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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, July 30, 2011

New Poem for Saturday: Roy McBride In Memoriam

On July 29 the wonderful black  poet Roy McBride, so beloved by the Minnesota writing community and beyond and forefather of spoken word poetry, succumbed to a long illness.  Roy and I used to talk for hours on the tin roof of my studio in St. Paul that overlooked the Mississippi.  He was love incarnate.  There are videos made by the wonderful Mike Hazard available on You Tube.     Many thanks to Lorenzo Lapislazuli and Ruth Mowry for the combined Chagall painting and Rilke quote from A Year with Rilke.  xj 




The House with the Green Eye  - Marc Chagall



Three Little Poems
To the memory of the great Roy McBride
  
Who knows: eyes may be watching us
from all sides. Ah, only stumbling toward you
am I no longer on display. Growing into you,
I am forever set invisibly
in the darkening shelter of your heart.

Rilke, The Shelter of Your Heart,   Uncollected Poems
          
i.

Tal Vez - Maybe

Perhaps, you thought
As you lay in the dark
Encased in white plaster

You could make a beacon
Of your new body
Your iridescent shell
Could summon

An angel from the shadows
Someone prescient
Well apprised of the ordeal

It was to have been swaddled
In a blanket that turned to stone.

It is true.
You lay in the dark all in white
A bride of silence
Invisible, vestal, pure as flame
On the altar of the bed.

Voices were far away
As if the family
Had gone on 
The butter knives of their paddles
Slicing mile on mile
Down the green Rio Grande.
  
Ii
 Little Adobe

Little house you claimed my heart
With your peeling blue window frames
How you were cupped in the density
Of the autumn cottonwood trees
On Guadalupe Road.

The red hollyhocks sang of morning
The meadow larks sang back.
I was safe there
In my darkened room
Branches whispering against the glass
Comforting and half-muted voices.

This was before the Dark Time
When she was taken away
And I didn’t know
What to do with myself

Except with my small hands
To dust the stopped antique clock
With my toy broom
To sweep and sweep
The cold flagstone of the patio.

 Iii

The Unnamed

Everywhere
Are children in a plight
No one sees.
They hunger or they pine
With great eyes
From a corner
In a country so far away
We don’t know its name. 

Let us be invisible with them.
Let us join them in their meaning
Nothing to humanity
Even to those who come upon them
Too late, the wounds of their open mouths.



cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
all rights reserved  jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

3 comments:

Maureen said...

Your friend, I'm sure, would be deeply appreciative of these poems offered in his memory. I especially like "Little Adobe".

Brian Miller said...

this was sad when i saw it...as spoken word is dear to my heart...well textured...like the subtle water reference at the end of tal vez...the last on plucks the heart strings...

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Merci, Maureen and Brian. Sorry B forgot to link back to D'Verse-- will do so in future-- glad it's going well. xj