La Parola Vivace: Two Poems for Monday and Magpie Tales

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.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Two Poems for Monday and Magpie Tales

Two poems-- mask prompt generated second poem. xj

Haddon Hall, Elizabethan England

On Remembering an Old Novel

We are bees of the invisible. Passionately we plunder the honey of the visible in order to gather it in the great golden hive of the invisible. Rilke

Among the yellowed pages of the worn novel

Lithographs of an English girl

Hair upswept, skin pale as bone china

By the third reading

I knew her heart and soul

And she came to dwell within me

Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall

I lived with her there, behind the oak door

On the moors of England

In the century before the century

Before.

Oh, the luminous heather

The tended fire in the parlor

The loyal black dogs.

I rode behind her, my arms

Around her waist

On her night sprint on horseback

To rendezvous with a forbidden love

At night I held the book close

When my mother rose up

Like a banshee from her half-sleep

Regaling the adobe, the eggshell

containing our family, with curses

So that I was shaken

I would remember that I lived in Haddon Hall

I was the girl a knight adored

I was the virgin in the garden

With unbound hair

Sewing my wedding dress.

Many dreams remain locked

In old books

Many tales of courage

The honey of language

How like little bees

We sip, dream, weep there,

Privately yielding ourselves

To an unreachable world.

Warrior Mask

2.

An Old Mask Sings

Now you cannot pierce me
nor blind me
nor cut my tongue from my throat.
I have proofed myself against
the fires of hell

Warrior I
striding into the very sea
immune to the wrath of the Siren
and the surging sea-mammal's jaws.

Who am I
I have bound my sex from you
I live by wit alone
on the salt flats
of the Messina Strait
As you like it and when
you dream

I strike like the brazen lightning
to make your mortal empire
eternally mine.

3-- Again, the Mask

When truth’s afraid she loves a good mask

A porcelain clown with acrylic tears

A satin ballroom feint over the eyes

A burkah at the well

A mask of innocence, a mask of guilt.

And how is there a mask of guilt:

Some draw arrows away

From the fleet gazelle

Making of themselves

A true prey.

The crowd, scenting plunder

wheels like a band of crows

Descending on a martyr,

Feeding frenzy of shame on you.

x
When I saw this prompt I thought about the centuries of incursion by Rome and others of Calabria, my spiritual home, specifically the fishing village of Scylla. This area is one of the most mythical places in the world-- Homer set the battle of Scylla and Charybdis here and sent Odysseus into the fray. I spent a few weeks there in 1973 in the arms of a delectable, sweaty, tender Calabrian man I met in Verona. He wrote The Song of the Resistance in my journal with a fountain pen and picked a wild rose I pressed in the journal. See my memoir Nightfall in Verona, posted in its entirety. xj

Thanks to Tess Kincaid and Magpie Tales for this disturbing and interesting prompt. xj

Wikipedia has a wonderful discussion of this novel that was a best seller in 1902 and quite a wonderful story involving the Monarchy and Mary Queen of Scots: I had the first edition, given to me by my grandmother, Helen Rodey Stamm, daughter of Bernard S. Rodey.

11 comments:

jeffrey lewis said...: great metaphorical descriptions here, great opening stanza it really hooked me.; July 17, 2011 at 4:46 PM
Maureen said...: Evocative poem.

Only a grand story could be told in a place like Haddon Hall. Those ancient homes still have a hold on storytellers.

I've crossed the Moors late at night in the rain and was ever so glad to reach my destination.; July 17, 2011 at 4:56 PM
Maude Lynn said...: This perfectly captures the refuge of a much loved book!; July 18, 2011 at 7:14 AM
Ann Grenier said...: I am right there with you in Haddon Hall - a dreamer all the way. But I don't think I got far with the Ode except it seems the poet has been to hell and back...surviving the experience? Evokes the warrior perfectly.; July 18, 2011 at 1:53 PM
Jenne' R. Andrews said...: Hi Ann-- my poem is the mask speaking, not me-- thanks for weighing in! xxxj; July 18, 2011 at 2:04 PM
Chronicles of Illusions said...: Love both poems but your journey with the mask had me enthralled. :); July 18, 2011 at 2:39 PM
Stafford Ray said...: What a feast of ideas and images! Too many to pick one for comment really but I will.
"A mask of innocence, a mask of guilt.
And how is there a mask of guilt:
Some draw arrows away
From the fleet gazelle
Making of themselves
A true prey.
The crowd, scenting plunder
wheels like a band of crows."
I too have a dread of mindless crowds that too often crucify the messenger.; July 18, 2011 at 3:51 PM
Sioux Roslawski said...: Jenne'--

The lines
"Warrior I
Striding into the very sea"
are marvelous.; July 18, 2011 at 4:03 PM
Maggie said...: How beautiful. "Oh, the luminous heather." Wonderful.; July 18, 2011 at 7:42 PM
Tess Kincaid said...: Very nice, Jenne, both. I liked the second one best.; July 20, 2011 at 11:30 AM
Doctor FTSE said...: All 3 delightful. With Tess I liked the second poem best. although I know Haddon Hall well.; July 20, 2011 at 3:41 PM

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WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Two Poems for Monday and Magpie Tales

11 comments: