Anisette Studio

Shibui Found Image Art by Pejj Nunes. “Flower Garden”

Good morning! Coffee at the right. An overcast day. The birds still sing, it’s a wren, it sat on my plant holder yesterday, my granddaughter help identify it. Only the male’s sing. More dreams last night, Tom was in one of them. I like that.

I love old books! Today, I have a poem by one of my ancestors, Robert Peter Tristram Coffin. He was born in 1892 and lived to 1955 the year I was born. He grew up in Harpswell, Maine on Great Island on his parents’ saltwater farm. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1915. His skills in writing won him prizes, including the Hawthorn Prize for short stories, twice! He was awarded the Henry W. Longfellow fellowship (another relative.) He Spend a year at Princeton and went on to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He did a year in the arm services during WWI. In 1924 he published his volume of poems, Christchurch, The first of forty books. By 1936 he had won the Pulitzer for Strange Holiness. (I am collected books signed by him.) Other awards include Honorary Life Member, National Arts Club, 1931. He has some delightful sketches in his books. Another Phi Beta Kappa Poet at Harvard, 1932. Gold Metal, National Honor Poet, 1935, and elected to National Insitute of Art and Letters 1946. He lectured at the University of Indiana, University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the English department at Wells College in Aurora, New York. He returned to Bowdoin College in 1934 to 1955 and was honored there on July 1948 when he read from his poems and displayed his drawings.

I met a lady Rita, years later who worked at Bowdoin College who knew Robert P T Coffin. She had told me he was not to smoke his pipe at the college, however he did! She said he was a delightful person. And quite a character. It was nice to meet someone who knew him! I think we were talking about mothers’ genealogy or perhaps what she had done in life. My mother’s favorite passion was genealogy. She found many writers and poets in our family tree. It makes me wonder about my own love of writing, especially poetry. I am compelled to do these. There are three published poems. For me it is painting with words or painting (art). One or the other.

Strange Holiness

There is strange holiness around

Our common days on common ground

I have heard it in the birds

Whose voices reach above all words,

Going upward, bars on bars,

Until they sound as high as stars.

I have seen it in the snake,

Flowing jewel in the brake.

It has sparkled in my eyes

In luminous breath of fireflies.

I have come upon its track

Where trilliums curled their petals back.

I have seen it flash in under

The towers of the midnight thunder.

Once, I met it face to face

In a fox pressed by the chase.

He came down the road on feet,

Quiet and fragile, light as heat.

He had a fish still wet and bright

His slender jaws held tight.

His ears were conscious, whetted darts,

His eyes had small flames in their hearts.

The preciousness of life and breath

Glowed through him as he outran death.

Strangeness and secrecy and pride

Ran rippling down his golden hide.

His beauty was not meant for me,

With my dull eyes, so close to see.

Unconscious of me, rapt, alone,

He came, and then stopped still as stone.

His eyes went out as in a gust,

His beauty crumbled into dust.

There was but a ruin there,

A hunted creature, stripped and bare.

Then he faded at one stroke

Like a dingy, melting smoke.

But his fish lay like a key

To the bright, lost mystery.

By Robert P T Coffin

A sad poem. How well a poem can express one’s feelings. And if you have had such experiences yourself___ well! Early Maine mornings on a back dirt road or path with white morning dew lacing over the grasses. The cool air and birds singing. I love such mornings. I love to sit on large rocks, freezing my butt but watching a pond or lake, there is nothing like it! I spend most of my life in Maine, and I was a farm wife for nearly 21 years.

I have not seen a fox lose its life but have seen them and many other animals stop, and stare back at me with curiosity, then move on. A delightful by them.

Best wishes! Pejj Nune

The Bowdoin College Library’s Special Collections Library holds many of his manuscripts, drafts, proofs, notes, personal records, lectures, plays, poems, books, recordings, and photographs.

“Epilogue.” Colby Quarterly. December 1965.

Sanborn, Annie Coffin. The Life of Robert Peter Tristram Coffin and Family. Alton, New Hampshire. 1963.

(From http://maineanencyclopedia.com/coffin…, the Maine Encyclopedia)