A Pantry of Poems

When she was a Haverford student, Rainey Tisdale ’94 found comfort and solace in the thousands of trees on campus. As her family life back in North Carolina unraveled “like a southern gothic novel,” the arboretum became her refuge, a place where she could set her roots in the face of uncertainty. 

“When I visited Haverford on my college tour, I could feel how special it would be to go to school in the middle of an arboretum. I felt that viscerally,” Tisdale recalls. “It’s a big part of why this place felt so right to me.”

Late last month, Tisdale returned to campus to install Provisions, an exhibition in Lutnick Library that channels her experiences into a tender offering: 81 jars of what she calls “poem preserves.” Each is filled with buckeyes, the seed of the Aesculus tree, that Tisdale collects after they fall. She then dries them and inscribes each with poetry in tiny, meticulous script. Every jar is marked with a tag indicating the poet and poem contained within and includes at least one buckeye Tisdale collected from Haverford’s 18 Aesculus trees. 

The assemblage of jars, which Tisdale finds at thrift stores and upcycles, resembles an old-fashioned larder. That’s precisely the point, she says. “I'm drawing on the pantry as an important metaphor. We need to preserve and put by for the long winter our poems, just as much as we need to preserve our peaches, okra, and tomatoes, because poems also nourish us in a way we need to be nourished.” 

Tisdale, a museum curator in her daily life, began writing poetry on buckeyes more than a decade ago. She says she found inspiration in the buckeyes’ natural form, the tactile process of painstaking handwriting, and her family history: her father was a prolific poet, and she grew up surrounded by his verse. The transcription process, slow and meditative, is almost a form of devotion that allows Tisdale to absorb each poem word by word, she says. 

“Organized religion never took for me,” she says. “I explored a few of them, the major ones, and they just didn't inspire me. But somewhere along the way, much later in life, I realized creativity has always been my religion and poetry is the sacred text.”

The notion for the exhibition grew from Tisdale’s long friendship and shared love of poetry with Haverford staff member and poet Charlotte Boulay. Together, they issued a call to Haverford’s community seeking original poems or suggestions for published works that community members found particularly meaningful. The collection they’ve curated includes works by established poets such as Tracy K. Smith and Elizabeth Bishop alongside contributions from alums and students. Boulay’s poem “Foxes on the Trampoline,” the source for one of the first jars Tisdale ever created, is also featured. 

"The vernacular of Rainey’s artistic practice spoke to me from the beginning,” says Boulay. “I've lived with the jar of my poem that she made for me some years ago for a while now, after she gave it to me. My first book came out 11 years ago this spring, and this collaboration has helped my writing by convincing me that I should keep at it, and that my poems might still have something to say."

While some of Tisdale’s jars have appeared in smaller-scale installations—most notably the Fulbright Scholar Program’s offices in Sofia, Bulgaria, last year—Provisions is her largest display so far. It arrives at the perfect time, as April is National Poetry Month. During the opening reception, which Tisdale describes as “very gratifying,” community members read poems and walked away with their own buckeyes inscribed with the words “You are poetry.”

“We're living in a time of great uncertainty. We spend a great deal of that time at work,” says Boulay. “It means a lot to me that Rainey and I proposed a small way of speaking to each other and to the community through this exhibit that might remind people that both poetry and the natural world can be a respite, and perhaps a guide.”

Provisions is on view through June 2. A virtual discussion about the exhibition is scheduled for April 23.