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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.

Thursday, January 6, 2011

New Poem in Draft January 6 -

I've noticed that some of the poets I love-- notably Eliot and Whitman-- aren't shy about repeating words and phrases, mixing them up, for that mnemonic effect we all love-- so, this was a poem about the night but as is the way with wayward poems, about other things as well.  Thanks to those taking the time to read it!  I'll visit you...xxxj


The Solitary Dialect of the Night Owl

I make my way down the blacktop in the deeps of the night
The long tunnel through the barrio that is the night
The arcade of stars that night becomes
Dipper spilling over with platinum fire
If we could hear the song of the heavens
We would run, falling, sleep-walking
Rowing ourselves over ice with our own arms
So stunned by the crescendos of heaven

I make my way down the blacktopped circuitry
Where frost becomes fire and there are star-falling songs
As in an arcade, its few euphoric stragglers
Crossing against the eighteen wheelers bearing East
To the prairie, no drivers
The long blind ships of the night on their thunderous wheels
The Burlington Northern on its midnight run, the long call
Of warning some don't heed
Hot bikes skidding out in a sea of sparks
Jackets on fire, the lost angels of the winter dark

I go out to lock the car and there is a voice
Night’s beguiling voice 
In the crown of the dead oak that scratches the stars
Something is calling to me; it is calling and fluttering 
With topaz eyes that flash like neon asters
Caught in the bark-stripped branches

Who are you, heading East
By starlight in the deeps of the night.
Who. 
To whom do you speak
I reply, making a low noise
In my throat, a low guttural noise
A foolish human would make
In response to a night creature
In a tree in its halo of star-flung sky
And what are you?
Something come to telegraph
The hour of my death?

I make my way over blackened grass
Where frost becomes fire and there are star-falling songs
Of mourning and surrender

If I had but one answer, you who preen there
Wrapped in the down
Of the dawn and the night's last hour
Its last sweet cold kiss stealing my breath 

If I knew who I am or who I ever was 
or might become
I would be at rest, at peace, 
my head on a feather pillow
Learning your impertinent patois
In my dreams.  


Copyright Jenne’ R. Andrews 2011
All rights reserved.



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7 comments:

Fireblossom said...

Are we related? I'm telling you, we share mojo or something.

That first stanza is amazing. I especially love the rowing ourselves with our arms part. I also love the spirit tree and the conversation,if you will. The poem as a whole is realllyyyyy good! A blast to read.

Um...but since it is labeled "In draft", I am thinking it isn't finished. May I offer two things that struck me? If I'm being annogying, I apologize in advance. Nobody died and made me editor for the western world. Nonetheless, I don't think the second stanza is up to the standard of the rest of the poem, though I like the Harleys and their lost angels. I don't think the repetition of the stars and arcade works. My opinion only. And I think you mean "patois" not patios" near the end.

This poem knocks the top of my head off. Forgive me the unsolicited advice, if it wasn't wanted.

January 6, 2011 at 4:48 AM
Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks-- think we've been reading each other's mail? xxxxj must to bed but will live with the draft a few days-- thanks for your suggestions! xxxj

January 6, 2011 at 4:51 AM
Maureen said...

Jenne, your words are so lyrical; the poem moved me deeply. The song in this reverberates, almost lulls with its beauty.

I agree with Fireblossom about that first stanza; it's one of the best you've written. My, what an image is created with "Rowing ourselves over ice with our own arms"! The "crown of the oak that scratches the stars" also is lovely.

January 6, 2011 at 9:35 AM
Dawn Potter said...

I disagree with Fireblossom: I like the second stanza quite a bit.

January 6, 2011 at 11:15 AM
Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thank you, Maureen and Dawn and Shay...xxxxj

January 6, 2011 at 12:16 PM
Claudia said...

first - i loved the title...and i liked the images you use...The long ships of the night on their thunderous wheels..

January 6, 2011 at 12:28 PM
Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks Claudia-- great to have you and Dawn stop by! xxxxj

January 6, 2011 at 1:31 PM

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