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PostCardPoems
by Clark Lunberry

January 3, 2022 Contributed By: Clark Lunberry

Featuring my deceased father’s bequeathed collection of postcards, with retrieved fragments of language found in a shredded copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past

 

“Interstate Highway, Route 70, Wheeling, West Virginia”

 

“Pantheon (April 6, 1984)”

 

“Badlands National Park, South Dakota (June 26, 1983)”

 

AfterWord

 

My father, Dale Lunberry (1927-2012), was a jeweler and watchmaker for many years in Phillipsburg, Kansas. For decades, when traveling, always with his wife, my mother, Barbara Lunberry (1929-2002), he often purchased postcards of the places they were visiting. Hundreds and hundreds of these were collected and carefully catalogued by him, no doubt intended as souvenirs, as a means of remembering the many places where they had been. On the backs of the postcards, along with the official captions identifying the locations, my father would often write a very brief inscription of the dates of their visits (these are indicated, above, in parenthesis). At my father’s death, I inherited this box of postcards, uncertain of what I would ever do with it but reluctant to throw the cards away. 

With the arrival of COVID-19, and the extraordinary consequences of spending so much time at home, and, importantly, of not traveling, I found ways in which fragments from a copy of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (shredded for another project I was working on) could be made to accompany the postcards, offering them a kind of poetically clandestine caption. 

To my pleasure and surprise, and before I knew it, my pandemic project had taken on a life of its own, offering me a means of imaginative travel in time and place, while also allowing a collaboration of sorts with my deceased dad—an engagement with Proustian remembrances from his past, my present, and of our time together and apart. 


CLARK LUNBERRY is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of North Florida, in Jacksonville, Florida. Along with ​his interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, Lunberry creates site-specific “writing on water | writing on air” art and poetry installations, placing large-scale poems on water and windows. Recent installations have been completed in Uppsala, Sweden; Durham, London, and Oxford, England; Paris, France; Toronto, Canada; Tokyo and Hiroshima, Japan; Stanford University; ​the University of Georgia; and at the University of North Florida.

Filed Under: Featured Content, Poetry Posted On: January 3, 2022

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