ChickenBones: A Journal
for Literary & Artistic African-American Themes
www.nathanielturner.com 
Ellis the big Daddy / is really loose, but only in the fingers
and it is moving to hear Jason, / who should be bowed down by tradition
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Ellis Marsalis albums
Duke in Blue / Loved Ones / Joe Cool’s Blues / The Marsalis Family / Piano in E-Solo Piano / Heart of Gold
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Books by Lee Meitzen Grue
Goodbye Silver, Silver Cloud / In the Sweet Balance of the Flesh / French Quarter Poems / Three Poets in New Orleans / Downtown
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Ellis Marsalis on Wednesday
at Snug Harbor with Jason on Drums
By Lee Meitzen Grue
Natalie hangs with the young jazzmen,
knows somebody on the door.
We go upstairs, nod our small acquaintance at Ellis
where he sits on a stool, casual in conversation
with students and friends.
At eleven he goes back downstairs
and sits down at the piano.
Talks into a side mike, introducing
Dewey Sampson on bass, and Jason Marsalis on drums.
Jason looks like a kid whose orthodontist
has stretched rubber bands from his back molars
to the heels of his shoes,
and when he starts the drums sound just as tight.
This is the kid who’d been loose last year.
Ellis the big Daddy
is really loose, but only in the fingers
and it is moving to hear Jason,
who should be bowed down by tradition
and the live up to your brothers that everyone expects.
Jason just sits there and works — works hard.
Works through adolescence
at a trade, a family trade.
He picks up on a saxophonist and a vocalist
from Duluth or Washington or Albuquerque,
they run down from upstairs to take their places on stage
with Ellis, the bassist, and Jason.
At some point a drummer named Cheoff comes on
and Nicholas Payton on trumpet plants himself in the middle
of the stage like a brick house and turns it up,
and the drummer who took over so smoothly in mid set
from Jason is loose
but sharp this Wednesday,
can’t help thinking about Wynton, how they used to say
his trumpet had no soul, just technique, and the tone
of Wynton’s trumpet now,
how what he gives is sometimes fatherhood or hungry children.
There’s promise in the stiff clothes of adolescence,
Ellis holding it all together
in those effortless runs
that never seems memorized
and he plays my favorite song
“Lush Life” and I get back
into the music
and away from thinking about
the high school student
learning his in a bar at midnight.
“Ellis Marsalis on Wednesday . . . ” appeared in the Warren Wilson Review.
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By Lee Meitzen Grue
Lee Grue is arguably one of the finest practitioners of poetry in New Orleans’ storied history. These superb writs are equal to the upwelling of jazz itself: from Tremé street corners, to the wayward French Quarter, to the carefree vibes of Bywater, all the way to back o’ town; this astonishing collection speaks from a mythic pantheon off yowls & beats as timeless as the Crescent City herself. “If you’re missing New Orleans, and you know what that means, you need to read Grue’s book front to back, place by place, time by time, name by name, everything that breaks your broken heart and asks it to sing. A generous, loving tribute to poetry and to New Orleans”Dara Wier
“Lee Grue’s work is one of the majestic pylons that keeps New Orleans above water, a pylon woven thickly and subtly from the city’s history. Her poetry weaves her personal history to the five centuries of the city’s own, a fabric stronger than the dreams of engineers. Lee Grue holds us all on the warm open hand of her music; she emanates the love that raises the soul levees”Andrei Codrescu
Lee Meitzen Grue was born in Plaquemine, Louisiana, a small town upriver. New Orleans has been home for most of her life. She began reading her poetry at The Quorum Club during the early sixties. There she met musicians Eluard Burt and Maurice Martinez (bandleader Marty Most). Burt had just come back to New Orleans from San Francisco, where he had been influenced by the Beats. Eluard Burt and Lee Grue continued to work together over many years. Burt and his photographer wife, Kichea Burt, came home to New Orleans from California again in the nineties, where the three collaborated on a CD, Live! on Frenchmen Street. Eluard Burt passed in 2007.
Kichea Burt contributed some of the photographs in Grue’s book DOWNTOWN. During the intervening years Grue reared children, directed The New Orleans Poetry Forum workshop, and NEA poetry readings in the Backyard Poetry Theater. In 1982 she began editing New Laurel Review, an independent international literary journal which is still published today. She has lived downtown in the Bywater for thirty-five years. After the flood of 2005 she began teaching fiction and poetry at the Alvar Library, which is three blocks from her house. Her other books are: Trains and Other Intrusions, French Quarter Poems, In the Sweet Balance of the Flesh, and Goodbye Silver, Silver Cloud, short fiction.
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The White Masters of the World
From The World and Africa, 1965
W. E. B. Du Bois Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan / The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll / Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
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update 8 July 2008
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