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eaglesweb.com
poetry for the ear in the
tradition of blind Homer
A multimedia literature and arts website, updated daily with
newly-recorded poems during the school year. Click HERE for our
editorial policy or to record your comments. Click on the red
logo to return to home page. Click on your browser refresh
button to hear background music again.
Autobiographical
Sketch of Walter Rufus Eagles
Click HERE
to listen to Walter read his own poems spanning five decades.
Click HERE
for DEDICATION to my Verda,
LA English teacher, the late Mabel Fletcher
Harrison.
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Poet & Santa Penguin
[age 68] & [age?]
Photo by his granddaughter
Ariel Eagles at age 5,
January 2003.
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College Yearbook
1957
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Poet with His
'Familiar' ('Mahra')
May 2003
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Above:
Walter Randolph Eagles and Gladyse Mai Lasyone Eagles in the late 1970s
Below: Their five children, also in the late 1970s
In ascending age order, left to right:
James Harry Eagles, Jessie Eileen Eagles Kelly, Thelma Reid Eagles
Griffith, Walter Rufus Eagles, Lou Anne Eagles Smith
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Winnfield, Louisiana was historically a
singularly independent town, the capital of Winn Parish ('county' for
other US states). After the "South" declared their
secession from the Union, Winn Parish re-named itself "The Free
State of Winn" and promptly seceded from Louisiana and the
Confederate States. I was born in this town during the Great
Depression on August 26, 1934, to Walter Randolph Eagles and Gladys Mai
Lasyone Eagles, and was the second of five
children. By the
way, Winnfield is also the ancestral home of the Long dynasty of
Louisiana politicians (Huey, Earl, Russell etc.)
My father worked for the Carey Salt Mine in
Winnfield from the time of my earliest memories, where he stoked the
boiler that created the heat to dry the crushed rock salt as it came up
out of the belly of the earth on a conveyor belt that ran day and
night. Largely a self-educated man, "Pete" carried a
harmonica in his shirt pocket all of his life, and knew tunes and words
to several hundred songs. He had a special love for poetry, and
could recite folk poems and song lyrics from memory. Earlier
in his life he had been a log-cutter, a carpenter (like his father
before him), a farmer and a railroad track workman. My mother had
been a bookkeeper and practical nurse, and also had a passion for
singing and piano playing. She could read music, but knew many
songs by memory like her husband.
My
older sister Lou Anne Eagles Smith, an accomplished pianist as a young
girl, had also become a journalist even in high school, and she has been
my inspiration in the areas of music and writing ever since my pre-teen
years. I have two younger sisters, Thelma Reid Eagles Griffith and
Jessie Eileen Eagles Kelly, and a younger brother, James Harry Eagles,
all of them gifted in music. All five of us are alumni of the
school of music of the "Fifth Sunday All Day Gospel Singing and
Dinner on the Ground" that was characteristic of the Deep South in
my boyhood (read Unheard
Melodies.)
Our
family lived in the town of Winnfield until I was eleven years old, when
we moved to Verda, Louisiana in the next Parish south, Grant. We
took up residence in the 19th Century McMills house at the northern end
of the Shell Point Road, where the continuation was a horse trail (or
footpath) into the pine forests. Listen elsewhere
to my reminiscence of this rural village, which had a post office,
a general store and a one-building school. Verda also had a sister
village a mile and a half away, New Verda, which also had a post office
but no school. Neither village had a mayor, neither
having been a town in modern times. The years I lived in
Verda were my formative adolescent years, and my affection for the place
and its people at Mid-20th Century continues to this day, not with
sentimental nostalgia but with exact and detailed audio and visual
memories of shaped-note singing conventions, swimming holes, watermelon
patches, deep pine forests, caring neighbors, a horse-driven sugar cane
syrup mill operated by my uncle on my mother's (French) side of the
family, and much, much more.
Our
family moved again in my senior year to Colfax, an old cotton culture
town on the Red River, with many plantations and reminders of the bitter
Civil War and the infamous Colfax Riot that took place there on Easter
Sunday 1873, during which white vigilantes murdered over a hundred
blacks, many of them in the act of surrender, or flight from the burning
Parish Court House, which the thugs had set on fire. It was during
this year of on-the-spot study that I began to change the racial views I
had inherited from my own white culture as a small child.
After
graduation from Colfax High School in 1952, I studied for several months
at Louisiana State University, but cut my studies short to enlist in the
U.S. Marines during the Korean War. I served in Korea in the
mountains and at Headquarters Platoon, 1st Marine Division (Detached), Yong Dong
Po. An experience on the Air Force base there gave rise, half a
century later, to a poem of mine, Reunion. "Rest and
Recuperation" ["R&R"] in Japan upon two occasions
during the Korean service introduced me to Japanese language and culture
for the first time. At the end of that tour of my tour of duty in
Korea, I was transferred to Pearl Harbor's Headquarters, Fleet Marine
Force Pacific, at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and finally to Barstow,
California, to the US Marine Corps Supply Depot there, where I was
honorably discharged as Sergeant Walter Rufus Eagles, USMC in September
1956, having been released just short of completing my four year
enlistment in order to enroll in college at Northwestern Louisiana State
College (now University) at Natchitoches, Louisiana. While in
Barstow, I studied violin with the Methodist minister's wife.
At Northwestern, I
completed my undergraduate studies for the Bachelor of Arts in
Government with minors in philosophy, music and Spanish at the
college. I played flute and second violin in the college
orchestra, and sang in the choir as well. (Many years later I sang
in the last Latin choir at Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Church in Sun
Valley, California.) During my years at Natchitoches, I was
awarded the Lesche Literary Award for 1956-57, and won first prize in
poetry at the 1957 statewide Louisiana Collegiate Writers
Conference. While in undergraduate studies I wrote literary, drama
and music reviews for the Current Sauce, our weekly college paper, and
was also published in Inner Space, the campus literary
magazine. In January 1960, I was graduated cum laude and
was elected to Phi Kappa Phi honorary scholastic fraternity.
After
graduation, I taught English at Wicomico
County Senior High School in Salisbury, Maryland1
and then returned to Natchitoches to complete the undergraduate requirements
in mathematics, followed by graduate studies in math
there. While there, I was personal English tutor to several
international students from countries that included Japan, Greece, El
Salvador, and Colombia, while acting individually and as student
secretary and friend to the Dean of International Students, G.
Waldo Dunnington, PhD, a distinguished international scholar in
mathematics and German, who was a translator at the Nuremberg
Trials.
The
artist and actress Mary Lou ('Marilu') Holmes Vorhoff and I were married
upon relocating from Natchitoches, her home town as well as our college
town, to Sun Valley, California, where we still live. I worked ten
years as an apprentice, then journeyman, in the trade of goldsmith with
master craftsman Harold
Fithian until his brutal and as yet
unsolved murder. Harold was a great influence on my life,
introducing me to Will Geer (from whom I learned to love Walt Whitman's
poetry as recited by Will) and to many California artists in the areas
of music, art, literature and drama.
During these years, I also
studied mathematics at California State University at Northridge.
Additionally, I worked out proofs at home on the foundations of
mathematics, with the three volumes of Russell and Whitehead's classic, Principia
Mathematica. Truth
be told, I never got past Volume One, the largest of the three.
Marilu and I have three
children: Wendy (who works with Warner Bros. Studios in
Hollywood/Burbank area), Randol (an artist who paints in animation with
the Klasky-Csupo Studios in the Hollywood / Los Angeles area) and David
(who, like his father, is a poet, and along with whom I studied
Gregorian Chant three consecutive summers at California State University
Los Angeles.) We also have three granddaughters:
Rachelle, daughter of Wendy, and Ariel & Aurora, daughters of our
son Randol.
I began writing as a young
child, but did not write formal poems until my last year as a Marine at
Barstow, California. Major poetic influences at the beginning were
T.S. Eliot (especially the Four Quartets), Wm. Blake (especially
the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience),
Shakespeare (especially the sonnets), Beat Generation poetry and the
Japanese haiku and [classical] waka forms concurrently
with independent study of Japanese language and calligraphy.
I had studied Haiku in Korea
using the three, later four volumes of Haiku, by R. H.
Blyth, the distinguished English scholar, translator and former POW in
Japan during WWII, where he acted as special tutor to the Emperor
Hirohito). Later on in Honolulu, at the University of Hawaii,
my ultimate contact in this field was Robert Aitken, (who had also been
a POW in Japan alongside R.H. Blyth) a scholar in Zen and Poetry, and
now a Zen Roshi (retired) to the big island of Hawaii. Aitken Roshi
generously allowed me to consult with him while I was studying from his
original master's thesis on Zen and poetry, the University's copy having
been stolen from the main campus library.
Since 1973, I have earned,
and still earn, my livelihood as a scrivener of another sort: tax
preparer ('writing' tax returns for others) and accountant ('writing'
general journals and ledgers for small businesses). Prior to that
I designed sculpture and jewelry mostly in molten wax thread technique
with an electric pen, another form of 'writing.' (Click here
to see an example in bronze.)
I have continued to the
present crafting my own poetry and reciting the poetry of the past five
centuries, concentrating since 1996 on web publishing, both text and
audio, at my American website (designed and maintained by me): www.eaglesweb.com. The overall recording project continues, and is expected
by conclude by May 1, 2006 in thirty CD volumes comprising 2,002 lyrical
poems in Modern English. I plan to continue to increase the
inventory of the Eaglesweb.com Audio Anthology of
Lyrical Poetry in Modern English to that same number of
recordings online for the benefit of students, teachers, poets and other
lovers of recorded lyrical poetry in Modern English -- the once and future such
anthology created, edited and maintained by an individual poet/webmaster
-- for their free listening enjoyment and learning.
[Last updated March 16, 2009.]
1
For several years I taught business English and court-reporting
English (roots, prefixes, suffixes and etymology) at Criss College of
Business (where I was Dean of Instruction) at Glendale University
College of Law in Glendale, California. [return
to paragraph]
DEDICATION: This
literary site is dedicated to the
memory of Mabel Fletcher
Harrison, my English teacher
fifty+ years ago at the Verda School. An actress as well, she taught Shakespeare to us rural
Louisiana farm children with enthusiasm and
devotion. Her history of Grant Parish, co-authored
in 1969 with Lavinia McNeely, is a good resource on the
area and its people.
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Mahra at work (rear guard lookout, claws
at the ready
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