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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, November 1, 2011

New Poem: Rilke Variation, for DVerse Open Link Night

Orpheus, Imploring  -  August Rodin


Thinking of Rilke on All Hallows Eve

Oh, the pleasure of it, always emerging
New from the loosened clay.  Those who
dared to come first had hardly any help.
Nevertheless cities arose on sun-favored
coasts, and pitchers filled with water
and oil…...

We are endlessly offered into
life: all time is ours. And what any one
 of us might be worth, death alone knows—
and does not tell.

Sonnets to Orpheus II

I do not meet you on the sun-favored coast
But in the Tuscan cypress at twilight
Where you walked alone, song stirring in you
Your hands at your sides.

When I first heard you calling from the page
I thought who is it that emerges
From the loosened clay
Of the underworld
Alive—a fellow seer and traveler
An Orpheus and Dante, brave interrogator
Out of the infernos of loneliness;

My vagabond heart went out
Into the forest crepuscule and saw how pale
You were, kneeling over a gravestone;
Behind the century’s curtain do you too
Bear witness to the pas de deux
Of the Gemini, two stars
in conjoined burning;
Did you as well, conjuring a Eurydice
of the garden,
dream of a counterpart?


And I knew you as both brother and lover
In language and spirit
In the kinship of deprivation, when I heard
That your mother incarnated
A lost daughter in you;
That is the Prufrockian infamy
We endured together:
How it was when we were small,
Vulnerable, and the profaned world
Slipped the axis of our sensibility.

Beloved to me is our unaccountable
Intimacy before the unseen:
And that we are each afflicted
With inner music sustains me now
As like you at the end, I am at odds with time
Striving to lend my voice and to stir those
Encountering my declarations.

If we could remake each other from wet clay
Reincarnate those we have lost

But instead lyrical volleys
Reverberate like bells peak to peak
And the passing grief-stricken moon
Yearns to stay behind to unite and
Succor us in the milk of her light. 



Rilke, as many poets before him, was captivated by the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.  In many respects his work reveals his own unfulfilled quest for a Eurydice wooed by his singing into his arms.  He reinvents the myth in that Eurydice rises from death and imbues the natural world so that he senses her everywhere—a risen Eve, in a sense and a metaphor for the extent to which Rilke felt that world calling to him, evoking response from him.  In this poem I am trying to comprehend Rilke's pull on me rather than writing for a wider audience but I hope that others feel kinship with it.

Rilke was, in our terms today, the victim of child abuse; his mother, mourning a lost infant daughter, dressed him in girls' clothing for a time.  

My allusion to Prufrock of course refers to the great poem The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock of T.S. Eliot—a maimed and alienated modern persona also thwarted in a quest for intimacy, and who sees carnal/romantic love as linked to meaning and fullness of being.

cc
Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011   

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

Prufrock...maybe deeper than fullness of being.
Nice post.Bravo.

Kathy Bischoping said...

Hi Jenne, thank you for recommending dVerse to me with a recent comment on a Magpie Tale. Now here I am enjoying another of your poems, having posted another of my own.

I was struck by the stanza that begins "And I knew you as both brother and lover", and feeling that the narrative had hit upon its turning point. (I puzzled over the incarnated sister, until the explanation at the end.) Those moments of recognizing and feeling kinship toward someone who has had similar worst experiences, of being sustained by common affliction, do have a pull that goes beyond, or willfully rejects, all logic. It's as though the moon knows it: this isn't gonna work.

Brian Miller said...

i like how you find home a kindred in rilke and your own vulnerability in this...the moon left to succor those left behind those that have gone one is an image that ends is apropo...

Tashtoo said...

Quite honestly found this write breath taking. And totally appreciated your commentary as well. I've learned so very much from posts and writes such as this. Thank you!

Anonymous said...

Seamless phrases float the reader through your insightful poem. This is an intriguing and excellent poetic dialogue. You've found a rich vein in these conversations with Rilke.

Claudia said...

in many ways i think Rilke was a cracked person...but maybe his writing wouldn't be as deep as it is if it weren't for the things he suffered...
you had me of course with the tuscan cypress..fell in love with tuscany this summer, it's a magical place and this magic mirrors in your poem..
If we could remake each other from wet clay
Reincarnate those we have lost...and succored in the milk of the moon's light are prob. my fav images in here..

robkistner said...

"As like you at the end, I am at odds with time..."

this passage touched me deeply, as it profoundly speaks to my place in the continuum...

Ruth said...

This is wonderful work, Jenné. Rilke brings out much good in us, and I'm fascinated by the ways his writing is more powerful than the life that shaped him, and how he "abused" others (I use the term liberally, because of how he left his wife alone to raise their daughter Ruth). I think she suffered from it, though she might not call it abuse. At any rate, I love that you are finding such inspiration from his writings, and creating your own gorgeous poems from it. That final image of the grief-stricken moon is incredibly comforting. Strange how the grief of another can succor us, no?

Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne,

Rilke is also one of my very favorite poets, especially, I think, earlier works (perhaps because of the habitual immaturity of my outlook.) I was curious to hear about his mother dressing him as a girl--he has such an incredibly subtle sensibility. I don't know how/whether those things connect, but perhaps he was in situations where he needed to perceive nuance more than most. What's always amazing to me is that he can be so absolutely particular==catch such fine flashes of detail, such revealing moments--expressions, the wilt of a flower--while also being so sublime and universal. You seem to channel this type of sensibility very well. K.

Brendan said...

A fine shadow-dance with the man who became his own Angel through the transfiguring power of the word. Rilke would enjoy this wake of a walk with him, loving the child and the man in him, the beloved exchange of voices. - Brendan

Sheila said...

enjoyed your insights into your spiritual/psych pull towards Rilke. I think many can probably relate. I appreciate the end notes as well.

Charles Elliott/Beautyseer said...

This piece reminded me that while working as Rodin's secretary, Rilke once wrote to his wife: "...works of art are always the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity...” Thanks!

Zoe said...

Jenne, I can feel the slight dissonance of you both in this, and it is something I also relate to - at times mourning for the passing of connection to what is around us, yet finding comfort in connection on a deeper level. At least, that is how I take it. :) What a tender poem. Love it!

Shashidhar Sharma said...

I have loved Rilke and his 'Tiger' poetry was the one that made me think in terms of Objects. You have taken this thought of 'All hallows Eve' a bit further on that and I enjoyed it very much...
Yes "if we could remake each other from wet clay.." we could find the reason for the life..

Thanks for sharing...


Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com/2011/11/whispers-fire-faayar-faayaar-dedicated.html
At Twitter @VerseEveryDay

The Orange Tree said...

unbreakable tie is beautiful revealed,
what a profound memories and thoughts.