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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.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

A Poem for One Shoot Sunday...




Poem for One-Shoot Sunday, a photo prompt hosted by One Stop Poetry.  Here is the prompt, a photograph by Jacob Lucas , followed by my “take.”


On Touring an Abandoned Opera House in Bavaria

This is how the set looked after 
Standing ovations brought the house down
And the roof melted in the rain.

Here then is where an angel sang
In a pearl-bright gown at the apron
Like a refugee from paradise

And I would close my eyes, trembling. 
I stood in line for a ticket in the weather
Sat in the gods, highest tier

Her voice would pierce me there;
I would walk rapture’s tightrope
When she distilled longing into light.

I am the one who threw roses
From the balcony’s darkest corner
I was there in Cologne the night

She sang Alcina, thawing all of Bavaria.
I have feasted on her bel canto like bread
And when I see the darkened proscenium

The scrim of the heather asunder
I conjure striking night after hours
When the ghost crew comes in drunk

To deal death blows to the set
But cannot quench the arboreal fire she left
For Traviata’s chandelier.

I walk along a bridge over the park
The roving moon defines
For the bereft.

I know that he tucks her in each night
Pressing her like a spent orchid
Between his hands 

Her nearly sepulchral face
Tear-stained, lunar white
In the stilled room’s shadows

Forever, the one true Lucia.
Here a closet diva aches for a reprisal,
Reliving every silver-throated run.



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011


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10 comments:

Beachanny said...

Wow and wow, wow, wow. Sutherland in Lucia di Lammermoor. I was there and you held me in the suspense of your words and the longing of your heart. Brava!

Brian Miller said...

a refuge from paradise...great description...this has a haunting feel to it...may the diva step from her closet..

Anonymous said...

Jen this was so touching. Very much enjoyed the read, awesome workx

dustus said...

You made both the performance and the aftermath come to live. Beautiful descriptive writing.

Fireblossom said...

I love the ghost crew coming in drunk. And the ghosty moonlit ending.

knot eye said...

one of the best I've read lately...many good points in imagery, staccato phrasing and lines

"thawing Bavaria"...who needs the word heat, when you come up with this

Peace, hp

knot eye said...

one of the best I've read lately...many good points in imagery, staccato phrasing and lines

"thawing Bavaria"...who needs the word heat, when you come up with this

Peace, hp

Steve Isaak said...

Perfect, love this. My fourth favorite entry (in order of reading) in this week's entries. Amazing, sublime, all that.

Anonymous said...

The passions of opera are, of course, eternal, so of course there are angels in attendance of every performance, enthralled with the the magic of the human heart and voice, so fragile, mortal, yet filled with a yearning that blows off rooftops in Heaven. Such a fine, fine poem here, so filled with life-in-death, the wild bouquet which is the resonance of all those lost singing nights. - Brendan

Alegria Imperial said...

As exquisite as an aria, as haunting as Lucia de Lammermoor's moaning, as grand in passion as all opera--thank you for your 'delivery' right here. Thank you for sparing me the anxiety of whether or not a seat has not been taken, of meeting a scalper in the line who'll take my money for a ticket with the wrong date, wrong time that I fail to see in my excitement as well as greed; thank you for a seat that allows me to listen and sit here all I want, long after the curtains come down and the sets have been unmasked and torn down. Brava!