WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

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, April 26, 2011

Poem for One Shot Wednesday, Magpie Tales

Please join us in the wonderful memes at One Stop Poetry and Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales.

The following is posted for One Shot and Magpie Tales-- the photo prompt for the latter follows.  Scroll down to comment-- thanks!













Song for the Pyres of Spring


We sing to comfort ourselves.  We hope that we are overheard 
and invited into the parlor where a fire burns in kaleidoscopic ardor 
and someone asks us why it took so long.  That is what I have hoped 

For myself.  That I am someone you were looking for, for all the years.
This dream kindles like a match in a beautiful burst of flame.  We walk forth
Into the greening spring, adorned with youth, impelled by vigor, aloft 

By an act of will.  We are unstoppable and we dance this.
But the last tango is waiting, to scythe down the field we have made 
together: our rustling tassels.  One by one then we are chaff for the pyres. 

We throw off light. We are one with copper and silver.  
I am your necklace of pearls and then I am erased, by the tide 
That roils in, cleansing the beach of my generation. All that is left 

Of me is a strand covered with barnacles, round ears listening 
to the surf, a regenerate starfish wrinkling in the light.










x
 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

10 comments:

Steve Isaak said...

Love this - vivid, as your work often is, engaging on multiple, effective levels. 'Gain, excellent!

moondustwriter said...

wow what a contrast - dreams, youth, life, burdens...
I appreciate the way you resolve this with the cleansing of the beach ( my home) where aging takes on new meaning

thanks Jenne

Brian Miller said...

dam jen, this is top notch stuff...startling vivid imagery and a daring romp on a spooked horse word play...

the first line that caught me was...I come
for redemption like a baptism by the past's
Impatient angel...tight

great flow image to image...

hedgewitch said...

It's so hard for me to comment on your poems, jenne--not because of any faults, but because so often they just leave me speechless. This is to me a poem rich in stages, moving through refinements and variations of mood, and each peels off another layer, till pain and loss seem washed clean. The language is so good. From the first line--but in particular beginning with "..That we are overheard..." through the following stanza. I don't know how that yearning, thought, need, hope could be better expressed. Excuse my overtalking it. Great piece.

Fireblossom said...

Show off.

;-)

John (@bookdreamer) said...

Good example of how a poem has to be read loud to enjoy it's treasures

Brendan said...

Whatever your realities, you songs are always eagles --wild, soaring and brilliant. - Brendan

Reflections said...

Stunning piece, so filled with vivid imagery, masterfully shared within words of the observer in a desolate yet beautiful world, all too often overlooked by progress.

siubhan said...

rich in imagery, this has a flow and a depth and a beauty that do justice to its title. Brava.

Lucy Westenra said...

I agree with Hedgewitch. This just leaves me speechless. Dare a lesser writer ask whether someone who has been "a practitioner of the craft of petry for four decades" is the same thing as a poet?