My Family of Poets
My Father was a newspaperman for most of his life—he doesn't like me to say 'journalist'—a writer, editor and photographer. (He gets credit for the cat shot in the Photo Gallery.)
He is now the family expert on haiku, senryu, and other Japanese forms. He informs me that the following is a haiku in that it's current (happening in the present), it's about nature, and it's seasonal. He also reminds me that a haiku has no title.
It's my pleasure to present three of his poems here.
in shaded grasses All rights reserved. |
COEDHer jet hair is parted straight down the middle She wears small, round glasses with wire frames Her words are on geology She eats her greens and fills her jeans All rights reserved. |
REQUESTSome call you one thing Give me the opportunity to see one more laughing child, Offer me time to smell freshly-cut cantaloupe, May I hear another whippoorwill in moonlit woods Grant me moments to contemplate the beauty of an I want once more to put my bared feet Then I could First Prize, Indiana State Federation of Poetry Clubs, Winter Forum, 2003 | |
John and Norma MacLeod, the very best parents I've ever had
Mother has published two books of poetry, conducts workshops and organizes commando raids in which the three of us descend on a defenseless, unsuspecting poetry group and read without mercy. Her piece from the Riley In Memoriam anthology below explains more than I can. I am pleased to also include the poem Spectators From The Sky.
My parents planted a seed, the rows sown with Riley, Stevenson, and Field. My father wrote poems for me to recite. Too young to know what was filling my psyche's storehouse, I heard Dreiser, Gene Stratton Porter and Lew Wallace mentioned around the house as if they were acquaintances. To be a Hoosier was the ultimate pride and to be a Hoosier Writer was the ultimate immortality.
By age 45, the seed of Hoosier writers kept sprouting; it got to be like honeysuckle, it took root, it began to cover my mental embankments; it began to strangle.
Poetry became a catalyst to reveal in print the unacceptable: to raise hell in a formalized way that society will tolerate; to come to terms with all the untouchables long buried under the security blanket of the old ways-the comforting but mentally lethal ways.
Intellectual freedom, as well as all other freedoms, demands responsibility. What I have discovered about myself, through poetry, allows me to share the daring and the rewards of my experience with other poets, writers and even mental patients. That is why I am a Hoosier Writer!
© Normajean MacLeod, 1976Beyond galaxies landing strips envision
lines patterned into crossing plains.
Floating decibel waves, sonic timbre
dissonant chords to Mayan jungles
vibrating sentinel of lyric chants
riding arcs of undeciphered melody
Rondo - split and multiplied.
Stonehenge dispersing cosmic Druids
launching celestial tones.
From the ground we feebly call them
on transformed beams of energy
marked by cultures ancient in their time
They reply in Spenserian English.
Back in the 1940's, Gramps built with his own hands the original Red Shed Studio on Cemetery Ridge in Brown County, establishing a home and a dynasty of the finest mixed hound dogs you would ever want to meet. As an artist, he made a living painting, drawing, printing and otherwise creating whatever might sell in the rustic tourist town of Nashville, Indiana. One such item was a post card bearing the homespun verse I present here.
Norman was an artistic, cantankerous, difficult ex-drunk with a low tolerance for 'balderdash' and the willingness to call it by its true name.
Which explains a lot...
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Song O' BrownO, the Hills o' Brown are many |
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