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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.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

New Poem: Leavetaking - for Friday Poetry Fest and Beyond....



 
A "bosque"-- clustering-- of poplars along a river.


Leavetaking

Tonight when I left the old place
I was blessed with the poplars’ suffusion
And illimitable presence:
It seemed they stretched with wide green hands
To pull down the skeins of starlight
Milky the way, untrammeled the night

I remembered the Golden bitches
In the pens that we made of found lumber
The slow steady thump of their tails
When I came out with clabbered goats’ milk
And stewed fish and corn oil in the kibble

The irresistible and omnivorous fat puppies
Small curiosity-driven moon babies rolling in the dust
All things mothering, near, rewarding
That bone-breaking work
Love’s work, to stay with the bitch
In labor and catch each pup, tearing open the sack
Wrapping it in a clean rag and clearing the airway
Awash in the seas of birth, all of us.

I loved most of all when the bitches
Came out of the labor trance and delighted
In their young, could not bear
To be parted from them, even for a swim
In the gilded creek seaming the property
End to end

This was my Eden, my cache of golden dogs
Under the fast-growing trees.
I gave my best years to them, the sweat
And the tears, pulled off miraculous saves
With Ringer’s solution and formula
And generic penicillin, long nights up
Holding and stilling each one

How we loved each other and how hard
It was then when two stud dogs
Were lost to obstructions
And the day a bitch whelped fifteen
With no milk
So that I was forced
To let them go to sleep in the element
from which they had just come.

Tonight I don’t want to leave
That sacred place scarred over
By the green wealth of the poplars: 
Nowhere else
On the six acres we bought
Our old dreams fading
To a mirage and friendship

Did the trees come in as if by intention
To make a cloister of shade and beauty
So full just now with summer
I could give myself to them, lie down
Against the yielding earth.





Gilded Peak Don't Rush Amor aka Tess (Gilded Peak the Craft of a Good Kiss ex Gold-Rush Gilded Peak Sevilla)

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

7 comments:

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

Most beautiful! You make me feel it all as if it were me — which is quite a feat as I don't have that kind of courage and dedication, let alone knowledge. Really, what can one say in the face of a poem so full of lived life and true emotion? It's perfect and needs no commentary.

Ruth said...

There is breathtaking beauty here, Jen. You are such a gorgeous writer. The lilt of your lines is immensely satisfying, always perfect. The "skeins of starlight" line really knocked me out! What a way to start this tale of bitches and their pups. Rich, rich language, and beautifully seen. What a craftswoman you are!

To see the arbor of poplars as scar, protection, is brilliant and once again shows the healing of nature, if only we can see it, slow for it.

Just stellar work.

James Rainsford said...

A wonderfully authentic write. Your vivid imagery and the beautiful construction of this poem are deeply moving. Thanks for sharing.
Kind regards, James.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Many thanks to each of you for these humbling comments-xxxj

Mystic_Mom said...

Images, feelings, sights and sounds, smells and so much more just come to life in your poetry Jenne! I love this poem, and the heart of it is rich with your love.

Kerry O'Connor said...

I love these autobiographies of yours. You have such an ability to take the experiences of life and turn them into art. Love the golden puppies, each one brought to life (and death) by your words.

Lisa B said...

Beautiful Poem...and beautiful dog!