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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, September 17, 2011

Poem for DVerse Poets Poetics Prompt: Trains


What a fabulous prompt brought to us by Claudia at DVerse Poetics Today-- I have long wanted to share an older poem of mine that has had some exposure, but for me is my ultimate "train" poem.....  I look forward to reading all of  yours! xxxj 



Lily Codington, Waking

“These were the least
Of my passions…”
Lily Codington writes
From her seat on the Zephyr
from East to West;
It bores, iron mastodon
Through Utah ranges.
Passengers lean on the panes
And dream:
Gold sleeps underfoot, in the arroyo:
There are silver threads
In the graves.

Lily’s hair is a skein of cinnamon.
She writes, sipping from a cup
In a  pewter holder.
Passing sombrero mountains
She pours from a Rose Medallion teapot
In a wicker cozy lined with pink linen:

Meditation on the Imported Teapot
Wedding Gift from John

The surface pictures are harmonious.
The mandarins court in gardens
Their feet hidden under silk robes.
In pink arbors the brides to be
Are pale, redolent
And gibbons hide in the banyans
It is their mating without temerity
At night in the trees
One hears, above the lute.
By night
In a dance as oblique as dross
They conceive.
Ii

And why then the appearance
Near some of these mouths
Of prayer or anguish
And why the upswing of the pagoda roofs
And the eyebrows’ arch
The track curves down toward the Mojave
Pekoe steams toward the glass
and the wheels throw off sound
from the canyon.

A single hand is so mortal
A familial gnarl of the fingers
Holding cup and pen;
It small and claw-like.
But the privacy of my hand, here
And of my body, away from John?

iii

Do I say a woman sings
No language for our redemption
not poetry
Not pain.  I cannot reach you
With ready speech.

Yet how we once wove our conversation
The marigolds of Amherst
The appetites
Of the Bostonian.
We agreed on love as mercy
As labor toward  an erratic God
We wept near the lilacs parting for war
I promised many gardens
In my heart I said
I would not covet
Possible lives.
 
Yet while you were away
I was moved and restless
I had a seance
In a grove
I was tapping syrup
With Mother, on her cane.
I saw Emily Dickinson, in taffeta
In salt grasses
Striking her breast
Her fists like quartz
And her shoes wet and sagging.

Trying to write on a train
Is like trying to walk in the winds of Boston
With an umbrella open
But I want you to know about our separation
In your face I thought I saw
A spirit both man and woman
I thought by hope or luck
We would leave the parlor
Of our immovable lives

I am impossibly alone at twilight
On the train to San Francisco;
They will hurt me
But how can I hate them
All our hands are restless
And we are all pioneers
Crying out “Vision!”



(This poem was originally published in Wingbone: An Anthology of Colorado Poetry, late 80's, and was the lynchpin of my MFA thesis.).

 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

19 comments:

Anonymous said...

so the lesson here is "all train tracks lead to Emily Dickinson" ;)

Brian Miller said...

each ofthe three parts build well jenne...the first for its descriptions...the last though def bears the weight for me...fine bit of story telling too...

Claudia said...

oh i like this jenne...writing on trains is magical...seeing the landscape float by and trains of thoughts running through one's mind...and then the magic when in all this movement, the pen scratches paper and it all makes sense suddenly...beautiful..

Anonymous said...

I am impossibly alone at twilight
On the train to San Francisco;
They will hurt me
But how can I hate them
All our hands are restless
And we are all pioneers
Crying out “Vision!”

Your words are amazing, I had no choice but to fall in love with them, this last stanza really broke into my soul, and I think it will stay for a long time to come...amazing

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Many thanks for your affirmatives--xxxj

Anonymous said...

Read like a novel... beautiful description.

Anonymous said...

Beautiful images on this amazing journey... I really enjoyed this, Jen.

~laurie

hedgewitch said...

A tapestry of image, and I can well believe it part of a larger work. Scholarly as well as emotional and interrogatory, a very rich poem.

Beachanny said...

The finest of writing here, Jenne. Worthy of the best of poets - the vision, the scope, the language perfect, fluid, graceful, literary and all the while personal. For every reader who brings his/her personal favorite poems with him/her to this read, they leave enriched with wider horizons. G.

Anonymous said...

wonderful range of allusions and associations.. enjoyed the story almost as much as the sudden juxtapositions...perfect for a train ride..

Anonymous said...

Jenne..really enjoyed the range of allusions and sudden associations...the narrative and the sensuality.. what a mix... perfect for a train ride..

Anonymous said...

Jenne..really enjoyed the range of allusions and sudden associations...the narrative and the sensuality.. what a mix... perfect for a train ride..

Anonymous said...

You could build a universe spiraling from this poem. I'll have to return to give it the additional time it deserves. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Sheila said...

impressive and beautiful language, jenne.

California Ink in Motion said...

I enjoyed the poem and the flavors you carefully placed within. Really a nice poem. I can see what it was published.

seasideauthor said...

What a fabulous poem brought to us by you. A fabulous poet. Thank you.

Ruth said...

So rich and elegant, Jen. I heard Whitman here too, those lilacs and war. I love so many words and phrases:

- Zephyr (I would love to ride it or the Southwest Chief)
- silver threads / in the graves
- skein of cinnamon
- marigolds of Amherst (great title for book or film!)
- fists like quartz

You are amazing.

Anonymous said...

A seance bringing Emily Dickinson in taffeta! Oh if only the seers could be trusted! I would give all my gold for that very moment! Lovely ride, a poem within a poem... but I came here, Jenne, to see "Something in me cascades..." I'm guessing you pulled it for editing at some after it reached my mailbox..... May I offer this word? Keep the geese... My absolute favorite things in life comes to me twice a year, with the coming and the going of the geese...... Hearing their hello's and goodbye's, and looking up to see that familiar "V" is one of the most grounding things in my lifetime... Good poem....

Unknown said...

Wow, what a brilliantly crafted masterpiece. I tend to really enjoy segmented verse, and so appropriate here, I wish I would have thought of using it. Not only are the sections separate, like that of tracks on a rail, or perhaps a station house, but they're connected in a very similar manner. Then the journey you take the reader on, is smoothly flowing at times, intentionally choppy at others and creates a magnificent train-ride like experience as we flow through the storytelling. Absolutely one of the best pieces I've read recently, and it seems I'm reading amazing work every day, can't say how much I enjoyed this write. Thanks for sharing, or I guess more appropriately would be to say re-sharing this piece, twas a very good read:)