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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, January 11, 2011

New Poem in Draft for One Shot Wednesday and Beyond.

Please check out the wonderful One Stop Poetry site where people all over the world join together to share their work.  It's a great thing!


Dusty Kiss
For Doug
(and many thanks to Maureen for the chord struck in me in an image in her new poem wherein a rattlesnake “sings to a slip of moon”….)

Look in the ash can you said
When I came home and I did
And there were the great jaws
And the unfurling body
Of a real matriarch
One of those who slithers to the ridge
On moonlit nights and sends the coyotes
Streaming home like shadows
Fleeing break of day

You had nailed her with a shovel
In your underwear and boots
When she was working up
Her black mambo tail at the dogs
And I was impressed.

Another time we woke to a phone call
And we saw a snake of fire down in the valley,
A scarlet ribbon
Sidewinding toward us—and then
Although it was Thanksgiving Day
We had Armageddon on our hands
And in our eyes; the winds rose
Flames danced on the ridge
Deer running before them
And the horses reared and burst their gates;
We put them all together
while we hosed down the hay.

Some rode away from the fire
And we stuffed an old stallion
into a one-horse trailer
And my pregnant mare Majesty
Shivered for a day in her iron stall
At Boulder County Fairgrounds
But didn’t slip the tiny foal
Nose to legs in her stretched out belly.

This was how it was in those days,
That quick courtship year between us
When I ate sawdust in the stinging wind
And pulled the road apples in every stall
Into a neat pile
And the colts danced and knocked me down
And I swore, often cried
And got back up

And I rode sweet Majesty to the mountain top
Where a hang glider came and terrorized her
So that she bucked in place and I bailed
And she ran downhill but then
When I rounded the bend on jello legs
There she was, looking at me.

The jaws of the snake:  an omen.
The wind prying the roof off the trailer
A warning.
Thee, beloved, slithering
toward me in the sheets
The sheets on fire and cooling
The heart inclined to Pikes Peak
Crackling on the blue infinity
that deepened
Waking too much within
So that we had to look away

Yesterday I found your words
That some loves come back
Like a rattlesnake regrowing a head
Or not.
Ours didn’t—not that way--
Despite the many fires
We built together
And the rattler stayed dead

But under the moon’s spell
The high heavens whitened
By the Milky Way
The pounding hail of a renegade storm
That got Majesty to stream colostrum
And “slip her pearl”
Your title for that chapter

I let go; you
Write the story now
And I’ll sing on like I did
As a girl in my Gene Autry hat
Humming “Don’t Fence Me In”
Riding that stick horse of mine
Across the pampas grass

The drunk rattlers you didn’t want
To wake
Passed out at the fireplace
Years before we got sky high
On the ranch called that
And surrendered to a dusty kiss
Your phrase,
And the dark foal with the white star’s name.





Draft
Copyright 2010
Jenne’ Andrews
All rights reserved
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6 comments:

Maureen said...

What a wonderful story-poem this is, great use of the snake, and the images - "black mambo tail", the old stallion "stuffed" into the trailer, "sawdust in the stinging wind", "The heart inclined to Pikes Peak" (made me smile), "love comes back/ Like a rattler", "high heavens whitened / By the Milky Way"; the stick horse being ridden across the pampas grass, "drunk rattlers" - are vivid. I hope Doug appreciates it.

January 11, 2011 at 3:21 PM
Brian Miller said...

this is a gorgeous story...all the little intricacies you wove...and the snake becoming the metaphor...nice one shot.

January 12, 2011 at 4:44 AM
Claudia said...

wow! what imagery and fantastic use of words and metaphor..
Although it was Thanksgiving Day
We had Armageddon on our hands...just wow!

January 12, 2011 at 9:05 AM
dustus said...

Awesome writing, Jenne. What strikes me most is the recurring snakes through what seems the entirety of a relationship. The way you weave that in suggest to me ever-present evil. Even when not discussed, they loom in mind, which to me makes the happy parts at the end all the more poignant. Always enjoy stopping by. cheers!

January 12, 2011 at 7:00 PM
hedgewitch said...

What a novel of a poem, condensing a life into living images and symbols. Pure gold, impossible not to read and take to heart. I'm hummin my own version of the Autrey tune, (the Hag's 'Ramblin Fever,') as I take your story along with me down the road.

January 13, 2011 at 8:24 AM
Valerie said...

A lot of excellent images in here. This could probably be trimmed a bit to give more weight to the best parts, since you have a wealth of stuff going on, but it's a great draft.

January 13, 2011 at 11:01 AM

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