by Garrick Davis

Child of the Ocmulgee
Poems by Freda Quenneville
(Michigan State University Press; August 2002)

Introduction

Sometime in September of 1994 (unless it was October or Novem-
ber); a bundle of poems arrived in the mailbox of the Pacific Review,
a literary journal for which I was serving as editor—but I was a little
Nero really. Full of hubris, and programmatic demands concerning
poetry, I had dashed off a letter to our contributors asking, nay demand-
ing, that they not send us nature poetry. For nature poetry was every-
thing execrable and stereotyped in the art: the last outpost of High
Romantic apostrophizing onanism, that standard pose of tenured hip-
pies in every English department, who peddled their mystical unions
with wild daisies (or sycamore trees, or bluebirds, or bluebirds on
sycamore trees) to every small magazine in the country. The genre had
become a cottage industry: both a long-standing compliment to, and
an indictment of, Wordsworth's influence. And so it was, in the fall of
that year, that one editor felt the confidence of the blesséd in pro-
claiming his bull.

Ms. Quenneville did not, of course, receive the letter. Among the
poems I read that fall day was "Washington Pass, North Cascades High-
way" and its effect on me was evident even several days later, when I
wrote to her, accepting it for publication:

Well, have you stuck me in one hell of a predicament!
I've been trumpeting the death of nature poetry for a
while and refusing to publish it, and asking that it not be
sent to our journal, when I read your poems. "Washing-
ton Pass" is the best nature stuff I've read since Frost's
"The Most of It."

What had prompted such enthusiasm? A voice, veering between de-
tailed narrative and abstract statement seamlessly, sure-footed even
among the irregular line-lengths and slant rhymes:

I wade alone up a nearby stream,
a tree-lined cradle of minnows
in the sand of the flood plain.
God is not a question nor absence.

Being a gluttonous man by nature, I immediately asked for more
poems. Ms. Quenneville wrote back promptly, enthusiastic about my
enthusiasm. I accepted another from this second packet and asked
again for more, and each time there was at least one piece of verse that
could not be ignored, like "Dharamsala." A random stanza should
prove the point:

The Dhaula Dhar, in eternal snow,
stands halfway up the sky.
Blossoming cherries cast
a net across the depths;
pines and ban oaks lean
like madronas on the bluffs at home.

The reader can judge whether I was seized by hyperbole in a weak
moment. Certainly, by the third packet or so, I felt in my vanity that
I had discovered someone whose connection to nature was not liter-
ary, whose imagery was usually faultless, whose tone was often sure.
The irony of the whole situation was not lost on me. But, of course,
I did not discover her; I was only the latest of her admirers.

Freda Quenneville was a secretary in the King County Depart-
ment of Public Works, a divorced mother of four, and a well pub-
lished poet when I met her. She had done readings at universities,
won awards, written articles for magazines, written lyrics for choirs.
She had studied under Elizabeth Bishop, and been published in the
right reviews. In short, there was a career as a regional poet, as a mi-
nor bard of the Northwest, pursued quietly and haltingly through
three decades, between the demands of a family and a job. Each year
a few poems appeared, it seems, wherever the post took them. In
1970, she came: "within two hairs' breadths of having a manuscript
accepted at Louisiana State University Press. Twenty-six years later,
she had come no closer.

Why this should be an unlikely fate for Freda Quenneville is a
story worth recounting. In 1960, as a young wife recently transplanted
from Indiana, she had enrolled in night classes at the University of
Washington and quickly gravitated to the poetry workshop run by
Nelson Bentley. There, her talent was obvious from the first. And
though she numbered Rilke, Yeats, and Plath among her favorite poets,
her master was Theodore Roethke:

Over toward Parrington Hall,
a grove of madrona and elm
are letting their leaves fall.

The grass is dense green,
and in light washed clear by rain,
the trees are swirls that lean

apart from the crowded walkways.
It seems to be a natural! field,
but I know it is hermetic space,

a crystal formed in air, inside.
I go among the silent trees
and breathe their golden height.

Having entered the unseen, I left
my books and papers on the path
to testify that someone took the step.

"The Step"

There was, of course, nothing unusual about a young poet imitating
Roethke in the 1960s. What made Ms. Quenneville remarkable was
the quality of her imitations; some of them are indistinguishable from
their models. And some of them are improvements:

I weave a net
line by line
and tie a knot,
and tie a knot;
cord by cord
I cross each space
and slip the string,
and slip the string,

When it is done,
line and cord,
I throw it over,
I throw it over
both our shoulders.
You see through
and the poem lets go;
the poem lets go,

               the net starts over.

"The Weave"

Ms. Quenneville addressed or dedicated a number of poems to
Roethke over the years. And yet her apprenticeship to him was very
brief, to die point of nonexistence. Some of her best original work
was actually written before these imitations; she was never overpow-
ered by his influence. With him, she obviously shared a sense of the
formal demands of poetry, as well as a fascination with the imagery of
nature, but she had merely to loosen his strict forms and perfect
rhymes to make her poems:

In the pine forest
the low thatches hang,
each needle like tallow,
green as a June bug's wing.

from "Pine Forest'.

Many of these early poems were quickly accepted by some of the
finest magazines in America. Ms. Quenneville found herself, a few
years after Bentley's class, an established poet with a manuscript ready
for publication, enrolled in a class taught by Elizabeth Bishop:

I was one of the "awfully nice" students
in your first writing class in Seattle
whose "trouble all along
was iambic pentameter."
You called me to your office
and tapped a meter on the table
with your crooked fingers:
"___ty, umpty, umpty, ump, get it?""
I did and didn't.

from "Loving Relations"

The class went well. Ms. Quenneville began circulating her manuscript
among the university presses, and she formed a friendship with Ms.
Bishop sufficient enough to maintain a correspondence over several
years. But then, a year from graduating, came the great turning point
in her life: she was forced to quit school. The manuscript of poems
was rejected everywhere, except at Louisiana State University Press,
which desired the written opinion of a well-known poet on her work.
Ms. Quenneville immediately wrote to Ms. Bishop, who responded:

You will be surprised or disappointed or relieved—or a
bit of all three, perhaps—to learn that I just received
your letter of July 11th two days ago, here. It went to
San Francisco and was eventually forwarded from there
to Brazil by someone, I'm not sure who, by boat mail, I
think. Then it was forwarded to me, airmail, to here, by
the young man who is staying in my house in Ouro
Preto. This all seems to have taken almost 3 months. I
am awfully sorry because I certainly would have written
a "plug" for you, as you call it.

Rarely has the tardy mail caused such damage. LSU Press, receiving
no recommendation, rejected the manuscript and Ms. Quenneville
took the silence of her former teacher for a judgment of her work.
Bereft of her diploma and her book, she experienced "one of the
strongest defeats" of her life. The dream of publishing a book was
abandoned, as were literary friends who were no doubt bewildered at
her gradual silence. (That she found the aesthetic distance to trans-
form this story, some twenty years later, into the amusing poem "An
Airletter from Elizabeth Bishop" is one of the minor triumphs of her
art.) Nevertheless, Ms. Quenneville continued to write and to send
poems to unknown editors at random magazines sporadically, which
brings us to the packet that arrived in my mailbox that fall day.

These are the delineations of the poetic career, of course, not the
poetry. Over the years a more private development was allotted to her
than to her more famous classmates and that isolation forced her
inward, forced her poetry into the personal, and finally into the spir-
itual. She had an enthusiasm for Eastern religions, traveling as far
afield as India; looking for the answers she needed, and some of her
best work is set there, written in various ashrams and temples.

Unsurprisingly, however, childhood became the great source of
Freda Quenneville's work, her own childhood spent in rural Georgia.
Nature poets, particularly, in fusing private concerns to universal
images and personal feelings to inanimate matter often find individ-
uality in the most common places: that is, after all, the primary mode
of their expression. For such questions about the nature of things,
such a search for identity, inevitably becomes the search for origins. So
the path of her adulthood, from monasteries in Dharamsala to her
beloved Ocmulgee River, was not circuitous but almost linear so far
as the life of the imagination is concerned. Thus, the young poet
would write—

Birds, leaf by leaf, unfold
from the live-oak tree;
squirrels rise like smoke.
The acorn's dark gold
stays warm against my cheek.
It is difficult to hold
the vision of a child;
my river is the world. "

"Scroll'.

and then return, thirty years later, to expand on the same theme in
her maturity—

A child who knows a river, who by luck comes back
from its depths—hands clutching moss as precious
to her as the lily of immortality to Gilgamesh—
is transformed by what flows and flowers through her;
is freed into the mysteries, an Orpheus
whose severed head, singing, floats downstream—
a river's end too far to see—
adrift on what was and will be.

from "The Child Who Saved Nature"

not simply because the elaboration of certain images was her central
preoccupation as an artist, for that tells us nothing, but because the
artist took these images for the very emblems of her life as a woman.
And that is why her verses so often, as her friend Duane Niatum has
written, "reveal the way childhood nourishes and guides us back to
the origins of our ancestors, which is another way of saying the world
of the universal soul."

But I am writing reminiscence, not criticism. And, in truth, I have
provided the reader with only the crudest facts of Freda Quenneville's
life because I did not know her well myself. Less than a year after we
first exchanged compliments, she mentioned receiving some physical
therapy for a case of tendonitis. Two months later, she had been di-
agnosed with a cancerous tumor, a slipping vertebra in her back, and
"some garden variety disc degeneration." I do not remember being
overly alarmed, principally because she was so calm, so sure that her
illness was really a blessing, and "merely the prelude to a new phase of
my career as a poet and whole person." I remember writing back, and
waiting. Two months after this, a very different letter arrived.

What caught my attention first was that it was handwritten. The
hand was not rushed, and the blue line was steady as it wrote, "in Feb-
ruary I learned that the cancer had spread to my bone marrow, in the
pelvis" and "fortunately, my oncologist is not one to give timelines."
I was shocked. Perhaps I was even more shocked by her demeanor, as
she quickly glossed over her prognosis to discuss the poems she was
writing:

These things are, of course, so interesting and exciting to
me that I am much too busy to worry about my illness
or how grim the reaper is. As long as I create my poems
(and now I'm doing water color paintings too) I am liv-
ing my life as I want to live it—and therein lies the great
potential for health and healing. And I have promised
myself that even if I get a complete and total cure to-
morrow, I will not return to my job, which I so disliked
and which cramped my soul. Part of me believes it is the
unexpressed, unlived poet/artist in me who had to get
the cancer so I could find a way to live my true life.

She was ebullient to the end, and it was not feigned. She wrote
and painted in her death-bed. Surely, she did so in the faith that Art
could heal Life, which is a common enough belief among artists.
Mainly, though, I think she did so because she knew that art consti-
tuted her true life, that her life was in the writing. In this regard, I
consider her an example for us an, and am honored to have been her
friend and editor, all too briefly; Freda Quenneville died on the tenth
of July, 1996. She was fifty-nine.

--Garrick Davis
Editor of Contemporary Poetry Review

Click here to read Freda Quenneville's poems.

ForPoetry