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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.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

New Poem for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond.... Homeward





Homeward

Houses rose around us, solid but unreal, and no one knew us.

Playmates, Rainer Maria Rilke

It is true that old friends fade away
that the solitary self
falls inward, inquiring how then

Shall I be safe and whole?
We see a scarlet bird wheeling in the fervor
of flight but she returns and returns

To her cloister of branches
The mariner is blown out to sea
lays low and then braves the swell

To come into harbor.
The self’s harbor is the house one builds
in later years, brick by brick, each

Still warm from the hours lived
it represents.  Stone by stone
the foundation, then the strong support

Of oak for the walls and the duly
plumbed walls themselves.
How lovely is thy dwelling place
 
Then, former child, battered by the seas
of the world;
this is the sane house of the self

Not imagined forth but a true strength
and true discernment, to paint the walls
a light-retaining white

To hang bright red flowers upon
that they should invite us within,
to come unto the completion

Of being, landlord
of our own lives, there in one’s own
redolent cloister,
chanticleers in the window’s bowing
willow,  singing
the writs of beauty.

x

Join in the DVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night! 
bronze:  Rodin
copyright Jenne' Andrews 2011


13 comments:

Joanne Young Elliott said...

I love this! The ebb and flow of our lives as we come home to ourselves and build. Beautifully rendered.

P.S. Rilke is my favorite poet.

Brendan said...

How shall I call these paper walls home? Oh yeah .. Thanks. Gorgeous work. - Brendan

Maureen said...

"The self's harbor is the house one builds" is a stand-out line in this lovely lyric poem. Its title is deeply inviting.

Rilke has been a great source of inspiration for your recent poems. Brava!

Ann Grenier said...

A beautiful poem, Jen.I just finished reading a little book about Sylvia Plath by a roomate at Smith College. Very disturbing. She did of course eventually succeed in her suicide attempt. Your poem describes the antithesis of such insanity. We must hope to live with the unnameable need and hunger, construct comfort from the memories of which our selves are made.

Arron Shilling said...

Very arresting and strikingly beautiful - inspiring subject matter a very affecting piece

Brian Miller said...

really a very beautiful poem jenne...wonderfully descriptive and engaging...being landlord of our own lives means bearing the responsibility for them as well...

Anonymous said...

Ann above is so right... you just described the beauties of life, the little parts of our own quaintness, an inner strength and desire for an absolute love of life and the years that accompany it. Jenne, you are one of the most talented poets that I know. I see beauty in so many things, so to say this poem is beautiful is one thing, but no.... Jenne this is an absolute masterpiece and I am completely humbled... sorry if that's a bit over the top or into the woods....... :)

Maude Lynn said...

"this is the sane house of the self"

Yes! Beautiful, meaningful write.

Scarlet said...

an interesting question you pose:

"that the solitary self
falls inward, inquiring how then


Shall I be safe and whole?"

like the reflective tone.. but the answers, I think are different for everyone. Thanks for sharing your thoughts ~

Tashtoo said...

beautiful...compelling....consider this piece felt. A wonderful read, much enjoyed!

hedgewitch said...

True words well expressed: the house we build ourselves with age and time and persist in through the buffets of our experiences is indeed the one we must live and die in, so why not decorate it in joy.

Mark Kerstetter said...

What I appreciate most about this, apart from its beauty, is the sense that this work is ongoing, one must do at least a little bit every day.

Beachanny said...

Red the flitting symbol as a flame, a beacon, as that touch of autumn, warming, consoling - flits in and out of the piece calling one home. Here in your words we find the solace, the fortress, the comfort the soul seeks. Excellent piece. Not only beautiful, but so precisely crafted! G.