The August Postcard poetry exchange is going to run again this year. If you want to commit to composing a poem a day and mailing it to an interested stranger, it can be a good writing fire starter. Only members of the group can see your mailing address. Each poem is to an audience of one.
I’ve participated before and the participation tends to dwindle as the month goes on, but on the other hand you can receive random poetry from South Africa or the U.S. or South America or the U.K.
In a couple cases, a poet googled me and did a response piece to one of my poems found online which I found pretty cool. In one case, I did the same and had the person tore into me in a couple emails saying I was infringing on her poetic ideas by responding to hers. (Shrug. Newbie poets, they’re all about the proprietary glow of preciousness.)
It’s a little word lottery. You get what you can’t expect in both directions. I got a few that were beautiful art pieces and real keepers of poetry.
David Sherwin did a post on the benefits he got from it. For example, the practice of turning down the inner critic and play in improvisation around an essence of a gesture. And the stack of cards “serve as a reminder that creativity flows from well-considered constraint, married to daily discipline.”