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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.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Poems for Friday Poetry Fest - Rubato

Join us for Friday Poetry Fest-- Link Live Now.  





Rubato

All things are the body of the violin,
filled with murmuring darkness.
There, grieving women lie down to dream.
There the resentments of generations
surrender to sleep...Rilke
  
And I am the cello of the goodly dark.
Play me then
Night, with your bow of memory

Make me quiver
With reminiscence
Strike my taut string

With the glancing blow
Of the renegade moonlight

Sheath me in the follies
Of the braided light
Hailing from distant stars
Rondo, capriccio

Largo of Brahms
O Wood, body of wood
Body of love
And her lover
The robust
Sinfully glad night.

ii

Night, improvisation
Is thine
Thief of the ordinary
Grave-robber
With your proletariat
Of  plundering owls

It is night that makes me anew
Night that cloaks all sorrow
Out of the silver membrane of the night

We come, spending the sleek body’s 
In the surge and suckling
Of the tide,
in a mating display 

Of fanning golden feathers
In the midnight ardor 
of the swordfish.




*When the word rubato appears in a musical score it means steal—as in take a little liberty with the score here.

Bonus Poem --




Treachery

how did this come to pass
bird with a shattered wing
foal with a club foot

that which enters the world
with something wrong.

Who laced the cell with toxins
who murdered the wheat
so that it goes to dust
carried away by the blackguard wind.

Who has defamed us
so that we are afraid to live
and cloister ourselves by day?

Who is the perpetrator
the thief of good will
the prosecutor without a case

Who made of me an indigent 
barren, alone, alone
Who tightens the noose of trembling stars
Around the shimmering earth?


cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011
email permission requests: jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

9 comments:

Maureen said...

"your proletariat / Of plundering owls" and "silver membrane of the night" are two standouts in your lyrical first poem, which contrasts a lot with the one that follows, the latter so different in tone and feeling, though well-realized, given its subject.

Zoe said...

They both pulled at my soul. I love the starkness of
Who laced the cell with toxins
who murdered the wheat
so that it goes to dust
carried away by the blackguard wind.

and also
With the glancing blow
Of the renegade moonlight
I think you captured the dark side of nighttime beautifully. Thank you for yet another soul feast!

Mystic_Mom said...

I was entranced with your poetry, and then I was totally enthralled with the bonus poem! Brava!

Ruth said...

I do love the image of woman as cello (or guitar, or violin). Your poem takes me back into that dark hollow where Rilke's did. Lovely work.

Timoteo said...

Two amazing poems for the price of one...and I didn't even need a coupon!

Mark Kerstetter said...

Both poems are beautiful. I especially like Treachery. Sometimes all one can do is ask why.

Maureen said...

J, thank you for the invitation to join the new meme today. I usually don't have a poem on Friday but earlier today I wrote a sestina and so added the link to that.
I'll do my best to make the rounds. I'm in the middle of some writing just now. Thanks again.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks to each of you who commented-- sorry I'm being a pill about the new meme, not mine-- the other one, but I have deep convictions about it all... hope you'll each come back. xxxj

Sean Vessey said...

Thank you for this meme and your poems. I found both enticing. Rubato is sensual while treachery is bleak darkness. thank you again.