) th good /old w~ay 109-114

Since I was offline from around midday Christmas Eve until a little after 6 yesterday evening I didn't realise the latest batch had been posted to Andrew Taylor's tumblr.

Andrew very generously says,

Having lived with these poems for a few days before posting this, I realise how much an honour it is to have 'worked' (posting) on this project with Matt. This has been some of the best mail that I've ever received. Thanks (so far) Matt.

I have to say it's actually an honour that this sequence has been so well received and that Andrew has actually wanted to help document the process.

As usual the images from this batch are at Andrew's flickr. The full sequence of images from the first batch onwards start here.

A while back here and elsewhere in the blog I wrote about influences that have fed into the creation of the poem. One that I forgot was an unsuccessful experiment I tried early on when I started submitting poetry. These were 5 minute poems. I'd put a page in a typewriter set an alarm for five minutes and type until I was cut off. No preparation allowed.

Although they take a little longer, with the exception of around eleven stanzas/pages/cards close to the beginning all the cards have been created on the stamp. The only forward planning is the recording of text not used on a particular stamp because I want to split a sentence or sequence of thoughts across two or more stamps. I may scan and post the pages where I've written these future fragments at a later date.