Look and Listen

Biography

My name is pronounced "Male-e"; I was named after a somewhat-affluent friend of my parents, Melie Manning. Melie and his wife were unable to conceive a male heir to perpetuate the family name, so he promised my parents a hefty sum if they would name their next son after him. My parents honored the agreement but Melie died before he could fulfill his promise, thus I inherited his name--a name I detested as a youth because my peers occasionally taunted me, with jeers like: "Melie is a girl's name!" However, as an adult, I realized that it is a unique name and I embraced it. My mother is a farmer's daughter, the eldest of seven offspring; she married twice and I am the second child of her second marriage. At heart I am a barefooted country-boy from the boondocks of NC, and possibly the only person you know who has picked cotton...which is sure to conflict with the sophisticated/urbane image some of my Readers might have of me. My fascination with English began at an early age; I learned to spell, read and write/type before I could construct a proper sentence--actually, I still haven't quite gotten the knack of it! I began writing poetry in 1975, at age twenty, with an eigth-grade education: Bored, lonely, thinking about my teenage sweetheart, I decided to write the lyrics for a song. As an audiophile, I like a variety of music and I enjoyed the creative process so much that I entertained the notion of a songwriting career. However, several months later, while soliciting feedback on my "song" collection, I heard the words that would change the course of my life, "These aren't songs, they're poems." Two-and-a-half years after publishing a Selected Poems collection I completed a Revised and Enlarged edition of same (pending publication). In fact, the poetry and prose featured on this site are from the R & E version.

Inspiration

Most of the many revisions to the Selected Poems edition involved the prose preceding the poetry. The following is a comprehensive list of the poems that were revised, in the order in which they appear throughout the book: Terrain of the Tern; As the Sun Set; In a Forest, Near a Stream; Nature’s Guest; One Summer Morning; Where the Rocks Have Eyes; A Word Too Seldom Heard; Two Blue Suns; I Heard My Muse Singing; Share the Journey; A Lingering Look; The Giant, the Queen, and I; The Call; The Option. The revisions, for the most part, were minor—e.g., in the poem In a Forest, Near a Stream I changed the word "proffered" to "cryptic;" and in The Option I added the omitted “s” to "homo sapien." However, when you take into account that these poems are already published, some of the revisions are substantial—as in the case of Share the Journey for instance. In any case, for those who have a copy of the Selected Poems edition to compare with the unpublished R&E edition, I’m convinced you’ll agree that the many small revisions, corrections and additions to the initial text enhances the same appreciably and justifies the R&E version. On at least three separate occasions I misplaced—for want of a better word—my manuscript when it was a work-in-progress and had to rewrite the entire collection from memory; of course I was unable to recall every poem and thus some of my best work was lost. As a youth I partied a lot but back then I didn’t know I was bipolar and that my disorder was the main reason I felt the urge to “self-medicate”—not to mention that I’m a baby boomer; that I experienced the rock-n-roll revolution and I was a hippie of sorts--a "free spirit" as it were. I was aimless and drifted in search of myself, getting by on my wit, grit, and odd jobs. Occasionally I’d get so wasted that I’d leave my manuscript, along with all my other worldly possessions, in someone’s vehicle or abode and find myself unable to remember who, what, or where. Oh, what I would give for the time and brain cells I’ve squandered! No matter, my body is a raft on the rapids of this transient life…but I digress. In the process of rewriting my collection time and again the poems naturally evolved and became increasingly more refined. The first time I misplaced same it was exceedingly difficult to recall all of the existing poems and impossible to remember them verbatim, which is yet another reason why the collection took several years to complete. The Proem, Foreword, etc., came much later, after I had sown my wild oats. To quote Jerry Garcia: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” In the preamble to the Foreword--the erstwhile "Apologia"--I implied that the Baconian Theory had been conclusively disproved, but evidently that is not the case at all: Stratfordian and Baconian "Societies" still exist and the authorship controversy will only be resolved after the Resurrection, when the authors in question can themselves settle the dispute.