Call for Papers
“Postcard Poetry & Poetics” Conference
Sorbonne Université, Paris, 3-6 June 2026
I
can’t get it out
to write letters or
postcards or anything:
— A. R. Ammons, Tape for the Turn of the Year (1965)
Postcards have often been viewed as embodying a “degree zero of writing,” to borrow a phrase from Roland Barthes. A lesser form of letter-writing dangerously poised toward not writing at all—as exemplified by Ammons’s decrescendo in the lines quoted above, “letters or / postcards or anything”— postcard-writing was long dismissed as a negligible subcategory of epistolary writing, one deemed formulaic at best, at odds with literary aspirations and typically lacking in aesthetic or semantic significance, if not downright obsolete in the age of instant electronic messaging.
One practical consequence of such cultural marginalization is that poets’ postcards tend to go unnoticed (or unregistered) in the archive. Inscribed postcards are typically unflagged in poets’ correspondences: they remain invisible in catalogs, where they are generally listed under specific dates or correspondents’ names rather than according to medium. Postcards that are identified as such in a poet’s archive, however, tend to be collectibles, blank cards that were neither written nor sent, a medium without a message: grouped under such categories as “loose material” or “miscellany,” they are treated as “mostly junk” (Ammons), not textual objects of interest, thus testing the boundaries of authorship and authoriality. Yet in recent years, postcards have increasingly come to the attention of literary scholars (e.g., Clissold, Cure, Prochaska and Mendelson, Reverseau, Rosenbaum and Ellis) who have sought to reverse the dynamic—by “picturing the postcard” as part of our cultural history (Cure), recovering these “ephemeral pieces of visual culture” once considered “cultural detritus” (Mendelson and Prochaska xi, xii) as part of “a heritage in the making” (Nachtergael and Reverseau 17, my translation), reclaiming blank postcards collected and displayed by writers as a meaningful part of their poetics (Reverseau 2019-2024), and altogether calling for an in-depth reexamination of literary postcards (Clissold), whether real or imagined.
What actually happens when poets invest the postcard as a poetic medium in its own right, approaching it as part of the elaboration of their poetry and poetics? As the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne (B.I.S.) prepares to host an exhibit of Elizabeth Bishop’s postcards in spring 2026 (with items selected from the Elizabeth Bishop Papers at Vassar College by Jonathan Ellis and Susan Rosenbaum), this international conference seeks to explore the enduring allure of postal cards, looking at the many ways that French and American poets from the early twentieth century onward have approached the medium as facilitating, inspiring, or circulating their poetic writing.
Recent scholarship in the wake of Frank Staff’s pioneering The Picture Postcard and Its Origins (1966) has increasingly challenged “the dominant narrative of postcard as a new medium that developed […] against the medium of the letter in antagonistic fashion,” redefining it instead as “a supplement to the letter” (Cure 4). Addressing postcards and deltiology (i.e. the collecting of postcards) from the intersecting perspectives of media studies, art history, cultural studies, and modernist studies, scholars have now successfully re-inscribed the medium within histories of the postal system, mass media, or photography, with a view to rediscovering postcards as epitomizing “the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (Benjamin). While they have often emphasized the pictorial over the textual, these scholars have also opened the way for a literary reexamination of a medium whose full poetic potential has yet to be gauged in order to provide a new account of the postcard as a literary object as well as a visual one. Interestingly, the first postcards that circulated in the 1860s and 1870s in Europe and the United States did not display images (Cure 5). Their pocket-size format and thick-paper texture were primarily meant to ensure swift business communication between countries and continents at a cheaper rate, through brief, straightforward messaging—a stylistic feature that was soon singled out as complicit with (and accelerating) the decline of literacy, much like today’s short messaging system.
Not only did the popularity of postcards increase dramatically over the following decades, blossoming across geopolitical as well as social borders to the point where they were hailed, and at times feared, as a democratic medium with revolutionary potential; but their rise also coincided with the boom of photography, a technology that utterly reshaped the medium and heralded the era of the picture postcard, a subcategory that has since become the dominant, default version of “the postcard.” Picture postcards soon became a favorite format for experimental artists and writers of the modernist era, who played with their reversible and, by the same token, subvertible quality, prompting Bradley D. Clissold to call the mailed postcard “a modernist communication technology” (6). Such unsettling of established hierarchies as underlined by Jacques Derrida in his celebration of the postcard (“What I prefer, about post cards,” he writes, “is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, […] recto or verso. Nor what is the most important, the picture or the text, and in the text, the message or the caption, or the address” [13]) nevertheless deserves to be challenged anew, in light of postcolonial readings of the postcard as reinforcing and disseminating racial or gender stereotypes (DeRoo), or Cary Nelson’s forays into “a largely forgotten form of literature—the printed poem card” (Nelson 2010, 174), which was also used as a vehicle for Nazi propaganda during World War II (2004, 2010). This conference invites scholars to reconsider how single/serial postcards have been used to build or extend reader communities, sometimes through the creative collaboration of poets and publishers (as exemplified by the poetry postcards printed and circulated by Ken and Ann Mikolowski at The Alternative Press in Detroit, along with other functional formats such as poetry bookmarks and bumper stickers).
Without downplaying the role of photography or casting it as a “troublemaker” in the history of postcard-writing (Brunet 8), this conference wishes to explore the full range of poetry’s postal cards including, but not restricted to, picture postcards—e.g., handwritten drafts of poems on found or made cards; letterpress poem-cards used as promotional material for book launches and reading events; even mass-produced sympathy postcards with lines of poetry either written or selected for the occasion—in the belief that postcards mentioned, described, collected, designed, displayed, or destroyed by poets all deserve scrutiny as part of their poetry and poetics.
We welcome proposals in the field of French and American poetry from the 1920s onward that will engage with one or several of the topics listed below, or expand their investigation beyond these guidelines. We particularly encourage original case studies of poets whose interest in postcards as a form of writing, whose postcard archive or postcard-shaped poetry, has remained largely unexplored.
I. Postcard Materialities, or Poetry in the Making
– postcards mentioned in poems
– poems written on postcards
– poems inspired by the postcard format
– poets’ essays on postcards
– poets’ experimentations with postcards
– poets, postcards, and travel writing
– postcards across borders and poets’ transnational poetics
– postcards and literary tourism
– playing with postcards
– poets’ postcards and clichés
– queering postcards
II. Postcard Collections and the Poetry Archive
– postcards, ephemerality, and the death of print
– poets’ postcards, nostalgia, retrophilia
– poets’ postcards as intermedial explorations
– postcards, the miniature, and small forms
– single / serial postcards
– found postcards and made postcards
– poets’ postcards on public display (museums, streets, and libraries)
– poet’s postcards on display in their studies (postcard walls)
– the material environment of poets’ postcards (boxes, albums and portfolios, books or frames, display racks, envelopes or slide shows)
III. Postcards, Reader Communities, and the Circulation of Poetry
– postcards as democratic medium
– postcard-writing: leisure or labor?
– postcard-writing as a genre
– the cultural impact of poets’ postcards
– postcards and poetry events/performances
– postcards and/as promotional material
– postcard-writing and gender
– postcard-writing and race
– poets’ postcards and censorship
– postcards as imperialistic medium
– postcards and propaganda
Papers may be delivered in French but English will be the main language of the conference. Please send a short bio and 300-word abstract by 7 November 2025 to:
Scientific committee
Olivier Belin (Sorbonne Université); Diane Drouin (Sorbonne Université); Jonathan Ellis (University of Sheffield); Valentin Fauque (Sorbonne Université); Ron Patkus (Vassar College); Susan Rosenbaum (University of Georgia, Athens); Juliette Utard (Sorbonne Université)
With funding from:
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne (BIS)
CELLF (UMR n° 8599), Sorbonne Université
Consortium SPHINX, Sorbonne Université
Réseau PHILOMEL, Sorbonne Université
University of Georgia
University of Sheffield
VALE (UR n° 4085), Sorbonne Université
Vassar College
Selected bibliography
Basso, Pauline, and Adèle Godefroy. Les Cartes postales de Michel Butor. Preface by Mireille Calle-Gruber with Anne Reverseau. Bourg-sur-Gironde : Éditions du Canoë, 2024.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. Hannah Arendt, Trans. Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Schocken Books, 2007, 217-251.
Berest, Anne. La carte postale. Paris : Grasset, 2021.
Berrigan, Ted. A Certain Slant of Sunlight. Ed. Alice Notley. Okland: O Books, 1988.
Bouillon, Marie-Ève, and Valérie Perlès, eds. Nouvelles du paradis. La carte postale de vacances. Paris : Éditions Loco / Musée de la Poste, 2023.
Brunet, François. Photography and Literature. London: Reaktion Books, 2009.
Clissold, Bradley D. Rereading Modernist Postcards. Critical Studies in Materialist Recovery. New York: Routledge, 2024.
Cure, Monica. Picturing the Postcard. A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.
DeRoo. Rebecca J. “Colonial Collecting: French Women and Algerian Cartes Postales.” Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity. Ed. David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 85-92.
Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card. From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1980). Trans. and intro. Alan Bass. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Desclaux, Jessica, and Bertrand Gervais, Corentin Lahouste, Anne Reverseau, Marcela Scibiorska, eds. Iconothèques : collecte, stockage et transmission d’images chez les écrivains et les artistes, XIXe-XXIe siècle. Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2024.
Devillez, Virginie, Isabelle de Longrée, Marie-Aude Rosman, and Anne Berest. La carte postale. Objet de collection, œuvre d’art. Namur : Fonds Mercator, Le Delta, 2024.
Doty, Mark. “A Postcard Concerning the Nature of the Imagination.” The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2, Fall 2004, 129-132.
Ellis, Jonathan. Letter Writing Among Poets: From William Wordsworth to Elizabeth Bishop. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Louvel, Liliane. Poetics of the Iconotext. Ed. Karen Jacobs. Trans. Laurence Petit. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Malaurie, Christian. La Carte postale, une œuvre : Ethnographie d’une collection. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2003.
Meikle, Jeffrey L. Postcard America: Curt Teich and the Imaging of a Nation, 1931-1950. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
Montandon, Alain, ed. Iconotextes. Paris : Ophrys, 1990.
Nachtergael, Magali, and Anne Reverseau. Un Monde en cartes postales : Cultures en circulation. Marseille : le Mot et le reste, 2022.
Nelson, Cary. “Love Your Panzer Corps: Rediscovering the Wartime Poem Postcard.” Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity. Ed. David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 167-181.
Nelson, Cary. “Martial Lyrics: The Vexed History of the Wartime Poem Card.” American Literary History. Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 2004). 263-289.
Perec, Georges. « Deux cent quarante-trois cartes postales en couleurs véritables ». L’infra-ordinaire. Paris : Seuil, 1989.
Prochaska, David and Jordana Mendelson, eds. Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010.
Reverseau, Anne. Le Sens de la vue : Le regard photographique dans la poésie moderne. Paris : Sorbonne Université Presses, 2018.
Reverseau, Anne, and Jessica Desclaux, Marcela Scibiorska, Corentin Lahouste, with the collaboration of Pauline Basso and Andrés Franco Harnache. Murs d’images d’écrivains : dispositifs et gestes iconographiques (XIXe-XXIe siècle). Louvain : Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2022.
Reverseau, Anne. “HANDLING: Writers Handling Pictures: A Material Intermediality (1880-today),” ERC Project, UCLouvain, 2019-2024, https://projethandling.be/.
Rosenbaum, Susan, and Jonathan Ellis. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Picture Postcards.” Introduction to Exhibition Catalog, and related Online Exhibition. Vassar College Libraries, 2023, https://vclibrary.vassarspaces.net/elizabeth-bishops-postcards-an-exhibition/index.
Schor, Naomi. “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900.” Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity. Ed. David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 1-23.
Staff, Frank. The Picture Postcard and Its Origins. London: Lutterworth press, 1966.
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993.
Warn, Emily. “D.I.Y. Detroit. How the Alternative Press shaped the art of a city left for dead.” Poetry Foundation, 20 April 2011, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69676/diy-detroit.
Willoughby, Martin. A History of Postcards. London, Bracken Books, 1994.
Zervigón, Andres Mario. “Postcards to the Front: John Heartfield, George Grosz, and the Birth of Avant-Garde Photomontage.” Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity. Ed. David Prochaska and Jordana Mendelson. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. 54-69.
