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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, April 24, 2011

A Poem for One Shoot Sunday...



I've actually written three poems for One Shot-- most recent first.  xj



Resurrection
Laudamus te, glorificamus te.


I put the Eucharistic wafer, the soporific
Under my tongue.
I mouthed the Credo of the Bach Mass in B Minor
And I focused on the crucifix on my wall.

I filled with light and transcended myself. I floated
Out of the wheelchair as a sound wave, a Sanctus
Traveling bed to bed, my lips against their lips.

Pauline sat under the clock asking the time
I rubbed her thin shoulders in their cashmere sweater.
Rose wept for her engagement ring
And I held her in my arms.

Julia pined in a high and indecipherable voice.
Kay read at the window at the end of the hall
At the end of the line, in her Scottish woolen skirt.
We shared Brie and crackers, and laughed.

I painted dolls and placed them
In the laps of the lost and forlorn.  I sang
O Holy Night to a demented soprano
Who smiled at me at the end,
“Beautiful,” she whispered.

One day I ambulated the hallway
Dragging my healing leg and Julia 
held up the sign for the wet floor:
"Cuidado: Piso Mojado."  
The hours trailed their damp filaments 
over us like golden rain


And the coiffed and broken migrated 
to dinner and succor,
Opening their mouths for the aides
Like unfledged sparrows.

I was home again.  Among my lost parents.
They were all there in triplicate, my mother
In bed talking about her Indian jewelry.
My father watching a football game.
They were mine.  Mine own angels
In the cloister of forgetfulness.

We loved each other in the profane night--  
I held Irene to my breast, her wig 
on the bed-stand.
I sang to JoAnn, my uncertainties 
melting away as she flapped her arms
In the death-throe,
A swan primed for flight.


xx


Fiat


For Kay Elliot and the other angels of Golden Peaks Nursing Home

The old woman has forgotten to be ashamed.  She watches Lawrence Welk
again and again, joyfully incontinent.  She greets all in her Sunday best each day of the week, in her Queen Elizabeth purple hat, her clean diaper. 

It is not a bad thing to be old, bent, and to forget.  Forgetting is freedom from the past, with its divorces and its chihuahuas killed at the corner, the child who overdosed on heroin.  The aged are beautiful in the way of platinum and polished family silver.  Our heirlooms and their loquacity.  They prattle at night;  their secrets spill out like white moths from their mouths.  With their sighs and gestures they relive the making of cupcakes, the planting of roses.

A wheelchair universe, often wordless, with its roamings and dreamings and rollings away from the disdained.  A demented old woman has manifold imaginary orgasms and the aid speaks softly to her to quell her cries.  But she is beloved.  When she dies she is surrounded by her kind, those beleaguered sisters who only hear her when they are asleep, her breath-caught humming of worn folksongs. 

On a Rocky Mountain high she lifts off, crossing the moon’s harbor, ship of bones in a wedding gown, making her way.

To read about photographer Greg Laychek please visit One Stop Poetry.  


Another Poem:




To Be Read

It is so utterly hopeless, as the stars are hopelessly
glorious in their uncountable numbers, the relentless unfurling
of light across heaven. Hopeless in the way of a marriage
withering by candlelight.  As in litanies of the barrio and the surfeit
of weeping before a crucifix draped in black crepe.

Hopeless to stutter into black space and be heard or forgiven. 
It is a crucifixion a death sentence, a rune and a conundrum:
this compulsion to discern. To need to devolve from the evolving,
anything astute, memorable.  What folly.  It is useless to put yourself
out into the void with the others dancing to the same tango.  To strike
gold you need an orchestra, the best violinists of Germany.  To be heard

And considered and your pages turned, you must be a book, but books
cannot make themselves; they need our help, the butterfly kingdoms
of dialect, the wine-laden epithets that come back to haunt.  The black 
bark smelted to paper.  A campfire of light-filled tongues, a night
inhabited by only you.  Only you so that you may shine out over all 
the seas and the seas weep  at the beauty of your words.

xx


Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

9 comments:

Fireblossom said...

Oh you REBEL! That prompt sucked, if I may put it in my customary delicate fashion. Still, I worked with it (twice!) because in the end I guess I am just another sheep baa-ing my way down the prescribed path. ;-)

But your piece...it gathers strength and ignites in the final paragraph, Love the bark, love the tongues, love it all.

hedgewitch said...

All three of these are way beyond just solid, and each covers a different facet of this thing called age, or that other thing called woman. I think I like your middle piece best, for the Queen Elizabeth hat and mordant chihuahuas, but 'To Be Read' is by far the most poem.

Brian Miller said...

hot jen...loved your piece and it build to an wonderful crescendo in the end...the first one that is...excellent

dustus said...

"Resurrection" is an inspired piece—the one I liked the most of three great ones. There is a fire within and between the lines. A complex conflagration of imagery expressed eloquently... I hope you know that I think you write beautifully, and I'm glad you consider me a friend (as mentioned on your sidebar alongside poets whom I admire and respect). Write on.

moondustwriter said...

Speechless
since I was 18 I have had a love for the elderly no matter how forgotten or frail - this spoke to my heart

and too be read ... Gold

Thanks Jenne

Chris said...

Powerful pieces today, Jenne. Potency floods the lines of each story - though I must say I enjoyed the prose piece "To Be Read" most of all. Favorite line: "And considered and your pages turned, you must be a book, but books
cannot make themselves"...so true. Thank you for your kind words on my own work as well today - I'm honored that in spite of some of your reservations toward the prompt-based creations/inspirations of the day that you enjoyed mine.

I will admit I'm not entirely certain as to what happened between you and Dustus today, but I hope that one day's unfortunate drama doesn't turn you away from One Shoot or One Stop in the future! It's always a pleasure having you, especially when you bring such lovely works as this to the community's eye.

Hope the weekend is treating you well.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks very much to each of you for your kind words-- things are fine, worked out-- not to worry. May we all thrive, have our dreams come true and be glad of our community-- Happy Easter Monday, now. xxxj

Anonymous said...

timeless words.
wow.

Anonymous said...

check out poetry potluck today at JP, first time participants are welcome to submite random poems. hope to see you in when you are ready, bless your day.