PaigeI recently started going through all my boxes of junk in order to prepare for a garage sale and pare down. I found in a box of stationary some postcards I had collected when I lived in New York and in Los Angeles.

One is a postcard similar to the image on the left, a card I bought at the gorgeous and amazing Mark Twain House in Concord, Connecticut. Growing up in St. Louis, I have my own prejudices and partialities toward Mark Twain, but this museum in Concord is hands down my favorite writer's house. The postcard depicts the Paige Compositor, the prototype of the typewriter that Twain sunk all his money into. Although Twain wasn't a poet outright, this machine is a piece of poetic history in its own way.

Ph2I also found a postcard for The Poet's House in New York City back when it was located on Spring Street. The postcard was meant to remind me to visit the place and I never did. I'm keeping the postcard to remind me to visit them at their new location on River Terrace the next time I visit NYC.  Be sure to stop by the next time you are a poetry tourist in the Big Apple.

  

I also found a postcard that was created in Los Angeles as a plea to then-Governor Gray Davis in an effort to express support for public arts funding and the naming of a new California poet laureate. The postcard was produced by Poets & Writers Magazine with the motto that "Arts are the Soul of California" and the picture side simply containing this quote:

"You will find poetry nowhere
unless you bring some of it
with you."

— Joseph Jourbert

I used to keep this postcard on my fridge. Now I feel a bit blasé about it. Sometimes you find poetry already there, unexpected, sometimes even unwanted.