I Send Too Many Flowers: Amelia Etlinger and the Art of Correspondence

ABSTRACT: Correspondence art has asked a lot of its recipients and, occasionally, promised much in return. Though long neglected by many canonical accounts of concrete poetry, 1970s feminist art, and art sent through the mail, Amelia Etlinger’s “visual poems” can teach us much about what it means to build and sustain an art practice based in reciprocity and care. Etlinger created her poems out of the collaged phrases and ephemeral materials that circulate among households, between friends, or across distant networks of collaborators. Her intricate formal techniques, which draw from traditions of fiber art and experimental poetics, offer a useful supplement to many of her contemporaries who cultivated aesthetic networks through the mail in order to critique or subvert restrictive notions of artistic freedom, aesthetic value, and the commodification of expression.