Wednesday, September 9, 2020

Another small personal note: poetry

Very occasionally, I indulge in a small personal note among these blog posts about modeling the Southern Pacific. This is another one, relating to poetry writing. It’s occasioned by the questions I get from time to time, about my poem, “Icing Reefers,” which appears on page 416 in the book, Pacific Fruit Express (Anthony W. Thompson, Robert J. Church, and Bruce H. Jones, Signature Press, 2nd edition, 2000), questions like, “where the heck did that come from?”
     I reproduce that page from the book below, for those not familiar with it. This happened to be a poem I had written awhile earlier, and thought it fitted with all the character of the book’s content. (You can click on the image to enlarge it, if you wish.)


     But that doesn’t answer the question about where that kind of stuff comes from. I have composed a Google Drive document to give a little personal history and background for my own writing, and then have included a number of pages of my poems, most of them published, with citations to the original sources. The page shown above is also there.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lhOmbso-o1N0hhWJbWQxf6e2LN7i9qKz/view?usp=sharing

     This is not an important piece of this blog, nor of my personal history, but it is part of what I do and how I learned to write. If you enjoy any of the poems, so much the better.
Tony Thompson

4 comments:

  1. A writer writes...always. Thanks for that.

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  2. Enjoyed your literary skills. Better yet is an appreciation for included photo which shows how an icing bridge could be placed. In measuring a similar setup for two of my reefers, the photo shows an 8' bridge. There were also 11' bridges that could extend to cover the hatches on ends of both cars.

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  3. Thanks for sharing this. Could you give us any details about your work as an icer?
    Always appreciate your blog
    Dave Yingst

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  4. I never did that work. But I've read people's recollections who did, and from photos and records I know a lot about the process. I tried to put it all together in a single account, as I think it could have been.
    Tony Thompson

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