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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.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

A Poem for the Sunday Memes/One Shoot, and In Gratitude, to R.B.

(Apologies to Rob at One Stop-- we're given the option to go in another direction but your work is beautiful...xj) <.



Robert Bly reading May 9, Minneapolis



Dawn

Para un viejo...

It is four a.m. and I am reading the words
of my old mentor
The one with the cloudy hair
The flying hands, the heart
That bears the weight of the world.

I am reading that he once slept
In Grand Central Station, hiked
miles to meet T.S. Eliot.
I am remembering how he lifted
My newborn goat up to the sky
On a Colorado afternoon

And the words he spoke to me
On a Minnesota night
That held me together.

I am remembering the night
We read together at the Minneapolis
Jungian Society
And he asked my therapist
What sort of Jungian she was
And she looked up smiling
From the piano and said
I am an onion.

ii

I am thinking of my old mentor
His patience and care
With my book
The kindness that shines from his face

He transmits that to me
So that on impulse I leave a note for someone
I have tried to put out of my mind
Who heard his music 

This makes me vulnerable
As are all of us, when we go into the new store
At the town’s edge, geraniums everywhere,
people watching us,
Looking at our hands in our pockets.

iii

Many things are awry in the world:
He writes "Call and Answer"
of Iraq, and death.
I swim toward and then away
Someone I have loved for too long
So that I am habituated to tears.

The stars fade into the dawn.
My curfew is 4 a.m.
When the birds wake
For their Chanticleer's Eponymous
meeting in the trees.

They will sing of their Higher Power.
They will babble lines from Neruda
They will descry the arrogance
Of poets who think only
Of themselves.

iii

The old dog  settles into her crate
The last foal slips from the mare’s womb
Into the sweet long grass
The coyotes come in

To eat what she leaves
Climbing to her feet
Nosing the filly toward her flank.

I would like to leave this body
Join hands with my old friend, the great poet
And in the nursing home
next door, the old English woman
with shrapnel scars from Dunkirk
on her thin legs, who sang Mozart 
and Brahms with me.

I would like to forgive the men
Who have left me
And myself for my own betrayals

I would like to sow seeds of forgiveness
In the dawn's black earth.


Notes on our last living Great Poet: Robert Bly


Since Robert Bly’s first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields, appeared in 1962, he has published twelve more books of poetry including The Light around the Body, which won the National Book Award in 1968, and recently, Morning Poems (1998) and his selected poemsEating the Honey of Words (1999). His translations have brought Neruda, Vallejo, Tranströmer and Ghalib, among others, to the attention of American readers. Through his literary magazine and his small press, in operation since the fifties, Bly has challenged the larger publishing houses to promote writers and issues outside the mainstream. Through his protest against the Vietnam War, as well as the Gulf War, through his prose books Iron John(1990), The Sibling Society (1996), and The Maiden Kind (1999), written with Marian Woodman, he has become a significant voice addressing social and political problems of our times.  (Excerpted from Paris Review feature.)  He recently read from his latest collection Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey in Minneapolis; at 85 he is the Poet Laureate of Minnesota.


In 1974 he founded The Minnesota Writers Publishing House and invited several Minnesota poets to join the collective.  We bought an offset press, and began the enthralling and often exhausting activity of getting our book s  into the world. My book, In Pursuit of the Family, was the fourth collection in the series of the first twenty poets.


Looking back to that year I remember only patience and love.  One day when he was in Colorado Robert drove out to visit my parents, who were quite ill.  He was forgiving of my attacks of anxiety and egotism around the chapbook I then thought of as some kind of masterpiece, and he wrote a loving commentary for the back of the book.  I hope to scan the cover image and post it on this blog soon.


Robert Bly has supported me in my recovery and artistic growth throughout the years.  Maureen Doallas, author of Neruda's Memoirs, T.S. Poetry Press,  and blogger at Writing Without Paper, did a beautiful, exhaustive, illustrated  feature of Bly earlier this year.   

xx

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

8 comments:

Dawn Potter said...

Jenne-- I think this might be 2 poems. The first is a small one that stops right after the "onion" stanza. That is a glorious ending. I may well be wrong, but try it out and see what you think.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Oh Dawn, you're precious. I was up all night, feel like I've dropped acid, and settled for breaking it into three stanzas for now. I had just watched the video of his reading of the poem about Iraq on Maureen's blog-- I hadn't seen her write up-- fabulous. I did say that to her. Thanks for reading this. Don't know if you've read the Paris Review interview she links to-- captivating, I thought. xxxj

Maureen said...

Thank you for your comment here and on my blog about the Bly piece.

I agree with Dawn re that last stanza of the first section, which is altogether of a piece and quite wonderful.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks Maureen-- good to hear from you. I'll add link to your piece-- I also loved the piece in The Paris Review. xxj

Dawn Potter said...

Well, this conversation is making me happy.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks... I'm sure you're tired, hope you have a lovely evening/dinner/time w/ family. xxxj

Alegria Imperial said...

Coming from you what else but stunning would this four linked poems be, to me! I love the image of the foal, most of all, with its essence of vulnerability and how you slide it to the 'nursing home'--razor-thin pain that lurks behind all our brightness. Thanks so much for sharing your lovely mind!

hedgewitch said...

Sorry if I was unclear--I had been going to write "a ringing tribute" to Bly--quite a cliche I'm afraid and I felt it didn't 'ring' true with the tone of the poem, so the phrase chiming bells popped up to describe my sense of the mood of the piece. Hope that clarifies, and thanks as always for your comments at VE.