DeFREES, Madeline

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Pseudonyms: Sister Mary Gilbert. Nationality: American. Born: Mary Madeline DeFrees, Ontario, Oregon, 18 November 1919. Education: Marylhurst Normal, Oregon, 1936–43; Marylhurst College, Marylhurst, 1943–48, B.A. 1948; University of Oregon, Eugene, 1949–50, M.A. 1951. Career: Member, Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, 1937–73. Elementary school teacher, Bend, Oregon, 1938–39, St. Monica's School, Coos Bay, Oregon, 1939–40, St. Francis School, Portland, Oregon, 1940–42; high school teacher, St. Mary's Academy, Medford, Oregon, 1942–44, 1946–49; St. Mary's, The Dalles, Oregon, 1944–46; instructor, 1950–55, assistant professor, 1955–63, and associate professor, 1963–67, Holy Names College, Spokane, Washington. Visiting associate professor, Seattle University, Washington, 1965–66; visiting associate professor, 1967–69, associate professor, 1969–72, and professor, 1972–79, University of Montana, Missoula; professor of English, 1979–85, and director of creative writing program, 1980–83, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Since 1985 self-employed writer. Poet-in-residence, Bucknell University, spring 1988; distinguished visiting writer, Eastern Washington University, spring 1988; distinguished visiting writer, Wichita State University, April 1993. Contributor to The San Diego Weekly Reader, 1994–96. Taught creative writing classes two quarters at The Richard Hugo House, Seattle, 1998–99. Awards: T. Neil Taylor award for journalism research, University of Oregon, 1950; Indiana University Writer's Conference Poetry prize, 1961; cowinner, Abbie M. Copps Poetry prize, Olivet College, Michigan, 1973; Hohenberg Foundation for best poem, 1979; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1981–82; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980–81; co-winner, Consuelo Ford award, Poetry Society of America, 1982; Carolyn Kizer award, Calapooya Collage, 1994; Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, 1998. D.Litt: Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, 1959. Address: 7548 11th Avenue Northwest, Seattle, Washington 98117, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

From the Darkroom. New York, Bobbs Merrill, 1964.

When Sky Lets Go. New York, George Braziller, 1978.

Imaginary Ancestors. Missoula, Montana, CutBank/SmokeRoot Press, 1978.

Magpie on the Gallows. Port Townsend, Washington, Copper Canyon Press, 1982.

The Light Station on Tillamook Rock. Corvallis, Oregon, Arrowood Books, 1990.

Possible Sibyls. Amherst, Massachusetts, Lynx House Publishers, 1991.

Double Dutch. West Sacramento, Red Wing Press, 1999.

Recordings: Black Box 11, Watershed, 1976; Existing Light, Watershed, 1980.

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Manuscript Collection: University of Massachusetts, Amherst; University of Oregon, Eugene; Lockwood Memorial Library, Buffalo, New York.

Critical Studies: "Domesticating Two Landscapes: The Poetry of Madeline DeFrees" by M.L. Lewandowska and Susan Baker, in Woman Poet: The West, Volume One, Reno, Nevada, Women-in-Literature, 1980; in Poet Lore by Sheila Bender, winter 1993.

Madeline DeFrees comments:

My strongest early influences were Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, both excellent poets but bad models, especially for beginners. By the time I discovered Hopkins I had already taught myself the rudiments of versification, putting to use the scansion I had learned in high school English and Latin classes. I read the Untermeyer anthologies, and when I found a poem I admired, modeled one on the same rhythmic and grammatical structure. I sought out books on prosody and practiced the various forms in a poetry notebook.

After I entered the convent, I wrote reams of light verse for the "simplicities" we planned to entertain the professed sisters. During Canonical Year (1937–38), when our reading of secular literature was very severely restricted, I concentrated on Hopkins, meditating on lines from the "terrible sonnets" and writing bad imitations. Of this apprenticeship two traces survive: a penchant for juxtaposed stresses and a fondness for hard c and k sounds. When I emerged from the Hopkins spell, I began submitting poems to Spirit, a Catholic poetry magazine and eventually scored an acceptance in 1949. From then on I contributed regularly to that magazine and to the New York Times until 1959, when I took a poetry workshop from Karl Shapiro at Portland State University. Shapiro helped me to break out of form, urged me to publish in the quarterlies, and promised to take poems for Prairie Schooner.

My poems, as well as my short stories, are largely generated by a love of language. I am keenly interested in words: their derivations, connotations, changing histories, affinities with words of other languages. I like to hide small bonuses in lines of a poem, as when I write, "There's a welt on my shoulder …," having in mind the German word for "world." Or "small fins / winnowing the ear," in which fins are part of a watery world but also "ends," as in the French. Finally, I see the poem as the most important verbal structure able to hold contradictories in balance and, therefore, the truest of all linguistic forms.

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Madeline DeFrees's poetry is witty, erudite, and filled with careful observation and keen perceptions about the two worlds she has lived in—the religious and the secular. Her poems are not just intellectual exercises; they are also passionate. Like the English Metaphysical poets, she manages to fuse the worlds of flesh and spirit.

For thirty years the poet was a member of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. Her first poetry collection, From the Darkroom, was published under the name Sister Mary Gilbert. Now retired from both the convent and teaching, she publishes as Madeline DeFrees.

The poems in When Sky Lets Go and Possible Sibyls often reflect on DeFrees's religious calling, as in "The Ventriloquist's Dummy" in the latter collection:

       I was tired of being
   a mouthpiece, the body stuffed sawdust. The head
   hard rubber: it would
   stretch …
 
 
      This dummy, the legend swore, could
   save a life. Could you?
 
 
                In the undeclared war
   I could save my own, the heart
   gone out of it, breath so faint the mirror
   refused to cloud. I tried CPR,
   turned up the volume, put away the shroud, spoke
   at last in my native tongue.

Such excerpts may catch the intensity and bold imagery of DeFrees's poetry, but they fail to capture the way in which, like John Donne, she is able to link disparate things. In "The Ventriloquist's Dummy," for example, the lines "Soul flung a diffident / thread away from earth, anchored on God, on Heaven" manage to suggest both a spider producing its web and the strings a puppet dangles from, the paradoxical sense of at once controlling one's fate and being controlled externally. Other lines play off other contradictions: "All those years perfecting my circus act / were sawing a woman in half." In the above lines she also associates the ventriloquist's dummy with another, potentially lifesaving CPR dummy.

DeFrees's talent extends beyond the short lyric to longer poems. One of these, in Possible Sibyls, is the five-part "The Garden of Botanical Delights." In one section she blends botany, dream psychology, and devotional diction:

   Here is my act of faith in the secret life of
   plants, the still more secret
   lives we harbor in our sleep when images
   float upward into light
   and everything that grows
   begins to speak: tension along the midriff,
 
 
   consternation among the broccoli, the several
   heads rising from a sinygle
   stalk, the many voices of bok choy.

DeFrees has written even longer poems, including the book-length The Light Station on Tillamook Rock, which draws on a year of living on the Oregon coast near a former lighthouse. The poem displays considerable research into marine life and the nautical history of the coastal area. In the seventh part, "Scene Out of Sequence: What the Coastwise Know," she juxtaposes the romance of the sea with what it can do to its victims:

                     Don't invent a necklace
   of anemones, starfish worn like a badge
   or barrette. Widows and cosmeticians have been
   known to faint, regarding three days'
   changes. Water-logged, we say, speaking of
   boats and floating timber, not unlike
   the swollen bulbs of kelp: shape of an amber
   beet tossed up by the tide.

In many of DeFrees's poems language is rich and imagery layered, and these works become more rewarding with each return visit. The tone is sometimes tormented and angry, understandable emotions in someone who comes to question her sacrifice in choosing a particular path for thirty years. But she can also distance herself and be playful about such matters. "With A Bottle of Blue Nun to All My Friends," in When Sky Lets Go, delights in ludicrous situations, a sort of religious burlesque:

                      The parachute
   surrounds her like a wimple.
   That's what happens when Blue Nuns
   bail out.
   It's that simple.

Elsewhere her voice turns more satirical, as when she describes in "Monasticism in the Western World," in Possible Sibyls, how

   To support the contemplative life, the Order of
   St. Clare in Corpus Christi, Texas,
   mixes pleasure & business, breeds miniature
   horses.

The poem concludes,

           Whether you want
   a pet or mascot, why not join the parade
   to the monastery? You can depend on these
 
 
   faithful companions, so easy to control, so

   willing, pulling the sulkies past
   the grandstand. Anyone at all can handle them.

In Possible Sibyls DeFrees also addresses her decision to leave the order, telling in "Denby Romany" of a woman torn between religious and secular passion:

   The stained glass shed its burden—gold, rose-
   red, garnet. Like Renoir
 
 
   she found richer colors in refusal of the perfect
   light.

In the last poem of the collection, "The Auger Kaleidoscope," DeFrees pictures her own personal resurrection:

          I am
   the daughter come back from the tomb to a dream
   of light on the mountain, each rolled-away
   stone semi-precious, hand-crafted, hand-cast,
   fit for sending a traveler on his way.

—Duane Ackerson