Sunday, September 23, 2007
Remembering snail mail
I am one of those people who laments the end of snail mail letter writing. Not that I do much about it. E mail is a worthy replacement, but the ease of exchange pushes that mode toward snippets of information rather than lengthy, informative missives. I have only four correspondents sending me e mails like old-fashioned letters. One of them is a distant cousin in England, another lives three blocks away, but I'm certain they'd all be hard copy letter writers in an earlier era. One person actually mails me letters in envelopes from time to time, scrawled on stationary, sometimes running up the sides of margins with arrows pointing the way, usually inspired by a newspaper clipping she enclosed. But she's in her 70s & I've long wished she'd surrender & plug the old computer someone gave her into a cheap dialup ISP & get herself an e mail address. Then she'd hear from me quite often. She's someone I'd send brand new ragged but right poems before I ruined them with revisions.
I carried on a regular correspondance with only one of my girlfriends, a nursing student. Her letters from school, in a fairly neat cursive, were long but grumpy, coursework was hard, she was always tired. In addition to classes she rotated through the various hospital wards & all shifts, some uplifting, some depressing, but always as the lowest in the staff pecking order. From the start, her education instilled in her the R.N.'s contempt for most specialist doctors. I saved those for about ten years, then selected a few examples & tossed the rest. Seeing the letters, bundled with string, only reminded me how badly I treated her.
Another friend wrote great letters after she moved to Chicago. When she came back to Jersey, I preferred visiting her because she served delicious cocktails in plastic glasses shaped like fish, & after we had a few she had a way of making me feel like the handsomest guy in the world even though we were never intimately involved.
Through the 1980s I exchanged long letters with poet David Cope in Michigan. Now a full time college teacher with many books of poems to his credit, Dave was then the boiler room man & janitor at a small elementary school, a job he liked, & he had free time in the middle of the school day to write his many friends. My letters to Dave are in the collection of the U. of Michigan library named for poet Anne Waldman. I made carbon copies of most of the letters, bound in the year-by-year journals I used to keep. They are generally not of a high literary quality. I'm just sneaking in those library storage boxes on the archival importance of Dave's voluminous correspondance with Allen Ginsberg.
Which reminds me I have a few letters to compose, to my distant cousin, & to the guy from upstate New York who smartly decided to use his musical expertise writing for money rather than free form radio DJing for nothing. The woman without e mail gets a phone call.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I carried on a regular correspondance with only one of my girlfriends, a nursing student. Her letters from school, in a fairly neat cursive, were long but grumpy, coursework was hard, she was always tired. In addition to classes she rotated through the various hospital wards & all shifts, some uplifting, some depressing, but always as the lowest in the staff pecking order. From the start, her education instilled in her the R.N.'s contempt for most specialist doctors. I saved those for about ten years, then selected a few examples & tossed the rest. Seeing the letters, bundled with string, only reminded me how badly I treated her.
Another friend wrote great letters after she moved to Chicago. When she came back to Jersey, I preferred visiting her because she served delicious cocktails in plastic glasses shaped like fish, & after we had a few she had a way of making me feel like the handsomest guy in the world even though we were never intimately involved.
Through the 1980s I exchanged long letters with poet David Cope in Michigan. Now a full time college teacher with many books of poems to his credit, Dave was then the boiler room man & janitor at a small elementary school, a job he liked, & he had free time in the middle of the school day to write his many friends. My letters to Dave are in the collection of the U. of Michigan library named for poet Anne Waldman. I made carbon copies of most of the letters, bound in the year-by-year journals I used to keep. They are generally not of a high literary quality. I'm just sneaking in those library storage boxes on the archival importance of Dave's voluminous correspondance with Allen Ginsberg.
Which reminds me I have a few letters to compose, to my distant cousin, & to the guy from upstate New York who smartly decided to use his musical expertise writing for money rather than free form radio DJing for nothing. The woman without e mail gets a phone call.
Labels: about writing
