On October 24, 2011, I posted about Michael R. Collings’ poem “Legacy.” Here’s an excerpt from that post and my reading of the poem:;
The excerpt:
Michael’s longish poem, “Legacy,” breaches the subject of family in a way that neither sentimentalizes the good nor that glosses over the difficult. This is apparent in the first lines in which the poet says, “By all accounts my great-great-great / was / a thorough-going bastard / or so I’m told” (lines 1-4). With this, he draws readers into the conflicted relationship between generations, a connection, at times, that can only be passed on by word of mouth, with the idiosyncratic, biased inflections of the voices that must speak to pass family knowledge between the “great-great-great[s]” and newer generations, between the dead and the living. (More.)
The reading: