Jody Azzouni

Jody's Notes

Back in the 1990s there were still bookstores. (And telephones were as sedentary as barnacles--can you imagine what a strange world it was back in the 1990s?)

Anyway, way back then, I put this poem on a card. A business card. With a design on one side and the poem on the other. A print-run of about a 1000. So it would be relatively unique. A collector's item. And I'd put them in books. In bookstores. Something extra a person would find. If they read the book they had bought.

I really was thinking: collector's item. Like a baseball card. Or, more grandly, like art. I numbered all the cards. (For no particular reason except that now each one stood out.) And there was a postbox address on them. As well as my name. Also for no particular reason.

It was a odd thing to do. Put little businesscard poems in books. I was probably depressed. Or suicidal. Bad things were happening back then. To me in particular. But instead of offing myself, I did this instead. (Weird hobbies, they can totally save your life.)

Anyway, I probably deposited about 40,000 or so of these limited edition poems on cards by the time I stopped doing this. (Because bookstores, for the most part, had gone extinct. And I couldn't think of anywhere else that I could stash poemcards. Safely, I mean.)

I got letters. (That's right, there were letters in those days too. Along with those strange sedentary phones. And bookstores.) Which made it all kind of fun. For example, I got this letter: "Hello, I'm not sure if you are going to receive this letter but I thought it would be worth a shot. While I was in the city last year, a homeless man handed me a card with a poem called The Vampire's Gift on the back. This poem moved me and I now carry it in my wallet."

Perhaps I should point out that I was not that homeless man. Really. It was totally someone else.

Some people would send me stuff of their own, some people would send me the card they had found, telling me where they had found it (in what book--by title--in what store--sometimes in what country). Sometimes a reaction to the poem too. They were mostly found in NYC (which makes sense since that was the only place that I put cards in books), but people told me they also found the cards in books in libraries in South America, on books found on beaches in California, and even in shrink-wrapped books found in Baltimore bookstores.

(Someone wrote me asking how I got this poem inside of a new shrink-wrapped book on Dracula found in a Baltimore bookstore.)

It was fun: getting these letters. I miss getting letters like this. Email isn't the same, it really isn't.

Anyway, this is perhaps one of my most popular poems. (At least based on the feedback I got back about it.) One person--I learned later--carried it around in her wallet for years; another one put it on her office wall. Someone else made a short movie about it. Really.

I republished this poem in my collection "The Lust for Blueprints."