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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, April 19, 2011

Poem for One Shot Wednesday/One Stop Poetry





The Angel of Her Discontent

I  think I could do it now without so much
as a body shudder or a blue-lipped sigh---
fill my pockets with stones and in the inner
weeping of a fallen seraphim
walk into the sea. This is what Woolf did,
not looking back. For I am tempted out of paradise
my dream of recovery worn to opalescence
on the edge of the blue span beneath
the cirrus over the foothills.  I home to those hills;
I want to meld into them 

Where water makes stones, water and wind,
rain and storms and after, we find 
a petrified owl of obsidian, blackly flashing 
from the forest floor.  
In my fever I count the garnets like lark's eyes 
in a box of my great grandmother’s. 
They were some kind of rosary as if grace 
arose from incantatory whispers. 
A friend writes of Lucifer falling into blueness, 
drawn to beauty in spite of himself--. 
if he were only not so made of vitriol but I know 
of that rich, dark nectar.  I am Lucifer 

Or  Lucifer's Lucia, in the gardens of blood-red roses. 
We each need an intervening angel 
yet I would strike even Gabriel with a petroglyph
So that he folds his wings like night and expires
through time, clear and icy black air trying to get my soul
to safety-- it would disintegrate, its fragmenting lost
satellite self, and I with it then.

ii

A photo of Eva Braun as a child on my desk.  Hitler locked her
away but she roamed above the sea with her Scottish terriers
trotting behind.  She poured dark wine into his crystal goblet.  
It was 1939. She must have even been beautiful, 
her hair in damp tendrils

Framing her face,  as she popped the cyanide 
capsule and folded into death like a white silk scarf. 
Perhaps I will name the angel of my discontent Eva Braun.

I ask of this semblance in the corner of my heart, she
who billows softly there in ghostly rectitude; How do you forgive
yourself for hurling the stones of words at someone and striking him
in the temple, sending him into aphasia-- if it had

Evolved to an amnesia but he remembers, and his eyes-- blue, watering,
Disconsolate, maddening you with how easily wounded he is
when you need him to be more than inexhaustible--
Who can endure a stoning.  A woman in a burkah, destroyed
in this manner for love?.  He cannot will himself away, even
from the time you took the Italian shoes and fed them to the stove
and the next day, there were the shoes’ iron stays, remnants
of a fallen Dorothy,  in the ashes.

I am one who has consigned herself to a lair, who roams at night. Fill
my pockets with rain.  Put silver coins on my eyes and sew closed
my mouth.  Think nothing of the thin cries of my bones, the absurd
beating of my wings at the midnight hour;  walk away.


April 13, 2011

xc

Visit One Stop Poetry and take a chance on the meme-- a good time always shared.
Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews, 2011 

12 comments:

Brian Miller said...

some damn fine imagery and story telling jen...love the blend of ethereal in the first coming down to earth there in the second...and you hold tight the cord of emotion...nicely played.

Fireblossom said...

Have you seen "The Hours", Jen? I think you'd like it, if you haven't.

I love that third stanza, with its obsidian, and the following stanza, which continues the stoney way.

It's refreshing in a certain way to come here...I read so many of the One Shot posts and what is missing in the great majority of them is the poetic image. Not so here. Here, they overflow, they are everywhere.

As writing, I love the final stanza, but I don't like its meaning. I'd have to yank you out and kick your ass. I'd unstitch your mouth, throw the coins away, saying scream, fight, carry on.

Ami Mattison said...

Well, you had me from the beginning with the allusion to Woolf's pocketful of rocks, and then the images just came in mesmerizing waves so I couldn't stop reading. Even Part II with its more translucent language and narrative didn't break the spell--only fortified it more fully with emotion. Sorrowful, lovely, lyrical, and as always, fine, fine writing!

Claudia said...

a poem with hitler and eva braun in it...dark and intense..and yes...reminds me of a dark period of german history..sometimes i think we have never quite recovered from this..

signed...bkm said...

Your writing is profound...and I need to read more of it...I read your bio and see that you must of grown up in Minnesota at the same time I did..or close...I was raised on a farm 20 miles east of St Cloud.....the state still provides images deeply driven into my mind....great work...bkm

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks to Brian, FB, Claudia, Ami, BKM-- I know it's on the dark side, meant a bit tongue in cheek but wanted to go its own way. FB-- it's good to know someone would unstitch that mouthy mouth! xxxj

Unknown said...

I most appreciate your efforts to show both the light and the dark, as in Lucifer and Gabriel and your reactions to each one. The lens turned on intention, then back on effect is a smart device, giving insight a most interesting angle. I shall return!
And did you notice I have an angel statue illustrating a recent post?
Serendipity!

Jannie Funster said...

Fill my pockets with bubble wrap
and tell Gabriel and Lucia Lucifer
I'll be out on the Sargasso
spinning straw into moonbeams
and weeds into crowns for the
orphans who've not yet been to sea.

See how you ignited my poetic fires!! Good poems always get my mind a-dabbling in new places.

Thank you.

Alegria Imperial said...

Some feelings have no equivalent in words. They hover around the words. The mist that hangs about thus make of the words what it doesn't seem when read. The mind reaches out to the heart for a soul. Once they do touch, the feelings leave the carcass of the words. That's how your poems affect me as this one again, Jenne! Speechless is the common word for it...ahhh or a deep breath its briefest expression. Thanks again!

Luke Prater said...

fine piece, for reasons such as this -

worn to opalescence > oh yes
on the edge of the blue span beneath
the cirrus over the foothills.

Luke

Vinay Leo R. said...

beautiful imagery indeed, intense and well woven! I liked it.

My Post Is Here

Hyde Park Poetry Palace said...

confidence is your words is cool.

eloquent delivery.

Enjoyed this, awesome talent.

Invite you to join poets rally week 42 by sharing a free verse today.
Appreciate your input.

Hope to see you in!
Have A Blessed Easter!
xxx