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.

Monday, June 13, 2011

Poem for Magpie Tales, One Stop's Free Verse Meme and One Shot Wednesday....

Update July 17-- little did I know that the marvelous manly mythic poet Brendan McOdrum would link to my work in his piece on Poetry and Myth today.  I think he may have been especially referring to the second poem in this post, The Wrack of Shells, which refers to Venus' birth from the sea...xxxj

Thanks to Tess Kincaid, poet extrordinaire, for photo prompt up at Magpie Tales, and poet Sam Peralta, for cogent and fascinating essay on Free Verse up today at One Stop Poetry.

I'm posting the poem below, written today, for the prompt, and below that appears my poem "The Wrack of Shells," my homage to Sylvia Plath written earlier this year, originally put up at She Writes.  Enjoy!  Comment on me and I'll come to you...xJenne'



Timepiece

Now little clock of the tide
Ticking among round and shining stones
I put you to my ear

It is there—the pulse of the sea.
The sea rolling and making you
With its translucent tongue.

The mothering sea
Laving and rocking you,
Fitting your tusk-hard housing
To the slick soft bodies
Of the fluke, the snail.

Now rock, rock, in tidal foam,
Knock, knock
Nobody home

Seashell on the seashore
Darwin’s Cambrian totem
 Fearful symmetry
Out of Narragansett
Endlessly rocking

Porcelain keys
To the how and why
Of thou, me—

Nacre carapace,
Once mollusked husk
Algonquin wampum
This orchestra’s all percussion--

Mnemonic knucklebones 
Shamanistic sand-worn
Vacant sea-homes

This bone-clatter colloquy
Of moon-miming shells.


--copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

 #2 -- As noted, posted earlier around Plath would-have been birthday; much, much is to be learned about the craft of poetry in reading Sylvia Plath.


To the memory of Sylvia Plath
  
“A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack
Of kaleidoscope shells
Probing fractured Venus with a stick
Under a tent of taunting gulls.

No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone
That chucks in backtrack of the wave;
Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,
A grain of sand is all we have.”

From Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea, Sylvia Plath


How then, our fractured girl
Did Venus too break apart at low tide
In scattered porcelain shards
Beneath our bare feet

Perhaps two disrobed
On the white sand
Before the indignant witness
Of rumpled waves

And stood revealed
As dual wounds
Red mouths made to leach
Brine, and lacerate--
Speaking words that abrade

The withdrawing sea leaves
Silted wrack
To seal small graves
Oysters drop pearls there
Bright confessions
Let slip from yearning tongues
  
And phantom sea stars
Bivouac in the ruins
Of the houses of the sand
Where love birthed herself
Rising sun-tinted
To stun and stripped
Tease the wayward young

This makes a lonely
Beachcomber brave:
I come unto you
Wet and singing,
But no sea-change checks
The sighing storm
That unnerves a hungry wave

You surge, stunning me with your white crest
And then pull back
To the unlit monasteries of the sea

As if to know me then and there
Has turned your blood to water:
Now I am a grain of sand
Burning on in the bone-house
Of a shell.


 Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011


8 comments:

Sioux Roslawski said...

"Algonquin wampum." That phrase just tripped off my tongue so elegantly.

Beachanny said...

Re: Timepiece
Loved the "rock and roll" rhythm and backbeat as well as backsplash of it. Took me to the Atlantic historically and actually. Cold waters, bright jewels, all music. Loved it. Truly musical. Thank you, Gay

Unknown said...

I could swim in this tercet

"Mnemonic knucklebones
Shamanistic sand-worn
Vacant sea-homes"

Brilliant tapestry of words you created. ~ Rose

Tess Kincaid said...

Love-love that knuckle bone shell beat!

Ann Grenier said...

Little clock of the tide, in Timepiece", is such a precious image. A beautiful poem.

Sean Vessey said...

Wow. Thank you for poetry of Sylvia Plath. Your poem is a fine tribute to her memory and style. Thank you for sharing your poem.

Anonymous said...

First of all let me say I love Sylvia Plath she's the whole reason I started writing! I love the whole concept of your poem, the language is brilliant! Absolutely terrific!

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Many thanks to all! xxxj