Last spring I signed up to participate in the WriteME Project, a pilot project develop by Maine’s Poet Laureate, Julia Bouwsma, to connect writers across Maine via epistolary poems. Everyone was matched with a pen pal in June and encouraged to share at least 3 exchanges of letters across the summer. It was pretty open-ended and up to partners to determine how to proceed. At the end of the summer the organizers asked partners to share their poems and feedback about how the project worked or didn’t work for them.

My partner and I touched base in June via e-mail and opted to begin our exchange via snail mail. We decided I would send the first letter. I found it so challenging to figure out how to write the first letter. What does one to a stranger!? I’m not sure I ever thought before about what an intimate form letters are. Once we got up and going it became a bit easier. Over the course of the summer, we switched to e-mail to manage time a bit better, and we finished up our exchange of three letters early in August.

Here are a few sections from my letters:

late June 2023 (from my initial letter)
Once I saw a tomato plant growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Right in the middle of New York City. It stopped me in my tracks. Somehow, while I watched, everyone stepped around it. At least while I was there. I like to think it bore fruit eventually, though perhaps its fruit was more subtle than a red tomato.

And I wonder about this exchange of letters. These seeds we’re planting. What fruit will they bear?

“I look outside my window, a view that endlessly pulls me outside myself and both into and away from my writing. Atop the tightly furled hydrangea buds, I spy a long, thin worm, like an extension of green, grasping the plant at one end and waving about. It must be seeking another path, a way forward on some intersecting branch or adjacent leaf. I watch it move from one end of the blossom to the other, fruitlessly repeating its graceful undulating efforts. 

As summer begins, with its break from the relentless pace of the school year, I think about the expanse of time and space before me, and about this challenge. Perhaps I am a bit like that thin worm, flailing about, trying to find my way forward. Perhaps the value is in the constant dance, the quest, not necessarily in attaining a precise destination. How many times do I need to learn to value process over product?”

And a piece from another letter:
July 18, 2023
….

Outside my sister’s house,
granite curves into steps
climbs into walls
and edges gardens and woodland paths.
It’s laced with pale starbursts of lichen,
swaths of pillowed moss,
fronded fern shadows.

Intermingled, they read like hieroglyphics
a mysterious secret language.

Instead of the movement of water,
I ponder the evidence of time passing
in ripples grown across granite boulders.

Island time is generous.

Last night there was a celebratory Zoom. Along with several other partnerships, my partner and I were asked to share some of our exchange of letters and any takeaways we had. I’m paraphrasing here, but Julia Bouwsma began the evening by saying that to her, poetry is the work of living. We don’t know where we’re going, she said, but we’re trying things out. We’re experimenting. It’s all about listening and connection.

It was a lovely evening and highlighted the enthusiasm and creativity of other poets across the state. Participants wowed me again and again with their words and their artistry and creativity–handmade paper, painted letters and such a sense of fun–a poem written inside a wooden Brie cheese container! One writer responded to her partner’s first poem with a poem using only words from the poem she’d received. It was awesome!

I’m so glad I participated, and I learned a lot through the experience. I really enjoyed having my words in conversation with someone else. Over time, our letters developed somewhat organically, embracing water imagery and a deep reverence for nature.

Still, listening to others share, I realized that I had missed an opportunity. While I enjoyed writing the letters and reading those I received, over the summer I somehow fell into thinking of them as an obligation, not an opportunity. Listening to others, I heard the play, the fun, and/or the real sense of deep connection. I think back to my initial letter to my pen pal, in which I asked, “How many times do I need to learn to value process over product?” Sometimes I worry so much about how what I do will be received, that I hesitate to just go for it. So, I completed our exchange, but I think it was more by following the “letter” of the project, so to speak, than by embracing its spirit. A lost opportunity to take some risks, to break some rules, to have some fun.

I suspect the project will be offered again this coming year, and I was so inspired by what I heard and saw last night, that I’m on board to try again. This time, I hope to enter in with a spirit of reckless fun and wild poetic abandon!

Stay tuned.

This week’s Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted by Rose Cappelli at Imagine the Possibilities.