The Collins Poetry Residency is established in honor of the Richard Collins family and their contributions to and encouragement of poets and poetry in the Iowa/Illinois Quad Cities and the Upper Mississippi River Valley. The residency supports community-based poetry and a regional poet who resides in the six-county Quad City area (Rock Island, Henry, Mercer, Scott, Clinton, Muscatine).

2010 Poet-in-Residence is Salvatore Marici of Port Byron

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

John McBride: Is Grant Wood's Iowa True?

John McBride has a B.A in English, magna cum laude; Ph.D. in English; and a Master's of Social Work. He has held several teaching and administrative positions in major universities until transitioning to a social services career that led to founding a Big Brothers/Big Sisters agency. He has earned numerous poetry awards from prominent journals and thirty state poetry societies. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals and other periodicals including Christian Science Monitor. He is retired, yet remains active in volunteering, visiting libraries, walking and jogging, and participates/leads various writing groups, and, of course, writing. He lives with his wife in Bettendorf, Ia. In his poem, I see the old and new supplement one another.

Is Grant Wood's Iowa True?

Past obliging cattle his brush maneuvers,
flows easily over the crop-rich slopes
of industrious family farms,
and there is much reassurance in
each neat replication
of well-maintained farmhouse, silo, barn.

Take yourself inside the picture, and you can stop
with any question and know
they will give you their best shot,
and they will chat, as long as you want,
if you appear at all interested,
on wind and rain and sun
and corn and bean rows.

And if you do step in, out of the blue,
into a rambling century-old farmhouse
for a cup of coffee in the bright kitchen,
you might notice the blinking computer
nodding good-naturedly to you,
specifying yields and the seeding plan
-but that was beyond his time,

so now you look out
the lace-framed window
to the small shoots,
so young, so unseasoned,
their rustling sighs at the combine
are still food for the imagination,

and then, sauntering on,
leave there, and reach
one of those acrylic towns
where it always is
high noon,
where weather-beaten homes
disclose white fences,
and all the cats,
demure on front porches,
have that cool do-I-care stare.