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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 8, 2011

New Rilke Variation: Inhabiting the World

 Posting for DVerse Open Link Night and beyond.....

Photo:  the painter Stuart Codington Andrews

 
Inhabiting the World

Oh, the places we would pour ourselves over,
pushing into the meager surfaces
all the impulses of our heart, our desire, our need.

Rilke, New Poems

Those beautiful rows of houses
made of stone along the river
and long lilac hedges containing
each garden
where my French double doors opened
to a tin roof and each morning
a cardinal appeared, whistling
out into the dawn:

I remain there or I left some part
of what I was, what my life became
like a vagabond lightly onliving
alone, with my soliloquies and ruminations
and flash in the pan nights of lovemaking
with those whose faces I cannot
remember now.

And then, the road down from the north
across the prairie until coming in
on the highway cut-off through the barrio
I began to see the snow-latticed peaks
song cresting in my throat and
speeding in my eagerness.

We occupy the rooms of our lives
permitting the light to entrance us
the lengthening night to come, and then
the highway calls, and the blue allure
of the mountains; how they seduce us
into their piney canyons,
rocks yawing open for the seeker

And the climber who heaves himself
up to the summit and rests there
elated, in the raptures of the stratosphere
before, self-defined and claimed by beauty
he makes the descent.


 A Year with Rilke...beautiful.
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews  2011

18 comments:

Brian Miller said...

a lovely verse...i enjoy your expansions on rilke...you open with a serene scene then give it a twist and then settle us with the climber in the end that once achieved must again go down...

Unknown said...

Excellent piece. The lines take you over as you read each line to line, as the work itself covets you close. Really enjoy the piece a lot. Thanks

Pat Hatt said...

Great word play, I was eager to see what came next as I occupied by little room..haha, wonderful verse.

Beachanny said...

Did you take me on this climb with you or did I only remember as I read. The sounds of flutes over rushing water and I soaked the morning moisture when the dew dropped on my way to the higher meadow to read and write. Your images always impeccable. You're poem transports me and transcends!

Mark Kerstetter said...

Picturesque, there's no other word. That climber "self-defined and claimed by beauty" is you, writing this poem.

Anonymous said...

You write so beautifully, the pacing and imagery--the particular and universal. Really lovely (as always!) K.

henry clemmons said...

Love lilacs and cardinals; got my attention straight away. The short stay at the summit is very telling and wise. There is no summit extasy without a descent; it would just be death on the summit otherwise. Lots of other kool stuff here, but these stuck out to me. A real pleasure!

wayside word garden said...

Lovely verse; takes the reader on a journey with you... and once on the mountain top, the climber must come down...enjoyable read!

Kathy Bischoping said...

A catalogue of pleasures.

The 1st stanza's beautiful colours of lilac, tin, and the flash of cardinal.

Then in the 2nd stanza, with "flash in the pan nights of lovemaking" I read -- because my instinct is to initially read paragraphs at a time and not words -- "pan nights of lovemaking" without the flash, and pictured a kind of bacchanal, which worked cheerfully with the forgotten faces.

In the 3rd, the snow-latticed peaks had a musical notation feeling, pairing up well with the cresting song.

In the 4th: "yaw"! And the 5th stanza, and overall: the idea of a paean to spontaneity, to the roads to be taken.

Shashidhar Sharma said...

Ok Rilke has been on my mind since few weeks now.. and this one is the best ... I liked it so much.. thanks for sharing...
"We occupy the rooms of our lives..." beautiful...

thanks for sharing..

Shashi
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com/2011/11/whispers-tears-in-rain.html

Scarlet said...

i love the images you weave from the scenes of the house to the road up to the mountains. your last verses are superb..to be seduced and see the beauty beyond the rooms of our lives ~

exquisite writing... and as always, i like how your comment about my writing hits a chord in me ~

Anonymous said...

I live on top of a mountain and am about to descend so this is speaking straight to me right now. Perfect word choices, the allure of piney canyons was precisely right. Sumptuous!

Mary said...

I find myself climbing that summit you mentioned. Mountains DO seduce. What a beautiful view on both sides. A rough journey, but worth it.

Maude Lynn said...

The second stanza is just stunning. Amazing writing.

Zoe said...

Oh what sweet aching! And then

in the raptures of the stratosphere
before, self-defined and claimed by beauty

Oh Jen, these words make me want to linger at the summit forever. Yet, once self-defined, how can we do anything but descend again?
The places this poem takes me are skillfully wrought, so unexpectedly delicate and delicious.

Pat-Mather Brown Gordon-ceton said...

This is lovely.

Anonymous said...

nice picturesque imagery

Claudia said...

We occupy the rooms of our lives
permitting the light to entrance us
the lengthening night to come... what a gorgeous image!