Beth
Ann Fennelly '93 came down to South Bend in 1989 from Chicago
with a few lead roles in high school plays among her credits and
the notion that Notre Dame would shape her into a full-fledged
actress.
She tried out for a campus play "and didn't get the lead," she
recalls. "In fact, I didn't get a speaking role. In fact, when
the Notre Dame Observer reviewed the play, they mentioned
the 12 people in the play who did a good job. There were 13 people
in the play. That's how it dawned on me, despite what my mother
said, I was wretched."
So much for failure.
"I looked around for something else in place of drama classes
and found a poetry workshop taught by the wonderful John Matthias,"
Fennelly says. "I remember feeling like all my life I'd wanted
to swim, but I hadn't known that until I was thrown into the water."
Today Fennelly is widely considered to be one of the best young
poets in the nation. Her first full-length book, Open House,
won several awards, including the 2001 Prize for Poetry from
The Kenyon Review. Her second book, Tender Hooks,
published in 2004, mines the author's pregnancy and new motherhood
(daughter Claire was born in 2002). The book was called "awesome,
humanely humbling poetry," by a BookList reviewer. Singer/songwriter
Lucinda Williams offered a jacket blurb after she had read Tender
Hooks: "These poems read like little short stories. Beth
Ann Fennelly's perspective on motherhood is the boldest I've ever
witnessed. She explores areas openly that others only think about
in the privacy of their minds. Her poems are brave and beautiful."
After Notre Dame, Fennelly earned a Master of Fine Arts in poetry
from the University of Arkansas and won a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship
from the University of Wisconsin. She taught at Knox College in
Galesburg, Illinois, before joining the English faculty at the
University of Mississippi, where she is now an assistant professor.
John Matthias, the distinguished poet who retired recently as
Notre Dame professor of English, says he is not surprised by the
numerous fellowships, grants and prizes Fennelly has won during
the past decade.
"Beth Ann was one of the two or three best undergraduates I've
had in a poetry writing class in almost 40 years of teaching,"
he says. "She was an absolute natural, a young poet with enormous
energy, invention, music and an urgent desire to read, learn,
write, question, invent. I saw her very early work as the real
thing, though she is skeptical when I tell her this."
For her part, Fennelly acknowledges that she got "on track"
as a poet at Notre Dame with the help not only of Matthias but
also of two other English professors and wordsmiths, Sonia Gernes
and Stephen Fredman. Faculty mentors continue to encourage her.
"That my old professors are proud of me and want to claim me pleases
me no end," she says.
Gernes remembers early Fennelly poems about an Indiana boy who
found a meteorite in his yard and about an old car named Ursula.
The poems "had a a wry sense of humor and displayed an instinct
for both salient detail and nuance of language that marked her
as someone with genuine talent," she says.
Fredman was director of undergraduate studies in the English
department when the undergraduate Fennelly marched into his office.
"She said, 'There are no poetry writing classes for me to take
this coming semester, and I expect you to do something about it!'
A former poet myself, I had to agree to offer her the class she
requested, even though I had resisted teaching creative writing
for 15 years," Fredman says. "We had a great time together, exploring
the work of contemporary avant-garde poets and looking at her
own poetry alongside them."
While doing independent study with Fredman, the young poet began
work on "Asked for a Happy Memory of Her Father, She Recalls Wrigley
Field," which was in Open House. This poem is faithful
enough to day games at Wrigley Field to have been included in
an anthology of baseball poetry. More important, it captures a
memory, minimal and tragically beautiful, that the daughter of
an alcoholic would cling to: "His drinking was different in sunshine,/as
if it couldn't be bad. Sudden, manic,/he swung into a laugh, bought
me/two ice creams, said One for each hand."
In many of her poems, Fennelly fearlessly probes her habits
and feelings, as well as her relationships with people close to
her. "I Would Like to Go Back as I Am, Now, to You as You Were,
Then --'' and "The Snake Charmer" in Open House are fresh
and frank love poems to her husband, the fiction writer Tom Franklin.
Motherhood undergoes scrutiny in the poems of Tender Hooks
such as "Three Months After Giving Birth, The Body Loses
Certain Hormones." It begins, "And my hair starts falling out./Long,
red hair on the sheets, clogging/every drain," and ends, "Who
else knows?/ The house finch,/building, in the basket of impatiens,
her nest./The eggs in her body are hardening, ripening,/ready
for her to start dying -- /the house finch, busily weaving/with
strands of long, red hair."
Soon after her daughter's birth, Fennelly says, she became fascinated
"with all the aspects of motherhood that surprised and awed and
humbled." Writing Tender Hooks was her natural reaction.
"For me, the best method of investigating the soul has always
been poetry. I wrote poems trying to avoid the obvious danger
of sentimentality, which sweetens and simplifies, and therefore
lessens our understanding of human nature."
Her husband won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Poachers,
a book of short stories published in 2000. Publishers
Weekly called Franklin's 2003 novel, Hell at the Breech,
"immensely accomplished," and Matthias describes him as a
"brilliant" fiction writer. The couple "constitutes a literary
powerhouse there in Oxford, Mississippi," Matthias says.
Fennelly, her former professor predicts, "will become one of
the poets whose work helps to define the characteristic poetry
of the early 21st century."
Joseph Urgo, chair of the Department of English at the University
of Mississippi, said Fennelly has established a strong following
among graduate and undergraduate students. "Ours is a program
that has been known almost exclusively for fiction because of
the long-established reputation of Barry Hannah and, before him,
of Willie Morris, Larry Brown and others. In recent years, since
Beth Ann's arrival, that has begun to change. Her poetic vision,
gaining national attention among poets and readers, has been attracting
young poets to the MFA program to work with her."
The second child of Fennelly and Franklin, a son, Thomas Gerald
Franklin III, was born June 11. Great With Child: Letters
to a Young Mother, a collection of letters Fennelly wrote
to a former student who had an unplanned pregnancy, is due out
from Norton on April 1, 2006.
James Raper is a freelance writer based in Norfolk, Virginia.
(October 2005)
