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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.

Sunday, November 13, 2011

New Poem: Saving the Chairs, for Magpie Tales Photo Challenge




Photo by Rosie Hardy, found/used uncopyrighted per internet Fair Use Policy

 

Saving the Chairs

In my dream it falls to me
To rescue the chairs
And array them on the daybreak field.

Soon a seraphic audience
Will take its seat.
Soon an orchestra with its heralding
Trumpets will descend
On a  topaz cloud.

That is to say
The sun will rise
And make its way over the pasture
Dispersing the steam rising
From the scattered
And curing bales of alfalfa

The wild geese will pass
And pass again in triangular
Synergy, calling with one voice; 
The bare willow on the creek
Will draw a pale yellow bow
Over its own compliant strings.

Ii

There have been chairs I saved
From the landfill
Tan and cream damask
Without arms
The vintage armchair
Waiting at the curb
On Cherry Street
With new upholstery

The wicker rocker
In the dumpster,
Its legs unraveling,
Murmuring of azaleas.

But entropy claimed them
Peeling off their paint
Shredding their fabric
With a thousand claws

Water pouring in
From the roof
Set them afloat
Like old canoes
Trapped in the rapids.

Iii

Try as we might
We cannot save all of the chairs
Time has turned on its lathe.

Someone will come
And set them out to pasture
Where they will settle
Into the earth

And the old women whose parlor
Furniture they were
Dream on in metal beds
With cranks and locked rails

Faces bathed in fluorescence
the withered oak leaves of their hands
resting in rumpled gray linen,
Split leather recliners
Bearing witness from the shadows.



cc

 Many thanks to the lovely Tess Kincaid and Magpie Tales  for another evocative photo challenge! 



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne--I wrote a comment that did not take!

It's a lovely poem--talk about evocative! The chairs are a great device. It's human but a bit ghostly/mystical and mist-ical, clever but in a gentle wise way. Very well rendered. K.

Anonymous said...

Jenne--I think I've posted two comments neither of which has taken! I'm so sorry. The long and short of them were that I thought this was such an interesting well-rendered poem. You've used the chairs to great effect, both on a human and symbolic scale. Well done. K.

Maureen said...

Wonderful poem, Jenne. Lovely opening section. I especially like the second section where you name the types of chairs, naming being like their reclamation. There's some terriby sad in "Try as we might / We cannot save all of the chairs...."

Great photo prompt.

Tess Kincaid said...

I've saved my fair share of chairs from the landfill...literally and metaphorically...beautiful write, Jenne...

Susan Anderson said...

One of my favorites today.

=)

Maude Lynn said...

That last stanza is so true and real it hurts. Amazing take on the picture!

Heavens2Betsy said...

I found this quite beautiful and enjoyed the images it evoked. penny

Kathy Bischoping said...

This is wonderful! The first part is needle-precise with its unusual powder-blue cloud, the willow drawing a bow, and the alfalfa. The second part dangles mystery before us like a carrot -- why the newly-upholstered chair is thrown away -- and has that wonderful wicker murmuring of azaleas and the bright spot of Cherry Street. And the third pulls the two together, still allowing the split leather despite the fluorescent metallicness of the setting.

Alas, I'm not Magpie-ing myself this week. But my latest write is here: http://drinkthenewwine.blogspot.com/2011/11/vacuum.html

Kathy Bischoping said...

P.S. I meant to say that something about the 1st part, I think about the line length or meter, had me think of the Cavafy poem about barbarians:

http://users.hol.gr/~barbanis/cavafy/barbarians.html

Tumblewords: said...

Truly stellar. I love this...

Ann Grenier said...

Beautiful as always Jen. It is always a treat to experience your creativity and have my mind expanded - see those quick bursts of light that spark as I read your lines.

Doctor FTSE said...

This is a lovely poem.