Marva Wright  CDs: 

Blues Queen of New Orleans   /  Do Right Woman  /  Marvalous   /  Bluesiana Mama  / 

 Born with the Blues  / Heartbreakin Woman

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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

CD Live! On Frenchmen Street

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Miss Marva Wright                 Sings Gospel at Rock n' Bowl   By Lee Meitzen Grue You're boozing it up since your man left and you haven't got the rent because you drank it up. you're feeling those blues when Marva leaves them and lays on the gospel until you feel that too even if you haven't been to church since the last flood.   Barflies start falling out in the aisles and somebody in white light bring you water in a paper cup to revive you and you remember, Yeah, I've got a soul, not connected to this body, if it wants to it can fly away.   Marva says in her big voice, You came to hear the blues, but wherever Marva sings the blues she sings the gospel, so she takes it up again until everything is washed out of you and wrung out of you and you begin to feel something near good and then she reaches out her hand with the handkerchief and her husband with the little moustache comes up and hands her down so gently from the stage.

"Miss Marva Wright Sings Gospel at Rock n' Bowl" appeared in The New Orleans Poetry Forum : 30th Anniversary Calendar

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Downtown 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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