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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.

Monday, August 15, 2011

New Poem for Magpie Tales Monday and Beyond....



Photo by Tess Kincaid, Magpie Tales poetry meme. 


Casita

I could not do other than to rescue
The little house in the barrio
Built a century ago, leaning crookedly
Against a willow
The old dried red chiles had gone pale
So that I hung a new ristra there
And put a vase of red roses from the market
On the chipped gate-legged table

Someone had left behind
Little hands played here, made mud pies
To the trill of the meadowlark
Little grimy faced children
Calling to each other in Spanish

In that migration of the poor, one month only
in a rain-parched year
Where the sugar beets pulled easily
From the loam
Then the work drying up
Family on the run from hunger.

Even so a tattered and torn
Comforter in one room
Hung over a window
Until I came with my dreams and paint
To whitewash where late tears of rain

Had left a hieroglyphic of lack
on the old walls.
Down came the curtains
Heavy with dust
I wanted a swan-bright whiteness
Everywhere I looked

And I worked in the heat
In my compulsion to purify…
To make new, this work
Of a woman’s hands
Even a woman alone
Weaving a nest for herself

And then a Sunday morning
Bitter espresso, real cream
From the grocery on the corner
And against the new white walls
I hung the paintings of red poppies

My landscapes with their green and blue
Depths of field
A lily like a jester’s hat
Thick rich pigment
Of mountains and a flaring
Tangerine sky

And then the chaff went out back
My paint cans, my roller,
I had come home once more
To self whispering to self
This is where we must rest,
Where we will dream.




cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews jenneandrews2010@gmail.com


15 comments:

zeke said...

I like the subtlety of the connections that you made with the colors.

Mystic_Mom said...

Bella! Bella! I love this, I can hear it, see it and smell it...even loving the poppy paintings! Just wonderful Jenne!

erin said...

how we carry about ourselves, our greater selves, and impress them upon the world. here - i am, my skirt and i, and our paint palette. how you will become me as i beat within these walls.

xo
erin

signed...bkm said...

the migration of workers and all they leave behind, I live around many in the central valley of CA...they come and they go..making home where they can, then gone as the season is gone ..and those that remain take rest...bkm

Maureen said...

Wonderful take on that photo prompt.

Some outstanding images throughout; my favorite may be "A lily like a jester's hat". The narrative is punctuated with rich visuals that make the reader stop and collect herself - "tears of rain // Had left a hieroglyphic of lack / on the old walls" is one; " this work / Of a woman's hands/ Even a woman along/ Weaving a nest for herself" is another. Both the choice and combination of details produce an affecting poem.

Maude Lynn said...

"And I worked in the heat
In my compulsion to purify…
To make new, this work
Of a woman’s hands
Even a woman alone
Weaving a nest for herself"

Beautiful. I think every woman has felt this way at one time or another.

Brian Miller said...

some nice textures to this jenne...the memories left behind and in the end coming home yourself...nice.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thank you each for your wonderful comments-- xxxj

Tumblewords: said...

Beautiful imagery, colored with heart and filled with soul. Love this.

Ann Grenier said...

Gorgeous poem Jen. Such a pleasure to be right there watching, drinking in the whiteness and the rich color, the poverty and pain of the previous tenants and your vision for renewal of the old place. I always look forward to your work with high anticipation.

Steve Isaak said...

Love this - excellent word picturing.

Trellissimo said...

I'm all for restful dreams...

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

I think this is magnificent. I love the way you take me right into the poem and the experiences recounted, as if I'd been standing beside you.

Lucy Westenra said...

I think this is about the best I've read so far this week. All's to say about it is in the comments already here. Thank you for an inspiring poem.

Erratic Thoughts said...

This is very nicely put, love the way you have weaved words...
Nice imagination of would have been and what changes you have done...I liked it!:)