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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.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

New Poem - Snafu -- for DVerse Poetics

To participate in the wonderful DVerse Poetry memes, follow the link.  

For me the impasto technique in painting is similar to what I would consider a "pastiche" method in writing a poem-- particularly one with a narrative arc.  The layering of detail--figurative language-- like building up layers of paint, is precisely what imparts depth.  I've sat on this poem for quite some time having a long and hot debate with myself.  As Virginia Woolf wrote, "I have (hopefully)  unburdened myself of my meaning."  xj


Snafu

Jet said the family was angry—angry that Henrietta’s cells were
being sold for twenty-five dollars a vial, and angry that articles had
been published about the cells without their knowledge. It said,
“Pounding in the back of their heads was a gnawing feeling
that science and the press had taken advantage of them.” 

From The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot.


I once imagined I had saved a few of your brain cells.
For many years I was afraid to have them unlocked. 
How much of your coding is mine. 
How much of you am I—

I would have shaken off this heavy
coat of self-doubt but long after you died
I scared myself mad and thought the stars
flashed on the ceiling of my brain;

I lay beneath a table in an abandoned house, weeping.
Someone shouted at me “You are not your mother”
but it was too late; I had taken you in,
cannibalized you, dissected

What I did not consume. Finally I put on my white coat
and took the vial from the refrigerator.  I spread you on the slide
and scrutinized you like a miner looking
for a vein of silver. 

Your cells blinked at me like eyes, accusatory: 
You grave robberI am in the service of science
I told you.  Open your eyes.

ii

I hid from your madness in my room.  I was ashamed
and I broke a pencil writing you a letter you never saw.  
Milton’s God made man from Himself. Not from dust,  
earth, but from God’s own celestial rib.  God wrought code

And built the cell’s housing by starlight.  The scripts
are infinite—this one for a jellyfish, that one for an adder.  
And this one for a mentally ill mother. 
This hieroglyphic, this gone mad dysplastic helix, mutations

Like warped dimes glittering on a glass slide.  A sideshow
for research;  they put you in mice and the mice
hallucinated: they caught glimpses of themselves
In a mirror and consumed each other. We devoured

Each other in this manner.  I ate your DNA and you ate mine. 
I had the blood of the water moccasin and you
the chronic fever of a poet.  I tried to hand back to you
the inherited darkness. The scripted faithlessness. 

iii

If we had indeed harvested a slice of your brain we would perhaps
know of a He-An cell as we know of He-la and Henrietta Lack. 
Yours I believe, would have lived in a vial back in the depths
of a lab in unwilling oblivion, until someone thought to examine

Your brand of madness under a microscope. In that interlude
you would have seen to it that someone heard your mourning,
your cursing at ghosts.  This is what your brain thought
it should do: sing out against inner perpetrators.

What became of the code when electrons were fired into it?
Those shock treatments.  Did it fragment or implode like
an over-turned scrabble board.  O my mother.  My one they
stretched out into a coma and violated with suppositions.

iv
God is, you would mouth, on your knees.  But not-God ruled
our years:  you taunted angels at full voice, at 3 a.m.
My own genetic sheet music, dark with rebellion, shared with Lucifer,
Returned fire, enveloped you like a hawk’s wings.

We sat at a small table, looking at each other.  I could not believe
I was pulled from you wet and writhing, that I began within you.
You wanted a girly girl, an angel, but everything is foreordained
in the cell--  except that in the blink of an eye the code

Misses a step: then cells grow wildly where they should not. 
Wanton malaise comes over the body; Huns in the kidneys, Cossacks
in the liver, infinitesimal materiel multiplying like junkyard dogs
in my cerebellum and yours.  
v

I made something like a mistake. Ill, I put myself in a nursing home
where you had been, where I saw you alive last. A woman
on the other side of the wall babbled to herself the night long
No one came to her and I could not, so great was the reminding.

I often see you sitting there in a metal chair dressed for church 
waiting for me. I would revive you in some other way, for answers.   
But this is impossible. I write in the wind doing the next thing 
and then the next-- the soul’s stained laundry. A casserole of blackbirds 
calling to the hands, your faux religious fervor au gratin--

I did not mean to refer to you as a pair of eyes.  When I last saw you 
they were mercifully closed, tears at the corners.  Forgiveness 
is slow to leach into my heart from wherever it comes.  

cc


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews   jenneandrews2010@gmail.com



15 comments:

Victoria said...

Oh, my. This left me stunned. Your layering of meaning is so skillful and imparts pain in every image. You are an incredibly talented word-artist. When I read this the novel, "Still Alice," came to mind. Although it deals with early-onset dementia, a lot of the scientific wondering invades that narrative. The author, Lisa Genoa, is a neuroscientist. Thank you for sharing this with us, Jenne.

Beachanny said...

Powerful, hard, well written. Dead mothers haunt us, it's true; not in the way they promised to. We didn't learn them, we didn't become them, but as we age we pierce the veils of their secrets and lies, and pity and try really hard to forgive.

Well done!

hedgewitch said...

Quite an exhaustive, lyrical and light-handed exploration of that bloody no man's land between mother and daughter. You bring a great deal of clarity to a dark emotional argument. The questions you ask here still can't be answered by science, but when that happens we still have poetry.

Anna :o] said...

Very profound stuff and wonderfully done.

Brendan said...

The dissection is raw and real here: where does parent end and child begin? The terrain you elaborately texture is a spiral circle or a labyrinth where the Minotaur is the monster we fear we'll become when we hear that dread echo in our own voice. Great work, Jenne.

Brian Miller said...

still alice was my first thought as well...which is a great book if you have not read it...ugh...your write is definitely evocative jenne...you managed the layer upon layer as well and end up with an incredible piece...

Anonymous said...

Oh my God, Jenne. Oh-My-God. That's all I can say right now, I'm speechless. I have to go read and read and read it because it is that intense, incredible. I'm coming back to comment again on it, I need to absorb. You HAVE TO publish this. You just have to.
Amy Jo

Zoe said...

Jen,
You create a maelstrom of emotion with this that I will need time to digest. Suffice to say, for now, that the power in these lines is raw, almost overwhelmingly intense and skillfully, oh so skillfully wrought.

Anonymous said...

Be-a-u-tiful! Seriously! I know of nothing else to say. So many images, so many emotions. Simply beautiful. *big hugs*

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

An incredible write. Sadly, I can relate quite well

Sharon Rose Thomas said...

I am with amyjosprague amazing write! WOW! You are really deeply layered in texture. DEEP DEEP. I just stayed literal and yours is so inspiring.
Seasideauthor

Anonymous said...

Highly original and profound, I too was stunned by its power.

Tashtoo said...

Yes...I could have read much more. My eyes and mind were held captivated by every word. Potent write.

Sheila said...

this left me teary eyed and panged with the realization that only those of us who have been there can understand.

at least we have each other. No one individual can claim to be the sole recepient of any experience. I guess this is a good thing.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

I know that this is hard to read in many respects. But I thank each of you for the time you took to do it, for encouraging me. I may send it somewhere-- not sure. Needless to say I have strip-mined this past and writing this poem required that I delve back into it-- but in the story of Henrietta Lacks I felt I had found a way in. xxxxj