Background
DeFrees, Madeline was born on November 18, 1919 in Ontario, Oregon, United States.
(Poetry. " IMAGINARY ANCESTORS is a search for self-defini...)
Poetry. " IMAGINARY ANCESTORS is a search for self-definition that leads Madeline DeFrees to that fertile ground where imagination unearths the past in order to invent the present. She unlocks her complex family past, which becomes a version of American history; struggles with the crisis of religious faith in our time; and affirms a moving, personal vision of America's feminine poetic tradition. Her language is chiseled and penetrating, full of those marvelous, idiosyncratic perceptions that recall Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore. Those who know When Sky Lets Go and Magpie on the Gallows will find IMAGINARY ANCESTORS a wonderful furthering of Madeline DeFree's art. Those who haven't discovered Madeline DeFree's poems will find this book a revelation" -Peter Balakian.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0913089141/?tag=2022091-20
(“DeFrees is committed to rigorous, even ritualistic, form...)
“DeFrees is committed to rigorous, even ritualistic, forms and a dense economy and precision of language.”—Poetry Brimming with characteristic charm and careful regard, Madeline DeFrees ranges in scope and scale from sonnets about Elvis, a poem-cycle about sculptor Henry Moore, and lyrics about cataracts. DeFrees’s poems are filled with daily encounters—birds outside the window, trips to the doctor, the plants in her well-tended garden—yet she brilliantly elevates these subjects beyond the personal. From “A Crown of Sonnets for ‘The King’”: “D.O.A.” Although the mourners know his fate is sealed they can’t give up on God, Who may come through. They cast about for something more to do: into Emergency, the patient’s wheeled. The human curtain parts. Aides leave the field to doctors who inject the heart and who start IV drips, then shock a time or two the organ grown so large with caring that it failed. Why are we working on this corpse? The nurse throws up her hands. The crew, shocked back to normal, admits discretion is the better part of valor. They’ll stare suspicion down, advise, rehearse the clothes that Elvis wears for his last formal. Up to this moment, blue was his favorite color. At 16, Madeline DeFrees entered a Catholic convent and remained a nun for 38 years. She has published nine volumes of poetry and has taught at universities and colleges throughout the United States. Her most recent book, Blue Dusk, won the Lenore Marshall/The Nation prize. She lives in Seattle.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/155659240X/?tag=2022091-20
( Contradiction and ambiguity are essential to the poetry...)
Contradiction and ambiguity are essential to the poetry of Madeline DeFrees. Her work is concentrated, multi-layered, spliced with humor and characterized by a passionate interest in every aspect of words: their literal and figurative meanings and associations; their histories, usage, disappearances, and resurrections. In her recent poems she approaches complex subjects with a new clarity, the dividend of a long investment in the art of writing. Just as her poetry demands distance from personal biography and revelation, it is also deeply affected by her own life story, most profoundly her 38-year tenure as a nun. Throughout her writing career—from her early poems written under the name Sister Mary Gilbert, to her newest ones in which she casts a lifelong glance back through history and lineage—the need to reclaim individual identity is balanced against the relinquishment of the self. From Going Back to the Convent What was I running from or into? The uneasy light of the senior prom? Mother's dream of a a child bride, supported by pennies from heaven? Or was it the writing life laid as a sacrifice to a jealous god on the tomb of the woman I'd hoped to become? Whatever it was, it will soon Be over. I write this now to reclaim it. A student of John Berryman, Karl Shapiro, and Robert Fitzgerald, Madeline DeFrees has taught generations of poets and poetry students, and earned widespread acclaim for her own work. Madeline DeFrees has taught throughout the US, including at the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she directed its Creative Writing program. She presently lives in Seattle, WA.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1556591667/?tag=2022091-20
DeFrees, Madeline was born on November 18, 1919 in Ontario, Oregon, United States.
Bachelor, Maryhurst College, 1948. Master of Arts, University Oregon, Eugene, 1951. Doctor of Laws (honorary), Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, 1959.
She received her Bachelor of Arts in English from Marylhurst College, (see Marylhurst University) and an Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Oregon. She has taught at the Holy Names College, the University of Montana and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. While still a nun, she taught at the University of Montana, in Missoula, from 1967 to 1979.
Since her retirement in 1985, DeFrees has held residencies at Bucknell University, Eastern Washington University, and Wichita State University.
She recently retired from the faculty of the Pacific University low-residency Master of Fine Arts program in Forest Grove, Oregon. She has continued to teach, lecturing at the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (Whidbey Writers Workshop) in January 2009.
She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her final collection was Spectral Waves, Copper Canyon Press, 2006.
DeFrees died on November 11, 2015, one week before her 96th birthday.
(“DeFrees is committed to rigorous, even ritualistic, form...)
( Contradiction and ambiguity are essential to the poetry...)
(Book by Defrees, Madeline)
(Book by Defrees, Madeline)
(Catholic religious book.)
(First Edition)
(Poetry. " IMAGINARY ANCESTORS is a search for self-defini...)
Daughter of Clarence Chesterfield and Mary Teresa (McCoy) Daughter of.