One day when it was windy and rainy and I didn’t go out, it occurred to me that I should pay more attention to my surroundings. It is so easy to take for granted the things you see every day, to stop noticing them. So I looked about me, at the postcards I have on display indoors.
If you buy postcards you sometimes find only a limited choice- I was in a shop in Folkestone recently and they had one or two cards of Folkestone itself, a few more of Canterbury, a few more of Kent. It is different in somewhere like the National Gallery, where there are hundreds of cards to choose from and one can be more idiosyncratic. Some of the postcards I have on display in my home show familiar, well-known images, and some are of things I have never seen, by artists I haven’t heard of.
The Postcards
The postcards take up little space.
White-tacked to the ‘fridge they
Cover its off-putting white face
With a sort of incomplete art history-
Mostly the acknowledged greats-
Mixed with a sort of incomplete world tour-
Capri, Tiananmen Square,
Battlefields of the First World War,
Butlin’s Bognor, Kazakhstan World Fair,
Wroslaw, Egypt, lots of The United States.
Then, juxtaposed with Warhol’s Marilyn,
A Bauhaus armchair, Rembrandt’s wife,
Hiroshi Sato Mannequins,
A William Nicholson Still Life.
The transport links are good here
And it doesn’t take me long
To reach the hallway where are
Disneyland Hong Kong,
Dublin’s (Joyce’s) Sandymount Strand,
The Nagasaki Bullet Train,
Grand Canyon, Berlin Zoo,
J.M.Turner’s Clouds and Rain,
Barbados, Tangier (general view),
Several other Disneylands.
Next to these a Botticelli sits
By Tokyo, the spires of Chartres,
A bowler-hatted chap of Magritte’s,
All kinds of 4-by-6 inch art,
The world from Leicester Square to Newfoundland.
These are mementos of other people’s lives-
Their beaten and unbeaten tracks,
Their favourite beaches, hotels, dives,
Their Guggenheim, their Louvre, their Prado,
Their yearly search for El Dorado.
I never look what’s written on their backs.
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