When the climate crisis feels too massive to think about or make sense of, sometimes it can help to put your thoughts and emotions into a form that is small, shimmering, and transcendent, and then to send that expression out into the world to do good work on your behalf. Last fall, as a response to David Opdyke’s monumental postcard mural Someday, all this, premiering in the Climate Museum Pop-Up, the museum’s resident poet John Linstrom led a series of workshops for high schoolers on the art of writing postcard poetry for the climate. On postcards reproduced from Opdyke’s mural, participants wrote poems expressing the urgency of the climate crisis in human terms, which were then sent to elected representatives to convey that urgency to them. 

In this workshop, John described the pedagogical philosophy of the postcard poem exercise and also led participants in writing their own postcard poems. This program was offered with the support of NYU 2040 Now and NYU’s Georgiou Library and Resource Center for Children and Literature, and it was held at NYU’s Georgiou Library, 239 Greene Street, 5th Floor, in Manhattan.