Lee Grue was our epicenter for poetry

If Lee Grue did not exist, the New Orleans poetry community would have had to invent her, reminisced Julie Kane, a Louisiana Poet Laureate and Emeritus English professor at Northwestern State University, who met Grue in 1978 and was quickly added to her party invitation list, including a wide assortment of intellectuals and artists.

Born in Plaquemine on Feb. 8, 1934, Lee Meitzen Grue spent most of her life in New Orleans, devoted to writing, teaching, publishing and cultivating a vibrant and diverse poetry community. She passed away on Saturday April 3, 2021 at 87.

“[Grue] just impressed me so much on that very first encounter,” Kane said during a New Orleans Poetry Festival tribute. “She just seemed to be the spirit of New Orleans and the French Quarter. Always dressed in white with that regal, queenly bearing, tall, at that time married to a handsome riverboat captain. What could be more romantic than that? And living down in the funky Bywater where you could smell the river and you could hear the horns of the riverboats. She was just so impressive just for her bearing as well as her poetry.”

She ran the New Orleans Poetry Forum in her living room Wednesday nights from 1976 to 1990. Consistently supportive of Lee’s work, her husband Ronald Grew built a stage for poetry theatre in their backyard. She wrote grants to bring internationally renowned poets like the controversial Russian Yevgeny Fitzchenko who had written about the Holocaust, to speak during the Cold War. Grue held readings at Lakeside Shopping Center, BJ’s bar, Maple Leaf Bar and even on the river ferry in efforts to bring poetry to ordinary people.

Grue telephoned Peter Cooley in his campus office in 1975, after he had accepted a faculty position at Tulane University, inviting him to her home. Tulane professors had not previously been interested in the local poetry scene. Cooley was surprised to see a barber chair in her living room. 

“I really did not know what to make of this place; it was quite unlike from Wisconsin,” he remarked about the city. Parties, poetry readings, theater productions and the nationally recognized literary magazine, “The New Laurel Review,” introduced Cooley to budding poets like Quo Vadis Gex Breaux, Jerry Ward, Jr., Tom Dent and Ahmos Zu-Bolton whom he later invited to intern or teach at Tulane. Without Grue, these poets would never have crossed paths.

Grue brought Cooley into New Orleans and taught him how to write about its “wonderfully eccentric people.” She also connected African American and white communities at a time when diversity was not “in,” he added. In 1989, Grue asked Kane to coordinate an ambitious reading with 20 poets at the New Orleans Athletic Club. The private club was one of the last holdouts of segregation, so a racially integrated event at the health club was symbolic. She was fiercely committed to racial justice.

She was a founder of Louisiana’s first integrated coffee house, the Quorum Club on Esplanade Avenue, where the nightly entertainment might include interpretive dancing, Mississippi Blues or poetry readings accompanied by flute and or bongo. 

At a rainy celebration of life gathering behind BJ’s Bywater in April 2021, dozens of neighbors, friends, family members and poets shared their memories under a leaky tent and umbrellas. Standing at a microphone, James Nolan recalled that after living abroad, she had shown him that New Orleans could be fun.

Valentine Pierce recited her poem about Grue, recounting the fabled meeting of Lee and Ron Grue. In 1963, after a whirlwind romance, Ronald invited Grue to go with him to Mexico. “If you feel that way, why don’t you just ask me to marry you? So he did.” At that time in Louisiana, he still had to prove he was White.

Grue graduated from the University of New Orleans in 1963 and received a master of fine arts degree from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina in 1982. Her poetry books include “French Quarter Poems,” “Trains and Other Intrusions: A Chapbook of Poetry,” and “Downtown,” as well as novels, “Blood at the Root,” “Sweet Balance of the Flesh” and collection of short stories, “Goodbye Silver, Silver Cloud: New Orleans Stories,” and “Mending for Memory.”

Foremost a poet, Grue was driven to share her love of poetry and nurture young poets. “One thing I valued so much about Lee was the way she regarded all poets as equals,” said Benjamin Morris. “She would take you seriously. She would welcome you in. She recognized deeply the dignity of the pursuit,” said Morris, just a “whippersnapper” when they met.

“Lee had a way of giving people wings so they could fly,” Valentine added.

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We buried my mother-in-law, Lee Meitzen Grue, and held a memorial for her at BJs in Bywater. 

Honored by her fellow poets and family with stories and poems and music by Little Freddie. I can only hope that I pass surrounded by as much love, respect and admiration from my family and community. 

Here are my tributes to her and To the journey’s end....

The morning of the funeral I awoke from an incredible dream, and I wrote this & shared it at the memorial. 

A Dream of Mama Lee

By Jamie Grue

I had a dream last night.

There’s a Rolling Stones song playing on the radio. 

I can’t quite make it out but the the music keeps going round and round in my head ..

dah du dum....

Duh da dum, dah da dum, dah da dum...

In the dream 

I’m finalizing details of the funeral.

She’s laying there,

and rather than dying, 

she is slowly becoming more alive ...

....waking up.

I may have to postpone the funeral.

I need to let people know.

Looking  so frail, so slight, so old.

Instead of drifting to forever sleep,

She pulls out Halloween teeth,

Gets out of bed,

swaying, faltering...

as she makes her way to a back room. 

I call to Ian alerting him she may fall.

When I open the door,

she energetically shoves the door back 

like a petulant child,

and I resist her pushing me away.

The room is lit up.

A colorful, landscape mural envelops the wall.

Her teal skirt and flowered gypsy shawl sway 

as she’s dancing,

smile over her full red-cheeked face.

We just start dancing together.

I call to Ian, 

“She’s alive!”

I’m thinking we have to call people,

cancel the funeral,

because she has at least another 20 years...

I woke up from my dream ...

with that Rolling stone music in my head....

dah da dum ... 

Ian laying next to me,

writing the eulogy in the dark on his phone,

and I thought,

Oh,

she is really gone.

But, she had visited me in the dream 

to let me know

that she is still dancing. 

That music coming through my head finally popped into being with the lyrics 

 

”Start me Up!”

When I looked on my phone to write down the dream 

it was 5:55 am exactly.

The number 555 is a message from spirit itself; 

It’s time to trust the process, new positive experiences will replace the old ways...

a good time for solutions or 

To restore a situation back 

to what it once was.

To what it once was...

There's nothing to worry about, 

because even if it feels like your whole world is falling apart, something is evolving.

A sign of Grace, 

kindness, 

salvation... 

the need for peace in your life. 

So much happening lately.

Something Lee always said to me …

“You’re so busy.”

I’m humming .. 

dah du duh

Duh da dum, dah da dum, dah da dum...

The lyrics come to me.

 

If you start me up!

If you start me up, I’ll never stop....

You make a grown man cry...

Ride like the wind, at double speed

I’ll take you places that you’ve never seen....

My never stop was different than Lee’s never stop, 

Yet, both full of vitality

.....So full of plans.

My morning message says ...

Slow down.

Take time. 

For yourself.

Spend time with the ones who love you most.

Lee was one who helped me slow down,

“Sit.”

“Keep me company.”

“Have a conversation...” for a whole day,

For Everyday. 

Oh....and never stop Dancing ! 

It’s a Fine Life

( Lee, as a young woman, visited her mother who was teaching in Africa. They encountered a mama elephant and her baby. This is part of the story I share in this poem.)

Cats climbing roofs.

Cats in the city do that.

Ian reciting Snows In Kilimanjaro about a devoted mother

while his devoted mama

lay taking her last breaths.

A writer dying in South Africa.

and 

Memories flood in ...

of a story.

Of a mama elephant 

Defending and devoted to Toto. 

While a young Southern writer

who loved to dance

recites poems 

and set matches to work just to see what would happen.

She’s visiting her teacher mama.

Now ..

Out in open savannah.

Hair in a vast breeze.

Suddenly approached,

threatened,

And escapes 

this wildness.

Just a mother  

....safeguarding her young.

This mama...

our mama..

Laying ...

as we cushion

in this curve of life’s circle.

So many stories of her own 

still in her mind.

So many Inscribed,

to be retold.

We survive our stories...

create memories...

like fire’s shadows on tents.

It’s a Fine Life.