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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, July 26, 2011

New Poem: Psalm for the Alienated

Join us this Friday for Friday Poetry Fest -- xj 







Psalm for the Alienated

All night the cocks crew, under a moon like day,
And I, in the cage of sleep, on a stranger's breast,
Shed tears, like a task not to be put away---
In the false light, false grief in my happy bed,
A labor of tears, set against joy's undoing.
I would not wake at your word, I had tears to say.
I clung to the bars of the dream and they were said,
And pain's derisive hand had given me rest
From the night giving off flames, and the dark renewing.

--Tears in Sleep,  Louise Bogan.



No palliative yet for the hurting place yes
The dark, deepened wound within
The insistent weeping that craves
Shadow’s discerning fingers

Each of us tapping out our Morse code
To one another tap tap tapping
And yet the wound of dark spreads
Over the land like sweet sargasso
And the cicadas wake
For their evening’s work

Accompaniment to solitude,
Lyric for the abandoned.
The one listening for the palpable
If only a kestrel’s plunder cry.

When did this alienation start
She asks, that one
I paid in ripened wheat
To open the tight fist
of my heart 

I was in an orange grove
Over the sea
My hands among the laden boughs
And someone pushed me
Into the briny soil.

But so are we all
Set upon at times
And repudiated
Even by our own.

This—she said to me
Or a voice within me
Whispered.

And to these chimerical forms
Within forms I replied

I have tears to say:
Have you counted
The many deaths
Worldwide, at this hour
The stalemates and overdoses?
Have you seen the weeping roses
On the impromptu graves?

I wait here for the cicada song
For the golden flags of autumn
For the memory of a kiss
To burn like the kiss itself.

I wait for the ballast of this body
To fall away. 
I pray that the spirit soars free

In translucent updraft
With each spiral shedding skin on skin
Of self-forsaking folly
And failed intention.



 cc

Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 All Rights Reserved   jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

7 comments:

Mark Kerstetter said...

I'm glad it's the cicadas I hear and not the tap tapping of all of our lonely morse codes: I think the deafening sound of the latter would kill me.

There's deep sorrow in this beautiful and poignant elegy.

Sheila said...

the sadness here intertwined with the attempt to process the whys and whens of such pain is allusive yet powerful and to one who knows this type of pain, also very obvious....especially the last two stanzas. I pray that the spirit soars free, too.

Brian Miller said...

hey look who it is...nice to see you tonight jenne....you touch on much in this verse...have you counted...that stanza is really powerful...wonderful imagery...

Ann Grenier said...

A beautiful, haunting poem. Alienation is a deep wound...a perfect metaphor. Blame seems indicated by the cicadas and I think of the katydids in our woods. Our old world seems to be spinning out of control, wounding words and weapons everywhere. I always enjoy your insights, your words are an inspiration.

la fille said...

so dark and beautiful!

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Profound thanks to each of you...xxxxj

Anonymous said...

Accompaniment to solitude,
Lyric for the abandoned.
The one listening for the palpable
If only a kestrel’s plunder cry

You imbue an oft asked question with startlingly original metaphors into a potent and beautiful elegy. I didn't get here earlier because the link didn't work for me. I found your link in comments you left at expatinCAT's blog. So glad I found this, thank you.