Note: This little essay was written many days before war came to Ukraine. With many others in countries around the world, I stand without words in view of the courage and grief of the people of Ukraine. Please reach out with love in any way you can today.

I thought I was over it. Guess not. Recently, on the back cover of a book of poetry, I read the following comment: “These poems rip up the Hallmark card and replace it with the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world.” Something inside me bristled. Again. Still. Rip up the Hallmark card? Rip my heart out.

I’ve been retired since 2008. Before that, for a goodly chunk of forty-one years, I was a writer for, yes, Hallmark Cards. I was hired there in 1967, with a fledgling bachelor’s degree in English from a modest public college. (You can read more about that on the opening pages of this blog). My job at the outset? To compose four to eight lines of rhymed verse that delivered Happy Birthday, Happy Mother’s Day, Merry Christmas, Sorry You’re Sick, etc.—we called them sentiments—in some way never before uttered. We were not permitted to say anything “too restrictive” (that is, not likely to be true for absolutely everybody) and we always had to end with an upbeat wish. Does this sound easy? I spent an entire year tossing my college girl notions of originality and poetry into the wastebasket. Every single day, I expected to be fired for incompetence.

For now, let’s set aside what may be easy or not easy about the writing itself. Painfully, I learned the truth: greeting cards are not poetry. However, I will forever defend the greeting card, by now evolved into a vast genre of styles and subjects, as the writing that may best meet “the difficult, demanding claims of love in an imperfect world.”

Good readers might occasionally choose a book of poems by Mary Oliver or Billy Collins or Wendell Berry or Emily Dickinson as a gift for a friend in celebration or sympathy. Most people, though, unable or unwilling to compose their own thoughts, will find, somewhere in the acres of greeting cards on display, a message that is both truthful and genuine, with an artful spin, or perhaps a note of humor.

Why should poets with their neurotic whining possess a higher claim to the task of bringing comfort and hope to fellow beings than a greeting card writer? A greeting card message, whatever the occasion, is about YOU, the recipient–and certainly not about the anonymous writer. Even a perfunctory greeting card message conveys the fact that the sender meant to reach out with a personal intention of kindness. Why should the “difficult, demanding claims of love” exclude the assurance of hope and human caring in a simple greeting card message?

Please. Stop this comparison. Let Hallmark be. Let it be a beacon of optimism and love in that imperfect world. Everybody needs it.

P. S. I don’t write greeting cards anymore, but if you’d like to reach out to somebody with poetry, please consider one or two or three of my books: Road Trip, Windshift, The Beekeeper and other love poems, all available at amazon. Thank you!