Lucy Kempton added her words to a postcard titled “The Dundee leaving Etel,” a facsimile of an original photograph from the tuna fishing museum in Etel in Morbihan, south Brittany. Kempton writes,
Tuna fishing was one of the main industries of the region until the first half of the last century. We found ourselves unexpectedly moved and haunted by the artifacts and accounts of a hard and dangerous way of life, and the devotional objects — carved shrines, nativities, inscribed prayers and so on — which the fishermen made. I would have liked to have sent the actual postcard snail-mail and handwritten the poem, because I like the idea of that, but it was a limited edition one and a bit precious, and I couldn’t bring myself to part with it!
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9 comments in “the Dundee leaving Etel”
September 29th, 2008 at 9:33 am
Stunning poem and photo. The comments also explain the emotional connection we have with objects, with the past, and with photos. Wonderful work.
September 29th, 2008 at 9:48 am
Beautiful, this is absolutely beautiful.
September 29th, 2008 at 4:29 pm
I love how your words capture the way I feel each time my husband heads out tuna fishing! He got one last week but they’ve been few and far between this season.
Just gorgeous!
September 30th, 2008 at 5:51 am
Lovely
September 30th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
a wonderfully captured and personalised piece of history
September 30th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Beautiful echoing of forms — the image just speaks these lines. Well done.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:39 am
Excellent standard of Lucy!
October 1st, 2008 at 7:12 am
Wow, that’s just lovely. The words and picture go together so well, it’s hard to believe they originated separately. I guess maybe that’s because you have a strong feeling for the coast of Brittany?
October 1st, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Thanks so much.
I tried to write a different kind of poem, more about the camera watching the man watching the boat, and images on the water and on the glass plate, but this one insisted on coming through instead!
A comment over at my place prompted me to think a little more about the question of fonts and handwriting, and rather made me wish I’d tried to handwrite the poem, since there is a degree of dissonance between the medium of the postcard and the use of electronically generated typefaces. This is perhaps more clearly a problem using a vintage card like this than a modern photo. However, I was uncertain that my handwriting, which is a fairly functional, semi-printed, sort of italic, and pretty modern in itself, and not at all French, would look well either. I tried a facsimile type of French cursive handwriting style font but just felt it looked a bit pretentious and phoney.
In the end I chose a quite old-fasioned looking seraphed tyrpeface (I forget which), which I thought would be the least inappropriate and intrusive.
I wonder what others think about the types of scripts used in the very interesting mix of visual and textual that Postal Poetry is presenting? (I was also concerned with the loss of image quality with a scan of a scan …)
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