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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.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Poem for Saturday - Rubato Ma Non Troppo....





 La Pensee - Marble, Rodin -- Musee d'Orsay




Rubato Ma Non Troppo, for Valentina Lisitsa


This is the animal that never was.
They didn't know, and loved him anyway:
his bearing, his neck, the way he moved,
the light in his quiet eyes.

Rainer Maria Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus II, 4


Lisitsa’s hands caress the flock of blackbirds: 
The Grieg, Saturday,
Lawns simmering in green fire.

Her hands, this Orfea, ignite
The piano
So that grief's’s sea-crashings pour forth

And the encore La Campanella
Places tiny blue flames
Against the spine of the listener.

But Rodin has trapped a woman
In stone…a woman. Une femme. 
La Pensee
See that her capped head rests

On her own tomb, the hard eyes
Of thought, thought
With its fistfuls of metal tongues
Its scripts and redoubled arguments.

Why a woman in stone?  
Because of his Camille of the Camellias?
A man would lock us in, 
shut us up.

Praise for the real
To hell with the ideal.
We bleed.  We tremble.
We yearn.


ii


Trapped, in marble, truncated Venus
Mute Orfea.  Yet the pianist
In her incandescent freedom,
her long prescient fingers
her seraphic womanliness 

Rings the sweet chimes
Of the Grieg, so that the cloud
At the lawn’s edge opens itself
To the tongues of light.

For you, La Pensee, head in the avalanche
Broken from the mountain.
Eternal witness, muse entombed
For you 
night's bell song coloratura
The clouds, with their rainy 
Las Campanellas and rejoicing

La Pensee in the rain gardens
The wet tulips, their bellisima
bel canto, weeping
for each Orfea
Locked in stone.


*notes


Valentina Lisitsa is a young Latvian pianist who has taken the world by storm; Her performance of the Grieg Piano Concerto with the encore of Las Campanellas and other pieces is on You Tube.


If the word "rubato" is written on a vocal score, it means that the singer is at liberty to ornament her singing.  Coloraturas are infamous for their rubati.


The Lakme Bell Song is a showpiece for the coloratura voice.


Camille was Rodin's mistress and model.


Rodin had other notions about the meaning of his La Pensee, of course--to show the dichotomy of body and soul, feeling/intellect, the weight of the intellect inhibiting the body.  My "rubato" is to take liberties with Rodin's "score." jra

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
2011








3 comments:

hedgewitch said...

That is a rather grisly statue, on close examination. A head severed from the female, surrounded by stone, becomes as stone. "...fistfuls of metal tongues.." extremely sharp image.

Brendan said...

Rodin's trapped-in-marble muse makes me think of those bodies pulled from peat-bogs, preserved for many centuries in the manner of their death - probably sacrificed to the god. Art requires discipline and form, a certain confinement to a medium; yet a dominating ego suffers no challenge to its rule, not even from his muse; and thus the entrapment, of the psyche and the work. Wonderful contrast using gender as its mainspring, though it may be the contrast of media - sculpture of necessity works to free a form from stone, while music lifts its wings from its very scales. Loved the quote from Rilke's Sonnets; its speaks of how imagination must run far ahead of the work. - Brendan

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thank you both, Joy and Brendan, for stopping by and giving me your take. One is never sure-- hence the value of a readership, however small. xxxj