Inside the Verses: Retired Calhoun professor’s poetry earning acclaim

By Catherine Godbey | Living 50 Plus

Sitting in his grandfather’s rocking chair, surrounded by family photographs and shelves lined with books, Harry Moore thumbed through the pages of his latest poetry collection, “We the People: Confessions of a Caucasian Southerner.”

“Writing this book and these poems has been a burden. I needed to write them. They are rooted in my childhood, growing up in Jim Crow racial segregation, to now, having an African American daughter-in-law and grandchildren, who, if you looked at them, would be described as Black,” the 81-year-old Moore said. “There is catharsis in writing these poems. I hope they offer clarity and connect with people.”

The collection of poems earned Moore, a retired professor of English composition and British and American literature at Calhoun Community College, the 2024 Book of the Year Award from the Alabama State Poetry Society.

The poems, which explore racial themes across seven decades, from Moore’s childhood in rural East Alabama to present day, resonate with Moore’s fellow poets.

“His book contains poems of reflection on how past racial relations in the South continue to be a source of shame with which many of us struggle. Harry confronts that struggle artfully and movingly in these poems,” said Jimmy Robinson, facilitator of the North Alabama Poets monthly workshop.

“His poetry seems almost like it was formed from the red dirt of Alabama. The roots of his poetry are buried deep in his home state,” Donna Estill, Calhoun Community College’s dean of humanities and social sciences, said. “I love the accuracy of his description of Alabama, in all its beauty and flaws. He doesn’t make it some glorious homage to a great past but a complex world of poverty and riches, race and collaboration, and all the emotions that accompany those ideas.”

A confessional poet, Moore, who enrolled in Auburn University to pursue a degree in accounting, started studying poetry after an English professor introduced him to nature poet William Wordsworth.

“I saw my world in his poems. He wrote about life on a farm, hunting, the hills, trees and birds,” said Moore, who grew up on a farm in Tallapoosa County.

Captivated by Wordsworth’s poems, Moore switched his major to English and began reading and analyzing poetry.

While teaching at Calhoun Community College, Moore started penning poems during his spare time and in secret. Not until the early 1990s did Moore begin sharing his poetry. After retiring from Calhoun in 2009, Moore published his first chapbook of poems in 2013. Wondering about the origin of the word “chapbook”? Just ask Moore, a wordsmith and logophile (lover of words).

“You can’t teach English without being curious about words,” Moore said. “The old world for peddler is chapman. Among the items the chapman would sell were cheap paperbacks. The poetry trade picked up the word and used ‘chapbook’ to describe short collections of poems.”

In the past 12 years, Moore published seven collections of poems, including four chapbooks and three books, the most recent being “We the People.”

“I loved teaching and then I retired and I loved it when they paid me not to come,” Moore said. “Since I’ve been retired, I’ve had the time to think and write. It’s been wonderful.”

An early riser — “If the first digit on the clock is 5 when I wake up then I will go ahead and get up,” Moore said — he does most of his writing in the morning.

“It’s a quiet time. I get coffee, work the Cryptoquote and the Jumble and, sometime during the day, I’ll do the Sudoku. I will also look at the New York Times morning feed and do the Wordle. I also walk about 40 minutes,” Moore said.

While on his walks, Moore finds inspiration for his poems.

“What I see on the walks triggers my writing, like the poke sallet by the neighbor’s fence or a bird I see. I walk and I get ideas and then I’ll come back and start writing,” Moore said.

For Moore, a free verse poet whose poems don’t rhyme, the sequence of the poems holds importance.

“The poems feed off one another,” Moore said.

In “We the People,” Moore segmented his poems in seven sections. Topics of the poems range from slavery, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Tuskegee syphilis study to his ancestors, who owned slaves, his father, who rented a farm, his mother, who worked at the cotton mill, systemic racism and hope.

In “Fathers and Sons,” Moore recounts going with his father to find a foxhound that had run off.

“Mr. Dozier Pryor, who was Black, lived near us in the big woods where a hound could get lost. We were unexpectedly invited into his house when I was 5 or 6 years old. He talked with us about his son, who was serving in war. He said he was worried and wondered if he was warm,” Moore said.

In “Isham’s Will” and “Inventory: Ransom’s Estate,” Moore examines his great-great-great-grandfather’s will, which parceled out his slaves, and the inventory list of his great-great-grandfather.

“My great-great-grandfather did not have a will. I went down to Dadeville and found a handwritten inventory of his considerable estate. Included in the estate were human beings listed and their dollar value. The kicker at the end of the list was ‘Esther an old woman valueless.’ That just floored me,” Moore said.

The poem that stands out to Estill is the culminating poem “Maybe this Time,” based on a young Black man Moore knew who couldn’t attend school.

“Every time I read that poem, I tear up a little. That poem is all the tragedy and sadness in our world today surrounding the racism that is still there, but also in the title the hope that it will someday be different,” Estill said.

For Bill Provin, a retired English and theater professor at Calhoun who Moore called his “best critic,” the poem “What’s in a Name,” which begins with a word derivation, ranks among his favorites.

“I especially admire his poems that begin with word derivations, taking the etymological roots of words and then using the changes and usages of those words over time to comment on life as he sees it today. Harry is a wordsmith, possessing a vast vocabulary, love and knowledge of the English language and he uses it with powerful effect,” Provin said.

Up next, Moore, who has lived on Jackson Street Southeast in the Albany district of Decatur for the past 25 years, plans on publishing a book of poems about his neighborhood.

“Many of my poems are rooted physically in Albany, like the poem I wrote about seeing the poke sallet by my neighbor’s fence. The book, ‘Convergence: A Neighborhood,’ will come out the first part of next year,” Moore said.