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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, May 31, 2011

Poem for the Memes, May 31, 2011





Marie-Thérèse avec une guirlande, Pablo Picasso, 1937 Oil and pencil on canvas, 24 x 18 1/8 inches (61 x 46 cm)Private Collection © 2011 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York-- at The Gargosian Now*



L’amour fou*


Quando m’en vo soletta per la via, 

La gente sosta e mira 
E la bellezza mia tutta ricerca in me 
Da capo a pie'...  "Quando m'en vo"--Musetta, La Boheme



The Parisienne and the mystique
Of her impromptu girlhood pirouette 
that it should so spark a rendezvous
With the painter on the bright rue
amid the rain-wet splendor
Of the tombs of the Montmarte

Where the once here, once there sleep
and sleep away-- tutte, tutte--
Moonrise and years and dreams

L’amour fou came knock knocking on a red door
With her swollen heart
Her almond sideways eyes
her mirth and feigned surprise—

He let her in in and she stood on a rouge chair
“Quando m’en vo... “ she pealed out
Snapping her pink garter on the dimuendo
Stunning all the white white cockatiels within miles

Of La Boheme's pensione. Darling, jeune fille, he pled,  
"Come down. Had we world enough
And time,  we would rumple the chartreuse sheets
Of afternoon.  But my goddess and my heart,
Spent ember of my will 

No other has such yeux as thine:  I live and die to paint you still."

 Jenne' R. Andrews  

* Mad love.  Scroll down to read about Picasso's obsession with Maria-Therese, to read the text of the aria Quando M'en Vo, and to see a beautiful performance of this aria with Dame Kiri Te Kanawa.

Notes on Picasso's obsession with Maria-Therese:


 In 1927, on a street in Paris, Picasso encountered the unassuming girl, just shy of eighteen years old, who would become his lover and one of modern art’s most famous muses. “I am Picasso” he announced. The name meant nothing to Marie-Thérèse so he took her to a bookshop to show her a monograph of his paintings and asked if he could see her again. Flattered and curious, she agreed, and thus began a secret love affair that would establish Marie-Thérèse as the primary inspiration for Picasso’s most daring aesthetic experiments in the decade to come.

Epigraph

Quando m'en vo - Musetta

Quando men vo soletta per la via,
La gente sosta e mira
E la bellezza mia tutta ricerca in me
Da capo a pie'...

Ed assaporo allor la bramosia
Sottil, che da gli occhi traspira
E dai palesi vezzi intender sa
Alle occulte beltà.
Così l'effluvio del desìo
tutta m'aggira, Felice mi fa!

E tu che sai, che memori e ti struggi
Da me tanto rifuggi?
So ben:
le angoscie tue non le vuoi dir,
Ma ti senti morir!


Trans

When I walk all alone in the street
People stop and stare at me
And see my beauty, head to toe

And then I savor the subtle desire
in their eyes 
My hidden charms
inferred from my outward loveliness--
In this way I am surrounded by the perfume of desire
So that I am happy!

And you, aware of these things
pull away from me?
So be it—
You don’t want to speak of your longing
But you’re dying for me.

Translation reworked by jra 5/31/2011

c
To read about the Gargosian exhibit, click here.
To enjoy the spectacular aria Quando M'en Vo, La Boheme, Giacomo Puccini, sung by the remarkable Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, click here.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

4 comments:

hedgewitch said...

You set the stage and play out the scene perfectly. When l'amour fou comes knocking, it's best to run...but who ever can? I love the garter snap, and the chartreuse sheets. Thanks also for the background on Picasso and the link to the aria.

Brendan said...

How can the muse not be exotic as a selkie singing from a rock on the moony tide? This is so rich and rollicking on the tongue, spiced Latinate by so many Italian and French phrases. A country casserole no painter of Minoan lineage could resist. - Brendan

Pat Hatt said...

Enjoyed this write
And reading the plight
Very original too
Great one shot by you

James Rainsford said...

"we would rumple the chartreuse sheets
Of afternoon."
What an incredible image this conjures. Another wonderfully intelligent and accomplished poem. Love it! James.