be losing out to the telephone.

By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:52:36 +0000

Alicia,
Thanks for your epistle to the letter. I read it and the linked article just after learning of tragic events in a friend’s life. Sending her an email or calling is out of the question. She’s not responding to either. A letter, though, I’m certain she’ll want to receive. Have we reserved handwritten notes and letters for such unspeakable moments, whether joyous or sad?
Yet lately, I’ve received many epistle-like emails from fellow poets: carefully reasoned arguments, memorably descriptive travelogues, hilarious or apt recountings of the night before. Perhaps as the technology has aged and our nostalgia grown for real correspondence, we’re still leaving our records.
Emily

By: Daisy

Daisy — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 15:47:26 +0000

The more I type, the less I’m able to think in handwriting, is the problem. And yes, I type much faster than I handwrite. Semi-relatedly: I was complaining once when I was traveling, computerless, that I found it impossible anymore to write poems in ink by hand on paper. My husband reminded me that Milton dictated Paradise Lost.