DeFREES, Madeline 1919-

(Sister Mary Gilbert)

PERSONAL: Born November 18, 1919, in Ontario, OR; daughter of Clarence C. and Mary Teresa (McCoy) DeFrees. Education: Marylhurst College, B.A., 1948; University of Oregon, M.A., 1951. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, walking, exercising.

ADDRESSES: Home—7548 11th Ave. NW, Seattle, WA 98117.

CAREER: Entered Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary as Sister Mary Gilbert, 1937; released from religious vows, 1973. Elementary school teacher in Bend, OR, 1938-39, St. Monica's School, Coos Bay, OR, 1939-40, and St. Francis School, Portland, OR, 1940-42; St. Mary's Academy, Medford, OR, teacher, 1942-44, 1946-49; St. Mary's, The Dalles, OR, teacher, 1944-46; Holy Names College (now Fort Wright College), Spokane, WA, instructor, 1950-55, assistant professor, 1955-63, associate professor of English and journalism, 1963-67; University of Montana, Missoula, visiting associate professor, 1967-69, associate professor, 1969-72, professor of English, 1972-79; University of Massachusetts—Amherst, professor of English, 1979-85, director of M.F.A. program in creative writing, 1980-83, professor emeritus, 1985—; full-time writer, 1985—. Visiting professor at Seattle University, 1965-66, 1972, Marylhurst College, 1969, University of Washington, 1970, and University of Victoria, 1974; poet-in-residence, Bucknell University, 1988; distinguished visiting writer, Eastern Washington University, 1988; distinguished visiting poet-in-residence, Wichita State University, 1993; creative writing teacher, Richard Hugo House, Seattle, WA, 1998-99.

MEMBER: Associated Writing Programs, Academy of American Poets.

AWARDS, HONORS: T. Neil Taylor award, University of Oregon, 1950, for journalism research; D.Litt., Gonzaga University, 1959; Indiana University Writer's Conference Poetry Prize, 1961; Abbie M. Copps Poetry Prize (corecipient), Olivet College, 1973; Hohenberg Prize, Memphis Review, 1979, for poetry; poetry fellowship, Guggenheim Foundation, 1980-81; poetry grant, National Endowment for the Arts, 1981-82; Consuelo Ford award (corecipient), Poetry Society of America, 1982; Carolyn Kizer Prize, Calapooya Collage, 1994; Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, Southern California Anthology, 1998; Lenore Marshall Award, Academy of American Poets, 2002.

WRITINGS:

(As Sister Mary Gilbert) The Springs of Silence (autobiography), Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1953.

(As Sister Mary Gilbert) Later Thought from the Springs of Silence (autobiography), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1962.

(As Sister Mary Gilbert) From the Darkroom (poetry), Bobbs-Merrill (Indianapolis, IN), 1964.

Black Box 11 (sound recording), Watershed, 1976.

When Sky Lets Go (poetry), Braziller (New York, NY), 1978.

Imaginary Ancestors (poetry chapbook), Cutbank/Smoke Root Press (Missoula, MT), 1978, revised edition, Broken Moon (Seattle, WA), 1990.

Existing Light (sound recording), Watershed, 1980.

Magpie on the Gallows, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 1982.

The Light Station on Tillamook Rock, illustrated by Rosalyn Richards, Arrowood Books (Corvallis, OR), 1990.

Possible Sibyls: New Poems, Lynx House Press (Amherst, MA), 1991.

Double Dutch, Red Wing Press (West Sacramento, CA), 1999.

Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems, 1951-2001, Copper Canyon Press (Port Townsend, WA), 2001.

Works anthologized in Best Poems of 1960 and Best Poems of 1965 (Borestone Mountain Poetry Awards), Pacific Books, 1962, 1966; Best American Short Stories, 1962, edited by Martha Foley and David Burnett, Houghton Mifflin, 1962; and other anthologies. Regular contributor to San Diego Weekly Reader, 1994-96; contributor to journals and magazines, including America, New American Review, Poetry Northwest, Sewanee Review, Northwest Review, New Republic, Writer's N.W., Nation, New Letters, Sisters Today, Yale Review, Paris Review, Atlantic Monthly, Massachusetts Review, and Iowa Review. Contributor of essays to Spectrum: A Reader, Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1987; Northwest Variety: Personal Essays by Fourteen Regional Authors, edited by Lex Runciman and Steven Sher, Arrowood Books (Corvallis, OR), 1987; and Anonymous Was a Woman, California Institute for the Arts (Valencia, CA), 1974.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A new poetry collection; a chapbook for Pudding House Press "Greatest Hits" series.

SIDELIGHTS: Madeline DeFrees is an American poet whose verses often reflect the tension between the religious and secular worlds. As a former nun, DeFrees knows both worlds well, yet she reveals her private side very reluctantly in her work, having gradually opened the door only after years of writing. A shy person, DeFrees entered the order of Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary immediately after finishing high school and took the name Sister Mary Gilbert. Being a nun and working within the Church seemed well suited to her quiet and sensitive personality, and DeFrees served as a teacher while completing her college degrees in English and journalism. Not long after graduating, she published her first book, The Springs of Silence, an autobiographical work about her experiences upon entering her convent. This was later followed by Later Thoughts from the Springs of Silence, which focuses on a time when Holy Names College was moving to a new location. Although these are prose works, DeFrees was also privately writing verses, which she rarely showed to anyone and did not publish in book form until 1964's From the Darkroom.

"The self-effacement of the individual in religious life is reflected in DeFrees's first book of poetry, From the Darkroom," according to Barbara Drake in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "which is more traditional in form and voice than her later work, though original." Although DeFrees wrote these poems as a means of expressing the inner life she had been hiding, her poems are nonetheless obscure and difficult to understand at times. Still, themes such as a search for enlightenment and the tension between good and evil can be seen. Writing the poems, however, posed a personal problem for DeFrees. "I lived for a long time in terror of some kind of mental breakdown," she admitted to Carol Ann Russell in the Massachusetts Review. "The poems were, in a sense, my lifeline because they provided a measure of release for my feelings. At the same time they compounded the problems because I felt guilty about my absolute need for writing."

DeFrees did not publish another poetry collection until 1978's When Sky Lets Go, which was released five years after she was dispensed from her vows. As DeFrees told CA: "The Montana move triggered new work, and in 1967, Stanley Moss, poetry editor of New American Review, included a poem in the magazine's first number. He hoped to persuade New American Library, the publisher, to do my book, but changes (from New American Library to Simon and Schuster to Bantam Books) kept the manuscript bouncing from Missoula to New York and back. Finally, Richard Howard volunteered to do the book in his 'Braziller' series if I was willing to wait two years. Two lengthened into four as 'Braziller' poets produced second volumes and bumped everyone on the list back by six months. In 1978, When Sky Lets Go finally appeared." Reviewing When Sky Lets Go for Poetry, Robert Holland commented, "For nearly thirty years a nun known as Sister Mary Gilbert, DeFrees now writes, from outside the convent, a series of 'Holy Sonnets' which turn Donne inside out.... These poems are like Donne's . . . mostly in their refusal to allow the speaker (or the reader) any rest, any false resolution of the unrelenting struggle she is locked in." In the poems, the reader can see DeFrees struggling toward her own identity after leaving her order. "Several of the poems," explained Drake, also "deal with feelings of isolation and repressed sexuality," which can be seen in the section "The Blue Nun" in which the narrative voice takes a "defiant walk on the wild side."

"The tension between repression and expression led, for DeFrees, to the development of a complex poetry that must be read with attention to all the various levels of meaning in language," wrote Drake. The poet uses such devices as double meaning, puns, allusions, and line breaks to obscure any direct insights into her feelings. At the same time, this type of abstruse writing makes her verses more open to interpretation, thus leading some readers to come to their own conclusions about what they mean. "The final section of the book, 'Pictures on the Shifting Wall,' focuses on poems of acceptance and resolution, dealing with death, hope, and despair," wrote Drake.

With Imaginary Ancestors DeFrees continues her course of self-reconciliation as she "mourns an ancestry she never knew and religious vows abandoned," as Literary Review contributor Fran Thomas put it. Imaginary Ancestors is a chapbook containing poems that are republished in Magpie on the Gallows and subsequently expanded in a 1990 revised edition of the original collection. Pointing out the feminist point of view in the new edition, Thomas commented that the verses display a "faith in woman-kind [that] supplements her faith in God. Though Ms. DeFrees's world is not easily accessible to the reader, the poems are strong and courageous, public but personal, universal and private." The poet continues to write about women and faith in her more recent collections, including Blue Dusk: New and Selected Poems, 1951-2001.

DeFrees once told CA: "Writing is for me both an instrument of discovery and a way of organizing and understanding experience. I get along best when I am writing every day—preferably the first thing in the morning—because under those conditions I am less likely to lose my nerve, and I make fewer false starts, can trust my judgment. Because writing is a physical act, I use anything to get going, usually writing in a kind of diary-journal first. I will allow anything here, not putting myself under any constraint to be brilliant: a mood, something I've been thinking about, what happened since I last wrote in this book. I next move to my notebook looking for snippets that might take fire. I often work on several poems at once, and if one of them fails to engage me, a totally different one may interpose itself. When I feel myself becoming involved, it is as recognizable as the motor turning over on a cold morning as I try to start my car.

"My favorite book is the dictionary in all its forms, including the Oxford English Dictionary. I refer to it often whenever I am writing. I have even been known to buy a fourth collegiate dictionary when on vacation at the beach because I couldn't exist without one. I like to revive former senses of words, to use their derivations, and, above all, to be as precise as possible while, at the same time, drawing on the richness of language, its connotative values.

"My working methods were profoundly affected by having to do much of my writing in odd minutes through the tightly-scheduled convent days. As a consequence, I developed my memory and could revise quite lengthy passages in my head while walking to school or waxing the hallway floor. I also like to write my way through a pile of scratch paper and, on typing a completed draft, tearing up the trail that led me to it. In my early writing career, I was strongly influenced by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Emily Dickinson. What I retain from them, I think, is: Hopkins—a fondness for juxtaposed stresses and for the sounds of hard c and k; Robinson—an innate preference for 'dark' poems, a kind of brooding melancholy; Dickinson—a metaphysical cast. My sensibility has sometimes been compared to that of Donne, and I admit that I find the roughness of his rhythms enormously attractive. In fiction, I am drawn to the work of J. F. Powers and Flannery O'Connor among recent writers. Among earlier models, some favorites are George Eliot, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy."

DeFrees more recently told CA: "I wrote my first verse at age eleven when the seventh-grade teacher assigned a Mother's Day poem. Mine was proclaimed the best, and from that time one, I wrote regularly. I read the Untermeyer anthologies and taught myself the elements of versification. When I found a poem I liked well enough, I modeled one on it, trying to duplicate the rhythmic structure exactly.

"Probably the reason I continued to write was that I felt like an outsider in Hillsboro, Oregon, a community of Dutch farmers. I lived in town. My mother insisted (wrongly, as it turned out) that we were not Dutch.

"My poems often begin with a new experience: a visit to the zoo, a tour of a newspaper plant, a foot reconstruction, or cataract surgery. Sometimes the 'trigger' is a phrase or sentence or sign: some language fragment that registers with particular intensity. If the poem is to succeed, regardless of which way it started, both language and experience must come together.

"Among my books so far, Blue Dusk is my favorite—partly because it contains the best from all my collections—and because it is so beautifully produced."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Poets, 7th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 105: American Poets since World War II, Second Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Woman Poet, Volume 1: The West, Regional Editions (Reno, NV), 1980, pp. 42-44, 45-47.

PERIODICALS

American Poetry Review, May-June, 1979.

Georgia Review, winter, 2002, Judith Kitchen, review of Blue Dusk.

Literary Review, winter, 1993, Fran Thomas, review of Imaginary Ancestors, p. 253.

Massachusetts Review, summer, 1982, Carol Ann Russell, "An Interview with Madeline DeFrees," pp. 265-269.

Ploughshares, fall, 1991, Joyce Peseroff, review of Imaginary Ancestors, p. 282.

Poetry, March, 1979, Robert Holland, "Lost and Found," pp. 348-349; October, 1983, Peter Stitt, review of Magpie on the Gallows, p. 42.

Prairie Schooner, summer, 1983, Carolyne Wright, "Courage, Honesty, and a Sense of Humor," pp. 90-94.

Quarterly West, spring, 1978.

Southwest Review, autumn, 1980, Fredrick Zydek, "Smorgasbord or Bread and Water?" pp. 425-430.