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Professor Jenne' Rodey Andrews, M.F.A., is a highly regarded American poet, critic and memoirist. Recent work has appeared in former Autumn House Publisher Michael Simms' Vox Populi (over fifteen poems) The Passionate Transitory, Belletrist Coterie, The Adirondack Review and elsewhere.

Andrews' current ms of poetry Beautiful Dust was a finalist for the 2014 Autumn House and she recently withdrew the work from Salmon Ltd, Ireland to protest unmoderated bashing of American writers by Irish writers on the press's social media pages.

Her most recent collection, Blackbirds Dance in the Empire of Love, lauded by Robert Bly and endorsed by poets Jim Moore, Dawn Potter and Patricia Kirkpatrick, appeared from Finishing Line Press 2013. A booklength collection Beautiful Dust was 2014 finalist for the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and solicited by Salmon Press, Ireland. Turning on work set in the West and her native Southwest the collection is under submission to 2019 publication prizes.

Andrews is currently hard at work on two new memoirs: The Shame Garden: A Woman Writes of Isolation, Despair and Self-Redemption, which in intensely wrought and imagistic prose poetry chronicles the anatomy of shame; it is the poet's late-in-life tour d'force, sending the reader through Dante's circles of hell, the sewers of Paris ala Les Mis, mano a mano confrontations with the Alien mater familias, fusing literary and vintage cinematic works in an elliptical dance with human history and experience of being Other. The poet has no idea of what will become of this work but hopes it finds a home as memoir with a small press.

A four part interview with Andrews went live at poet Maureen Doallas's blog Writing without Paper in 2010.

Other collections include the full-length Reunion, Lynx House Press, The Dark Animal of Liberty, Leaping Mountain Press, and In Pursuit of the Family, edited and published by Robert Bly and the Minnesota Writers Publishing House.

Her work has been anthologized in Heartland II, Northern Illinois University Press, 25 Minnesota Vols. I and II, Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, Women Poets of the Twin Cities, Oil and Water and Other Things that Don't Mix, and elsewhere.

Essays have appeared in MPR's Magazine, The Colorado Review, The Twin Falls Times News, and miscellaneous journals.

IIt is Prof. Andrews' belief that one's collection of poetry must be judged on the quality of its craft, voice, and language, not its themes.


With Mr. Bly the memoirist Patricia Hampl wrote a forward to her first collection and is considered the "mother" of the modern American memoir although she arguably shares this title with Mary Karr for Karr's The Liar's Club. Andrews mentored Karr in Minneapolis when the former was circa 19.

Professor Andrews has had an illustrious teaching career at Colorado State University and the University of Colorado where she taught prelaw students in the making of argument and the issues-oriented seminar The American West. She was the highest rated instructor in the University Writing program during her tenure at Boulder.

Currently Professor Andrews writes daily at age 70, having been rendered housebound in 2007 in a fall from a horse, at home with her lover and companion of thirty years the fiction writer Jack Brooks, ten new poems a month, and is working on an additional memoir about her pioneer roots, "Territory Fever: The Story of an Albuquerque Family," posted as chapters are finished to Loquaciously Yours where the poet has produced over 450 essays in the past decade on a variety of topics as well as book reviews. Upcoming: a review of Ethna McKiernan's new Salmon Collection.

Ms. Andrews is also a Civil Rights Advocate advocating in 2019 for the civil rights of the poet Ping Wang who recently won the AWP Award for Memoir.

In 2015, after a long battle, Andrews extracted her MFA in Creative Writing/Poetry from Colorado State University, begun and finished in the 80's, self-advocating under the Americans with Disabilities Act. In fact Andrews was instrumental in the Colorado Commission on Higher Education's approval of the MFA at CSU.

She is a literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Minnesota Arts Board Fellowship, was short-listed for a Bush Foundation Fellowship, and was full-time Poet in Residence for the St. Paul Schools from '74-78.

She lived in St. Paul from 1971-78 during the first wave of the Twin Cities literary renaissance, one of the first poets to inaugurate The Loft Literary Center, co-founding Women Poets of the Twin Cities which as noted boosted the careers of Mary Karr, Ethna McKiernan and others, and spent the summer of 1973 in Reggio Calabria, Italy which gave rise to the "voluptuous prose-poetry" memoir Nightfall in Verona posted in entirety here, designated by arts maven and former friend Caroline Marshall of NPR The Writer Reads as "fabulous."

Circa 2010 Andrews also founded a poetry group on She Writes which included Dawn Potter, Katha Pollock and other noteworthy writers, and supported the work of Meg Waite Clayton, fiction writer in addition to mentoring a number of other up and coming writers.

There is no way to estimate the influence on the lives and work of the some 12,000 students k-12 she met and encouraged in the seventies, but the poet James Tolan has attributed his career to her work as it was anthologized in Heartland II, Lucien Stryk, Editor. Professor Stryk read the title poem of In Pursuit of the Family on NPR.

As noted the poet lives in northern Colorado's Poudre River Valley with her husband, fiction writer Jack Brooks; the couple's daily life is centered around writing and enjoying their beautiful imported Golden Retrievers;-- see the Ardorgold website for details. Contact: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com.

Signed copies of the Blackbirds Dance collection, endorsed by James Moore, Patricia Kirkpatrick and Dawn Potter, are available from the poet. She posts new work below and is available for mentorship and virtual readings via Skype.

She is happy to critique ms. of poetry, fiction and memoir for a small fee.

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

For One Shot Wednesday and As New Challenge for All Comers....

Posting for One Shot Wednesday, a poem inspired by Tess Gallagher's Not a Sparrow which you may read by clicking on the link.  If you wish to take the challenge of basing a new poem in Ms. Gallagher's piece, please let me know; I'll choose a few to post on this blog next week.

Here's my poem:


Love in Advent

I thought I would rest there awhile
Next to the slowed winter creek,
My arm over his back,
The old sprigged
Comforter over us both
It was Advent and I must have heard
The Good News on the radio
“We shall all be changed”
I whispered to him,
Curling against his still, great
And cooling body.

It was quiet in the frosty shallows
And the snow sweetly fell
Over autumn’s smaller tragedies—
The beaver skeleton I’d found
With an arrow through its ribcage
The small bones of that which flies
Or falters, picked clean

Short months earlier
The great-hearted golden dog
Now lying against me
Had trumped the judge’s
“One last time around please”
For a Best in Show
And a feather in my cap.

Then one day, unattended
He’d busied himself
Grinding a small fiberglass fence
To shards
That when I found him weak,
Wincing, he threw up with rank water
I’d taken him in where they opened him up
And rebuilt him from the inside out
Three feet of intestine sutured every
Three or four inches.
They warned me these might not hold

And so it was that before first light
I was first to the vet’s place 
through the back door
My flashlight into that darkness
Where, great head on his paws
He had slipped away.

I loaded him into the back of the truck
And took him home
Skidding over frozen crabapples,
Opened the tail gate not seeing
The wheels had slipped over the incline
And he rolled out, knocking me down
So that we fell to the water’s edge
And I wrapped us in our shroud

I thought we should sleep on
Together
In the sanctifying, debriding cold
But then he to whom I have turned
All the years
Came, in his coveralls
His Farmall cap
Shovel in one glove;
I went back to the house
And ground coffee beans
To a fine, useless powder.

When he called to me
We walked down to the apple tree
Where he had taken care
Shovel full of loam by shovelful
To return love's body
To the earth.

I had not seen him weep before
But we did then as one,
Holding hands
Lingering there
On behalf of our dog
And our brother, Death

This is the cold dance
It has asked of us
Do you see how nothing less
Could bind you two
Together?

Turn up love’s flame,
Turn, and burn on.
Head back now,  
Through the apple blossom snow.



Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2010
All rights reserved.  

7 comments:

moondustwriter said...

Beautifully written and sad turn of events. It is a fine and loving tribute to a friend

Thanks for sharing with One Shot

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks, Moon-- but it did teach me much about love! xxxj

Monty said...

no better way to carry me back to same only in childhood, mourning process of my life's best friend. thanks for taking me back there. I smile now and enjoy his memory.

Fireblossom said...

I was doing all right reading this. I was. Then I got to the line about "To give the body of love/ Back to the earth" and lost it.

All the details are perfect...the crabapples, the flashlight, the description of the man, all of them make this so real. But it is the last four lines that make the poemn, in the end.

SO good. But you made me cry, dammit.

dustus said...

Such a beautiful, moving poem. Choice details render vivid scenes and by the end I felt spent emotionally, yet uplifted..."Turn up love’s flame,
Turn, and burn on." Well said!

Brian Miller said...

ah, beautiful story telling...regardless of the sadness it rings...and yes i can see how you learned of love...

Maureen said...

I can't improve on what the others have said of this already. The loss of Seamus still so close and Mr Stuffy before him, I feel the catch in my throat.