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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, October 18, 2011

Another Taboo Poem for DVerse Open Link Night

Please have a good laugh at my expense and scroll down to comment.  DVerse Open Link Night is live and lively.   

Update:  the poet Sheila Moore, who initiated the challenge to write a taboo poem and read many, many responses, gave me the gold star....thank you, Sheila. xj

Sinner

So Kenny Aldredge and I were in the church basement
Stretched out on a Sunday school table

The very one I’d helped the kids color on earlier in the morning

There in old church quiet and Kenny writhing on top of me
Comes with a grimace, whispering oh, Jesus
And I’m straining to feel anything, beneath the skirt, the slip,
The girdle, the sanitary napkin

Mother made me wear because accidents happen
And this was her version of a chastity belt.

And Father Darrow stuck his pale face in
Gay as a green orchard stick he was and then 
he called my mother
And she roiled down the stairs like a harpie
on fire, pulled me up to her chin like 
a hand-me down blouse and shouted

Did you have intercourse with that young man?

No.  I said.  Never. 

We just dry-humped, if you don’t mind
My saying so
I said sotto voce as she withdrew
from my lair like a mutant witch

Nor did I tell her of my fantasies
Of parting the snowy clerical vestments 
at Communion
When a Cary Grant clone of a priest said
Take eat, this is my body

Don’t mind if I do, how carnal
And bad of me and profane that was

And I taught myself then, at fourteen
How to stroke and pinch and tease myself
To lowly moaning Tchaikovsky and I made a world
Of self-induced rapture

Holding me in good stead now, I tell you
Decades later, sand trickling faster through every glass
Stretched out in the redolent house, the dogs asleep
Sweet n' shut-down man in my life on the periphery

The genius pulpy ridge stirring when I
press her, press again
That sleeping dove nestled between my thighs
I stroke and rouse and slake and
make wait and build

Until my back flexed and arched, shaken
to my molten core, a nine-alarm fire
Races along my spine and I want to swallow
The universe, this relentless, gripping mouth

I become, stifling my own
Amen!, resting then
Thanking every god there is for 
being a woman with a decent pair of hands.


cc

copyright the lecherous Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 all rights reserved

28 comments:

Brian Miller said...

brave brave poem...i love it...great bit of story telling and i there were points i certainly held my breathe...smiles....

Anonymous said...

Ha! Very evocative, sensual, visual. One is there. (One is there.) Self-help. Haha!

Anonymous said...

Ha! Very evocative, sensual, visual. One is there. (One is there.) Self-help. Haha!

Brendan said...

Hymen and amen. What's charity without helping hands, er, glands, er sands? - Brendan

Mark Kerstetter said...

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, if you don't mind my saying so.

As story, description and great lyrical lines, this poem scores.

And it does something else. When Ms. Moore asked for taboo poems last Saturday, I thought of this subject, but didn't even try. The painter Egon Schiele and the novelist John Fante are the only artists in any medium I can think of who have explored the theme of masturbation in a serious manner. I just think this is an amazing write.

Richard Theodore Beck said...

Wow! Now that's a REAL woman. God bless her! Hand work is less appreciated in these times than in the past. It takes a true artisan. Wow! Now that's a poem. Monstrous, sublime, sensitive, real, universal.

Claudia said...

now you are brave jenne..what a story!

Unknown said...

Nice write, like the way you set the piece up with a religious-like setting to it, really added a nice contrast to the taboo verse to follow. Well done, thanks for the read

Pat Hatt said...

Wonderful piece, truly gripping and well done!

Victoria said...

Oh you naughty little girl. Why is it that the "forbidden" is so much more tempting? :0)

Beachanny said...

Tapping at the roots of it all, Jenne. You were right - it's the perfect accompaniment to Joe's offering today. I'm at a loss to say more except that you are fearless and faithful to your poetry and it shows with every write.

Timoteo said...

You deserve a hand for this one, so here's mine!

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

I think that women writing of self-pleasure is somewhat rare-- so, I was a bit worried but thanks so much to each of you for the hand in things! xxxxj I post such heavy stuff normally, figured I'd kick back for once and let my grey hair/old freak flag fly. Love, J

Scarlet said...

A brave write.. one topic which I don't venture to even try...and you are right, it is a challenge to write about these things. Nice story ~

Unknown said...

wow, there's more here than just pleasure. The pain of early experiences, embarrassment, ridicule. Hmmm. You've got me thinking on this one, but either way, it is brave as everyone else has said. Kudos for baring it all and holding nothing back.

Anonymous said...

what a write, Jenne...isn't it crazy that if this were one of the male beat poets, or post modernists of today, we wouldn't even think, but a woman, gasp, talking about her sexuality with abandon. Most excellent...let that freak flag fly (love that!) ~

Anonymous said...

Courageous (I know it's been said but it needs to be said again), sad in the shaming, honest, uncomfortable and thought provoking (like watching Dogville), and per Mark's comment Anselm Keifer (an artist) masturbated into a book for 20 years to make a diary of his loneliness. A work of art.

Sheila said...

let my grey hair/old freak flag fly - LMAO at that comment. What a hoot! My elders always tell me that though their bodies and faces don't show it, their minds still feel and think like they are twenty years old. I guess this is true for you, too ;)

BTW, you get THE gold star for the best taboo poem I've read this week (and I read a lot of them :)

Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne--I didn't really get to comment on this before as in a rush. It's so brave and the details are so wonderful from the table at which you were just helping kids color to the mouth of the universe; the specifics of character and family (sanitary napkin chastity belt) to the universal. Tchaikovsky! Wonderful. K.

Arnab Majumdar said...

I am laughing, but it's not at your expense. Black humour is funny, isn't it?

Cheers,
Arnab Majumdar on SribbleFest.com

Ruth said...

Bravo! I should I say brave-o!

Well done, beautifully written, and nice stone fences massaged down.

Laurie Kolp said...

Honest and bold, hilarious and sensual; what a treat this has been!

The part about your mother making you wear a pad as a buffer made me LOL.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks again to each of you-- some conspicuous absences here this time but that's o.k.-- this is not everyone's cup of tea, so to speak. May we all write on! xxxxj

mrs mediocrity said...

taboo subject indeed, but you did a great job with it. bravo!

Unknown said...

Really enjoyed this, the thoughts of natural in our shamed world can be twisted you take that and add the humor needed to have the conversation. Wonderful write ~ Rose

Shashidhar Sharma said...

Its a fantasy and at that too for a very taboo subject to talk about ... Imagery is powerful and the going on, even more raw... and harsh and then turn around and become funny.... I enjoyed all the up and downs on this one...


Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com/2011/10/whispers-wet-and-sandy-beach.html
Connect with me At Twitter @VerseEveryDay

Anonymous said...

Jenne, I've never been much of a hunter...... I've been hunting quail several times and have never bagged a single one. (Unless you count the one I pulled from the grill of my friends car, where it died as a result of having been struck at 60 MPH..) I've been rabbit hunting and only ever nearly shot my friend Jay. I have downed a couple of deer, but missed a thousand other chances for each one of those. My point is that I have never considered myself much of a hunter until now. After having read your poem I realized that I am quite the expert in dove hunting, and in fact your poem just excited all five and a half senses in this old hound dog...... Wow!

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

LOL John-- a blur of wings, soft coos for you. xxxj