Mallory Pace
Words by Mallory Pace
The year is 2020 and Clark Lunberry has been sitting around his house for far too long. The pandemic is just beginning to put the world on pause as Lunberry yearns for his life of teaching and traveling back. He stares at buckets of shredded paper from his favorite book and a box of postcards his late father left behind, over 750 that is. And almost by accident, he recalls, the two fell together, perfectly in place. An accident that is now a published book of remarkable visual poetry — “Seeking Frozen Sound.”
Before becoming an English professor at the University of North Florida 19 years ago, Lunberry spent years living and traveling around the world, creating art, writing books and teaching English, all of which he still continues to do. After completing his undergraduate degree at Kansas University, he spent time in Europe, then in New York City until he settled into Japan for eight years, where he taught English. He finds inspiration from becoming a part of other cultures, meeting new people and stumbling across a few happy accidents along the way. His most recent book, “Seeking Frozen Sound,” is a product of one of those accident-turned-inspiration moments.
Growing up in Kansas, Lunberry’s father was a small town jeweler, watchmaker and avid collector. He traveled to many places over his lifetime, collecting postcards along the way. They were all very connected to the places he went, Lunberry said, but he didn’t really know what to do with them just sitting in a box. Until boredom struck one day and Lunberry began seeing the postcards less as souvenirs and more as beautiful photography.
Around the same time, Lunberry was working on a different project for the UNF Art Gallery where he shredded various papers, including a copy of Marcel Proust’s 3,200-page “Remembrance of Things Past,” which left him with buckets of tiny scrap paper. Some pieces were too shredded to make words out on, but others remained touched with one or two words, some incoherent, some mysteriously beautiful. The combination of the two was accidental at first, but then became intentional as Lunberry started to see a vision for what it could become.
“I had the postcards and I had the piles of shreddings … and it almost feels like it was an accident that one of the shreddings fell onto the postcard,” Lunberry recalled. “And I thought, oh, that’s kind of interesting. It was like a kind of caption on a photograph but inside of the photograph.”
The excitement and satisfaction of finding the perfect words to fit on the right photo was enough for him to keep going. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Lunberry knew this wasn’t a project meant to be rushed through. Instead, he would thumb through the postcards until he found one that was especially intriguing in some way. He would leave the card on his desk, not so much just to look at, but to become part of his environment, Lunberry said. He quoted one of his favorite critics, Susan Sontag, who once said, “If you wait long enough, every photograph becomes interesting.” The objective was to use singular words or put together phrases to accompany the photograph and work alongside it, rather than trying to dominate the image with words.
Seeking frozen sound on hearing the language of grace
This postcard inspired the title of Lunberry’s book and is set inside the Notre-Dame in Paris.
A thousand things are thinking
Lunberry was inspired by the complex nature of this postcard from the streets of New Orleans. He paired it with fragments of paper that wrote out, “a thousand things are thinking.” He knew immediately that he liked them together, although he couldn’t explain why at first.
“It’s the ambiguity of what 1,000 things?” Lunberry said. “In the photograph, there are 1,000 things — there’s the people, the cars, the signs, there’s everything there. But to imagine all of those things in the photograph as thinking was suddenly very interesting to me.”
He chose to place the words on top of the stop sign, as if it was almost nailed to it. He said it felt like the words respected the photograph and integrated right in, adding to the beauty of the image without overwhelming or distracting from its original meaning.
While some postcard poems seem to click right away or with time, some never do at all. Lunberry described one postcard of a beautiful scenic river in rural France, an area where he once lived for a year. It has such a personal connection, but everything he has tried with it never felt right; it didn’t add anything, only took away, he said. Other times, it’s as if a puzzle is filled with its missing piece. Just recently, after a year and a half of staring at one particular postcard, something mysteriously clicked in Lunberry’s head and he knew exactly what to do with it. He described the feeling of completing a postcard poem as gratifying, giving him an “enormous amount of irrational, ridiculous pleasure.” That’s what keeps him going.
Living in different parts of the world has given Lunberry more than just stamps on a passport. During his time in Japan, he became further infatuated with the English language. He often says that it was only by living in Japan did he even realize he spoke English, comparing it to breathing and how much we take it for granted. It came as a revelation, he recalled, to fully realize that the languages being exchanged sounded very strange to each other, yet were completely normal to the individual. Lunberry even found inspiration in his interactions with the students and their “poor” English. In an article published by the Kyoto Journal titled, “Deviant English and the Para-Poetic,” Lunberry compiled the writings of his Japanese students and presented it as accidental poetry. These sentences, phrases and short stories, seemingly written in “broken” English, turned into something poetic and full of curiosity.
“It feels kind of accidental, especially when I talk it through,” Lunberry said. “But I’ve always wanted to remain open to chance and accidents. They’ve been for me often a revelation. So instead of being terrified of accidents, see them as possibilities for discovery.”
“Seeking Frozen Sound” was published with over 60 visual postcard poems — with another on the way. Next year, Lunberry will be returning to Kyoto for a sabbatical project about the intersection of photography and writing. While in Asia, he also has plans to speak at a conference in Hong Kong about Proust, author of “Remembrance of Things Past” and other French writers focusing on memory and fragmentation. He feels excited about what’s to come next year and curiously hopeful he might stumble upon another happy accident.
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