"We looked forward to that day, once a month, when we'd open our mailbox and discover the Post-a-Poem envelope inside. We'd pour a couple glasses of wine, head outside and read the poetry aloud to each other, savouring every word."
-Elaine Littmann & Mitch Kezin, Vancouver  



Poems in the mail: why not?
One morning in early 2019 while lounging around the Orange Lamphouse's original Vancouver studio, Silmara and I were discussing Why We Write: Poets of Vernon, our latest documentary. We were only about half-way through shooting but already thinking of ways we could spread the word about the project. Inspired by an episode of Terry O’Reilly’s delightful CBC Radio One program ‘Under the Influence,’ we thought, “why not complement Why We Write with a to-your-door subscription service?” 
Over the course of 2020, for the price of a couple of books, subscribers would receive an entire year’s worth of excellent poetry delivered straight to their homes.
The works themselves, courtesy of many of the poets featured in Why We Write or otherwise connected to Vernon, were specially selected to present as wide a range of text and texture as possible. 
Each poem is self-contained and unique. At the same time, each lends its voice to a collective music and a new story. 
Laisha Rosnau’s To Do feels like both a poetic manifesto and a list of New Year’s Resolutions. As such, it was the obvious choice to kick things off in January. Other matches of poem to calendar month were not difficult: Sharon Thesen’s contribution, Calendar Picture for the Month of June, was followed by Gerry William’s Service Berry Woman, which cites July in its first stanza. 
Other connections were more subtle: the summer heat of Patrick Lane’s Bee Cave shimmered into the blistering wildfires of Heidi Garnett’s The Last Apple Orchard; which in turn became the cold death grounds found in Michelle Doege’s Breathe a month later. 
The works interact and intersect across time and space. Both John Lent’s In the Aloha Laundromat and Jason Emde’s Stranger open with a quote from Tom Wayman. Tom then closed out the year with a poem co-starring (so to speak) Lent – namely Shelby Wall and John Lent Perform 12-Bar Blues at the Upstairs, Vernon, BC. 
Each poem was presented in a beautiful and creative way by the Orange Lamphouse’s in-house graphic designer Silmara Emde. Some of them were bundled with video and/or audio ‘extras’: the printed version of Rod Neufeld’s song Kids in Vernon, for example, came with a link that led readers to a specially-created music video for another one of Rod’s tunes (The Old Coldstream Hotel), while Dr William Cohen’s Lonely Metaphors are Story-less Figures was accompanied by a short video in which Bill told a traditional tale of Sen’k’lip. 
By December, subscribers had a truly one-of-a-kind epistolary collection of some of the best in contemporary Canadian literature. 
We are grateful that Canada Post continued providing services during such a strange, worrying year. These voices in and of the poems became more precious as they reached out in a time when even the distance across the street from your neighbour seemed vast and un-transversable. We connected and became re-connected.
Will we do it again? Will we launch, say, Post-a-Poem 2022 to coincide with the release of Why We Write? Or perhaps wait until 2030 for the tenth anniversary (assuming the price of even a domestic stamp will be affordable then)? We just may. We’ll let you know. In the meantime, if you missed Post-a-Poem 2020, please scan the complete list of offerings below and seek out the actual books. We can pretty much guarantee that if you liked a given poem in our series, you’ll probably like the other pieces that surround it in its original publication, too. 

Only words
can fly for you like birds
on the wall of the sun.
A bird is a poem
that talks of the end of cages.

-from The Bird by Patrick Lane 



Post-a-Poem 2020
January
Laisha Rosnau / To Do 
from Pluck (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2014)
February
John Lent / In the Aloha Laundromat  
from Frieze (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 1984)
March
Kerry Gilbert / untitled 
from Little Red, p. 14 (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2019)
April
Bill Cohen / Lonely Metaphors are Story-less figures
(1995; revised in 2010)
May
Rod Neufeld / Kids in Vernon 
from the album Kids in Vernon (SOCAN 2005)
June
Sharon Thesen / Calendar Picture for the Month of June
from A Pair of Scissors (Toronto: House of Anansi Press Ltd., 2000)
July
Gerry William / Service Berry Woman 
from The Woman in the Trees (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2006)
August
Patrick Lane / The Bee Cave  
from Separations (New/Books, 1969)
September
Heidi Garnett / The Last Apple Orchard 
from Blood Orange (Calgary: Frontenac House, 2016)
October
Michelle Doege / Breathe 
(unpublished)
November
Jason Emde / Stranger 
first published in Panoply (online, 2020) 
December
Tom Wayman / Shelby Wall and John Lent Perform 12-Bar Blues at the Upstairs, Vernon, BC  
from Helpless Angels (Saskatoon: Thistledown Press, 2017)



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December 2020

Shelby Wall and John Lent perform 12-Bar Blues at the Upstairs, Vernon, BC
Tom Wayman

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October 2020

Breathe
Michelle Doege


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July 2020

Service Berry Woman
Gerry William


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May 2020

The Old Coldstream Hotel
Presenting Rod Neufeld's classic ode to Vernon BC's legendary watering hole. 


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April 2020

Our stories are who we are
Dr William Cohen tells a story of Senk'lip at Komasket.



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