a moment of beautiful – shadow
a shadow on the kitchen cabinet of a pine cone hanging in my dining room window
shadow
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frail interruption of light
ribbon without curl or selvage
pine cone without pitch
brief life from the ecliptic
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
a stack of post cards
Saturday, for me, is genealogy day. I am interested in the history of my family and I have a lot of boxes of information to sort through. If I don’t spend a dedicated time to the study of the items in those boxes, the work will never get done. And, I want to try and get my value from the small fee I pay each month to www.ancestry.ca .
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Over the last few Saturdays, I have been studying a small stack of post cards sent to my grandmother (Katie Clark) from 1906 to 1910. There are 174 post cards in the collection. The post cards are one record of her travels to the United States where she was studying to become a nurse.
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Born in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia in 1890, Katie Clark was raised on a farm with her brother and four sisters. When she graduated from High School, she went to Boston to become a nurse. She was joining her sister Anne who had started her nursing program there the year before.
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Katie Clark in her nursing uniform
Katie Clark, my grandmother
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Travel from the Maritimes to Boston and other cities along the Eastern Seaboard was common in the early 1900s and was usually by train. Nursing was a relatively new type of professional work for women and men. Professional nursing had been established in the 1860s largely as a result of the efforts of Florence Nightingale and others. By the turn of the century, many nursing schools were established in both the United States and Canada.
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Katie went to school in Newton Lower Falls, on the outskirts of Boston. She studied with two of her sisters (Anne and Laura) and a small group of women and men who became her friends. Katie’s photos show sliding parties and sports activities.
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Photos of winter sledding in Newton Lower Falls from Katie’s photo album (Katie is third from the right in the lower, right photo)
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Photo from Katie’s album of the school’s women’s basketball team (Katie is fifth from the right in the top row; her sister Anne is second from the right in the seated second row from the front)
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Post cards were one way friends and families could stay in touch. The post cards show that cards were mailed even within the same community and sometimes at the rate of two or three a day. The messages on Katie’s post cards often mention getting or sending letters and often ask Katie to send a post card, soon.
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The post cards are mostly scenic in theme. There are also a large number of comedic post cards …
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The card on the left pokes fun at Mother-in-laws (1910) ; the post card on the right is one of many scenic views, this one of the ‘flower pot’ formations near Alma, New Brunswick (1907).
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There are also post cards with seasonal themes, for Christmas, Easter, New Years Day and Valentines Day …
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One of Katie’s post cards with a Christmas theme (1907)
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A few of the post cards are blank, without stamp, post mark, address or message. Perhaps these were delivered to Katie in person as a contribution towards her post card collection. Sometimes the address is the only handwriting on the card. Usually, however, the sender included a brief message to Katie, written in a special space on the back of the card. In some cases the message was written upside-down, or in various blank spaces on both front and back of the card.
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A post card with a New Year’s message (1909)
The back of the New Year’s post card with a message and a stamp affixed upside-down ! (1909)
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The information on these cards goes beyond the written message. The cards are a record of where Katie was living at various times during the five year period. The post marks and an occasional return address indicate where Katie’s friends were living. The messages contain common expressions of the times. The post card themes tell what subjects interested people and the comedic cards show what people thought funny. And the stamps on the cards are a study of their own.
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In future posts, I’ll have a look at some of the information contained in my grandmother’s stack of post cards.
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
shaping a visual poem
Rather than being a mere mechanism for conveying ideas, words themselves can become a visual part of a poem’s theme or meaning. In a ‘shape’, ‘visual’ or ‘concrete’ poem, the words of the poem are arranged in a way to represent an idea or image from the poem.
The shape poem is a relatively old form and occurs many times in literature. For example, the Mouse’s ‘Long Tale’ in Chapter III of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is in the shape of a tail ( http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-pdf.pdf ). Other visual poems include parts of ‘Easter Wings’ by George Herbert and ‘Vision and Prayer’ by Dylan Thomas (see Poetry through the Ages: http://www.webexhibits.org/poetry/explore_21_visual_examples.html ).
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So, does a poet begin with the goal of creating a visual poem or does the shape of the poem evolve as part of the creative process? For me, the shape suggests itself well into the process, as part of my considerations of line length and punctuation.
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Here is a poem about an abandoned wheel barrow, part of my manuscript on derelict elements of our landscape. Like so many items, this wheel barrow has outlived its usefulness.
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First, the basic poem:
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wheel barrow
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lugged every cubic foot of garden, every brick
of the garden wall
tire flat, bucket dented
rusted, scratched
on its side in the compost heap, one handle
broken
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And now, as a shape poem:
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Children are often asked to write shape poems as an introduction to writing poetry. Writing a shape poem can be a challenge for any writer and a way to explore ideas about line length, punctuation and word choice.
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
words from the woodland – where branches touch
‘birch trees’ Jane Tims
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fear of heights
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as dizzying to look up
in the forest
as down
into the abyss
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the trees taper so
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they lean
water birch
against fir
rubbed raw
where branches touch
or reach for one another
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and sudden, wrenching sounds
a branch swings back or breaks
loosed by a squirrel
burdened where crows complain
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or where a warbler scolds
teacher teacher teacher
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
words from the woodland – bird song
I have a lot of projects underway, mostly on the ‘administrative’ side of writing. I have been ordering and revising a manuscript of poems on abandoned aspects of our landscape ( see https://nichepoetryandprose.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/first-and-last-and-in-between/ ). Now, I have reached the point where I really need to set the manuscript aside so I can approach it with a fresh eye in a couple of weeks. So I will use the days between to order another manuscript of poems about sounds from the woodland. The poems mostly use animal and bird sounds and songs as metaphors for human communication.
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Some of these poems have been around a while, packaged in another form. In the last weeks, I have been thinking about the bird song metaphor and now I am ready to consider the poems in relation to one-another. Perhaps I am responding to the Black-capped Chickadees, chattering in the Tamarack. Or the Hairy Woodpecker who comes every few days to beat his head against our telephone pole. Perhaps I am thinking more than usual about human communication (having just learned to ‘Twitter’).
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January 8, 2012 ‘two Mourning Doves’ Jane Tims
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drawing doves
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‘… cease to mourn …’
Virgil, Eclogue I
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grey sighs beneath graphite
or where eraser softens
troubled feathers
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doves lament, disturb
fine detail, mourn
the fingers’ tremble
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pencil strokes beak
and fingernails, kernels
of corn, husks of sunflower
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
art auction !
This week begins another Art Auction at Isaac’s Way Restaurant in Fredericton, New Brunswick. For the next 4 months (late January through to late May), Isaac’s Way displays art by local artists and runs a silent auction and sale. This 23rd auction will sponsor MUSIC lessons for Fredericton kids-in-need.
Thank you for your interest in this community fundraiser at Isaac’s Way Restaurant! We organize three auctions per year, each raising funds for one of four artistic areas: dance, art, music, and theatre. This is a win-win-win opportunity for sure: the children gain confidence and creativity, their families feel blessed to have the help, you [the artists] get a chance to display in a public space along with free advertising, the instructors earn more income and word-of-mouth recognition, the community feels good to be helping the kids, customers get local, original art at amazing prices, our wait staff has an excellent conversation starter with visitors, and our restaurant gets a colourful face lift three times per year. Everyone wins!
In this 23rd Art Auction, Isaac’s Way will be displaying the work of more than 50 artists.
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I have a painting in the auction, an acrylic entitled ‘blue stone’ (24″ x 20″, unframed, gallery edges). It is a version of a watercolour done during my virtual cycling trip along the Cornwall coast.
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Here is the watercolour, ‘blue stone’ …
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October 25, 2013 ‘blue stone’ Jane Tims
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And the acrylic, now for sale or auction at Isaac’s Way …
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blue stone (Jane Tims)
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This will be the forth painting I have contributed to the auction: ‘blue stone’ (acrylic), ‘iron gate in Cornwall’ (acrylic), ‘gate in Ponsanooth’ (watercolour), and ‘rainbow gate’ (watercolour).
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If you are in the Fredericton area, I hope you stop in at Isaac’s Way. The food is delicious, the atmosphere is inspiring and you have a chance to acquire a piece of art by a local artist! The restaurant is located in the historic York County Court House (est. 1855), so you can even dine inside the former vault!
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
stitching a small quilt
These cold nights, I keep warm with a cup of hot chocolate and a sewing project. This winter I am making lap quilts, small quilts only 30 inches by 36 inches. A lap quilt is a cozy companion on a chill evening.
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To make the quilts, I am using small scraps of material from my many sewing projects over the years. My quilts would not win any awards. The pattern is random and the stitches are long and a bit crooked, but the quilts are fun to make and use.
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quilt
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from the air
forests and snow-
covered cornfields
are light and dark patches
of a quilt pieced together, stitched
with fence posts and wire
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
take flight, metal wings, take flight
A fellow blogger recently suggested a different way to present poetry in a post – to give a little background on the poem’s origins and perhaps show the evolution of the poem from draft to ‘final’ stage.
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Sounds like fun!
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The poem below began with a watchful eye. I am always on the lookout for an image to inspire a poem. Walking the path to the door of our house, my mind was on the rain, the warmish day and the forecast, an expected return to freezing temperatures.
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I spotted the bird bath, full of leaves and melted water. And perched on the edge of the bird bath, a moulded metal bird. This bird is bolted to the edge of the bird bath’s copper rim. Presumably he is there to attract the real birds. But since no real birds use the bath, he is the only one ever there. My relationship with this metal bird is mixed. I like its quiet perching on the edge of the bath. I like its rusty patina. I don’t like its occasional disappearance when its metal bolt lets go. Then, I have a struggle to find its little metal body in the thick layer of leaves under the bird bath.
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So this is the set-up for the poem – a day of January thaw, melt water everywhere and knowledge the metal bird will not stay put.
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First, a photo of the metal bird. The words ‘take flight’ were bumping around in my brain and I knew I would have a poem from this. I want this poem to be about opportunity, about taking change and turning it into possibilities for an altered future.
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I’m a poet, not a photographer …
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Then, I grabbed my ‘rough book’, the place where every poem I ever write begins. Sometimes, I hand-write several drafts, but in this instance, I felt like typing, so I copied the rough draft into the computer, almost word for word, but not quite.
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brief thaw
2nd draft
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metal bird, embellishment
of the copper bird bath in the garden
take your chance, your flight
temperature at melting
perhaps your rigid wings
can flex, find feathers soft
as tomorrow’s snow
fluid as ice now running
in the brook, molten icicles
their glitter subdued
follow chickadees who land
grab a seed and return to the
woods for safety, take your leave
and next spring I will not
find your rigid body fallen
wrapped in last year’s rotting
leaves on warming ground
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So that is the rough poem. I like it. It flows, it contains some interesting metaphors, and it captures the possible flight and altered future of the metal bird. It needs editing.
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For the next draft, I ‘press’ on words, getting rid of some, replacing others. I annotate the earlier draft, finding places where I like the flow, where I find internal rhyme or alliteration. In this poem, there are lots of words about metal, and I hope to include others. I change ‘ing’ words and the past tense to verbs in the present when possible.
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brief thaw
3rd draft
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metal (iron) bird, (silver-plated ?) embellishment
of the copper bird bath in the garden (doesn’t matter if it is in the garden)
take your chance, your (take ?) flight
temperature at melt (title says this)
perhaps your (rusted?) rigid wings
can flex, find feathers soft (fine?)
as tomorrow’s snow (when, last week ? next week ?)
fluid as ice, now running runs
in the brook, molten icicles
their glitter subdued
(take flight ?)
follow chickadees, who land
grab a seed (from the bird bath ????) and return fly to the
woods for (woods for ?) safety (of the trees ?) , take your leave (take flight ?)
and (and or/ore) next spring I will not (not ?)
find your rigid (rigid ?) body fallen (fallen ?), wrapped
in last year’s rotting muck rot of
leaves on warming (new-warmed?) ground
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Well, I made a complete mess. Perhaps the fourth draft will be an improvement.
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In the fourth draft, I incorporated the above ideas, and made a lot of changes. For example, I tried some different approaches to stanza … some of my poems are very irregular in their stanza breaks. I think this poem needs stanza breaks to help the reader. I also wanted to repeat ‘take flight‘ at intervals in the poem. Although I considered stanzas of three and five lines, my final decision, four stanzas of four lines, was based on the syllable counts of the lines and the sloping shape of each stanza. I am a rabid syllable-counter. I find it helps me decide what words are not needed at all and makes me consider alternatives.
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brief thaw
4th and (for now) final draft
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iron bird, embellishment
of the copper bird bath
take your chance
take flight
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perhaps your rusted wings can
flex, find feathers, fine as
next week’s snow
take flight
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molten as icicles from
the feeder where chickadees
seize a seed
take flight
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or next spring find your metal
body rigid, wrapped in
last year’s rot
of leaves
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take flight
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Before I make further changes to the poem, I will read it aloud several times. The repetition of ‘take flight’ may have to go. Notice, I have not changed the title of the poem … that could change, although I like not mentioning the actual thaw in the poem. The title is a great place to add other information for the reader and I often forget this opportunity.
Do you have suggestions for other changes I could make to the poem? I welcome your comments!
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
first and last and in between
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This past Saturday, I worked to create a manuscript of some poems I have written on the theme of discarded and abandoned elements of life and landscape.
There are 38 poems in the rough manuscript, making up about 50 pages. The poems are a study of change. They include poems about abandoned boats, roads, churches, toolboxes, sheds, trucks, bridges and so on.
I have published a few of these on this blog … for an example, see ‘Foggy Molly’, a poem about an abandoned boat (https://nichepoetryandprose.wordpress.com/2013/01/30/abandoned-boat/ ).
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Part of creating this manuscript is to put the poems in order. I find it hard to decide how to arrange 38 poems so they flow, one into the other, and so they tell a story.
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1. My first step is to print a table of contents of the rough manuscript. I read each poem through and assign a couple of key words to describe it, jotting these into the table of contents. For my 38 poems on abandonment, I obtained 27 key words. Many of these are shared by various poems, but a few are unique to one or two poems. My key words are, in no particular order:
lost ways, regret, grown over, barriers, evidence, sadness, history, haunted, adaptation, voice, intention, anger, change, memory, denial, improvement, new life, lost function, buildings, items, understanding, cruel, resistance, life/death, shock, keeping past, lost/misplaced, broken
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2. Next, I put everything into a table, with Xs to show which key words fit each poem. This does not take too long to do and helps me consider the meaning of each poem. Below is just a small section of my table:
| Poem Title | lost ways | regret | grown over | barriers | evidence | sadness | history | haunted | adaptation |
| Recovery | X | X | X | X | |||||
| Reason for Leaving | X | X | X | X | X | ||||
| South Nation Bridge | X | X | X | ||||||
| Outfield | X | X | |||||||
| Diverted road | X | X | |||||||
| Invitation to tea | X | X | X | X | X | ||||
| Lane | X | X | |||||||
| Abandoned church | X | X |
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3. Once I have the table created, I tally the Xs in the columns and decide which key words are most common. Key words occurring in more than 10 poems are shown in bold:
lost ways, regret, Grown over, barriers, evidence, sadness, history, haunted, adaptation, decay, intention, anger, change, memory, denial, improvement, new life, lost function, buildings, items, understanding, cruel, resistance, life/death, shock, keeping past, lost/misplaced, broken
The words that apply to almost every poem usually speak to the theme of the poetry collection: in this case, the words ‘change’, ‘memory’ and ‘lost function’ were very common, no surprise in a collection about things abandoned. Other key words, common to a few poems, suggest possible themes for the sub-sections.
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4. My next step is to look at the key words and see what themes ‘speak’ to me. I also want to have a progression of ideas through the manuscript. In this case, some of the poems are sad and rather hopeless, while some show how abandonment leads to understanding, and, in some cases, to new purpose and new life. From the key words, I selected six sub-sections: ‘lost ways’, ‘decay’, ‘haunted’, ‘broken’, ‘understanding’ and ‘new life’.
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5. Now comes the long work of re-ordering the manuscript. I create a new document and, one at a time, transfer the poems into their new sections.
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6. I like to name each section, taking the name from a line in one of the poems in the section. These may change later, but for now, they give me a reference within each group of poems:
lost ways – ‘overgrown …’
decay – ‘left to rust …’
haunted – ‘ghosts are lonely here …’
broken – ‘dry putty, broken glass …’
understanding – ‘the rock to stand on …’
new life – ‘a turn towards horizon …’
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February 11. 2014 ‘old shed near Charlo’ Jane Tims
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Today, I will begin a read of the manuscript to see how the poems flow within their sections. Many revisions are ahead, but this is my favorite part of the work!
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Have you ever gathered poems into a manuscript and did you use any particular method to decide the order of the poems?
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
thwarting the squirrels
Feeding the birds provides me with hours of enjoyment in winter. However, bird feed is costly when marauders come to call. I have watched with dismay as the tongue of a single deer laps up every morsel of sunflower seed. Or laughed as the squirrel eats peanuts from inside the squirrel-resistant bird feeder. Lately, a very fat raccoon has emptied our suet feeder night after night.
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Last weekend, we rigged something new to see if we could reserve at least one feeder just for the birds. The idea is courtesy of my friends A. and D. who showed me how well the contraption works at their bird feeding station.
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The idea is simple. We stretched a sturdy cord between two trees at a height of about seven feet. On the cord, we strung six empty 2 liter pop bottles. We tried all sorts of ways to drill holes in the plastic and found that a screwdriver heated over a candle flame melted a neat hole in the bottom center of each bottle. Then we put a metal s-hook between the two center bottles and hung the feeder. The squirrels will try to walk the tightrope to get to the feeder, but when they reach the pop bottles, these spin and the squirrels cannot hang on.
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After one week, the squirrels and raccoon have left this feeder alone. They still have some food to eat at the other feeder, but at least the seed in this one is reserved for the birds! As you can see, the snow banks are getting higher and soon the squirrels will be skipping across the surface of the snow to reach the feeder. Higher please!
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Copyright 2015 Jane Tims
nichepoetryandprose 