La Parola Vivace: New Poem and New Challenge

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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.

Friday, December 17, 2010

New Poem and New Challenge

Several of us having great fun working with a poem by Dorianne Laux up at The Smoking Poet-- "Antilamentation" from her stunning collection The Book of Men. (see link to her poetry on left side of home page of current issue-- no individual link). Here's mine:

Prompted

“Regret none of it, not one/of the wasted days

You wanted to know nothing”

-- from Dorianne Laux

Regret not

Your many indulgences

And dissipation—all that wine

After hours in the Commodore Hotel

Where F. Scott and Zelda

Similarly squandered the hours

In lovely anecdotal dishabille

That in your brownstone studio,

Liquored up, winding

The metronome of your desire

You taught your secrets

Like an easy piano method

To your onetime Latin love

Regret not that you embedded antique

Dinner plates

In the porous door of morning

Because you were alone.

Or that you drank too much Pouilly Fuisse

At your own wedding

Forgetting to match gifts with givers

Or that you divorced

The oddball Texas milkman

You married in a black out,

Because teat-savvy though he was

He wasn’t enough

For you.

Regrette rien, as Piaf sang

in the smoky light

Of war-dark Paris,

The Songbird of

France

. Be the songbird

In your own life—a long warbling

Makes it so.

Never regret

The long trips home

Over ribboning highways

from Minnesota to Colorado

Self-sedated, to prop up Raggedy Ann

and Raggedy Andy

Those parents trapped in mortal distress.

You kept them alive.

Yes. Don’t punish yourself

For the excess with which you stole

A husband and some cookies

And once a free ride to Europe

--it’s good to receive, to get

To obtain, even on the QT.

Or, for scaring yourself, turning back

From a gig in South Dakota

Because the prairie swallowed you

Like a carrion bird

when you looked at it:

Agoraphobia—like being a drunk

Is not a sin.

Be undaunted as you were, and remain:

If you don’t recognize that one in the mirror

Don’t look. March on, face into the wind,

Packing in with your many layers

Against the vestal skeins

Of December snow

Regret not that you lent your voice

To kyrie, sanctus, amen

And for a time believed

that the sun rose and set

In God. Or that abstinent

Now from half of life

You wonder what is true

and what is not

And place one gnarled foot

Before the other

As if you were certain,

As if you believed

In gardens, moonlit rendezvous

And reckoning

5 comments:

Maureen said...: "Prompted" is right! Some great word plays and lines in this one.; December 17, 2010 at 1:44 PM
Steve Isaak said...: Your usual literate, exemplary work. Love the flow, the word choices, etc.

I love how you make literate not be equated with pompous - which too often happens with literate writers - your work maintains a challenging, suffusive intimacy. :); December 17, 2010 at 2:41 PM
Jenne' R. Andrews said...: Steve-- I would imagine that all of us taking these challenges are literate. Do you mean "literary"? Anyway, I appreciate your compliment. You yourself write with quite the opacity, I would say, but coming to terms with things that aren't overly simplistic is good for all of us. xj; December 18, 2010 at 6:59 AM
Anonymous said...: Interesting imagery - takes one back to other times, other places..."war-dark Paris" and the old "Raggedy Ann and Andy," even in the visage of figures like Fitzgerald in the Commodore...a skilled play of words, well-thought out and well-penned. Takes us on a journey, a stimulating and satisfying one, from beginning to end. Lovely work.; December 18, 2010 at 12:04 PM
Anonymous said...: rich words..
perfect writing..; December 20, 2010 at 4:13 AM

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WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

Friday, December 17, 2010

New Poem and New Challenge

5 comments: