WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

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 15, 2011

Rilke Variation: Testing the Crust - for DVerse OLN and Beyond....

 A new response to the latest poem posted at A Year with Rilke-- posted for DVerse Poets' Pub Open Link Night  (OLN)



 
Testing the Crust

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

Onto a Vast Plain, Rilke, Book of hours II 1

Earlier in the year a plant at my door
went into riotous bloom with
heart-shaped flowers;
it was so shamelessly alive with itself,
dropping nectar-heavy blossoms 
where I walked

I cut it back, imposed my will upon it
but not until now, November
is it subdued-- splayed
and brown, like a dried starfish.
I hear it humming psalms of
solace when I pass.

But what of the scripts of the heart
when the bare yet enduring
cottonwoods loom over the street
and winter’s quiet ruin enfolds us?

It may seem that we are safe and warm
in the morning rooms throwing off residual
light like the alpenglow from 
the snow-cast mountain

But out on the ice fields of being
are we not testing the crust
with each wary step,
like the great explorers
who could not keep from
giving themselves to that
forsaken wildness

Preparing ourselves for the inevitable
misstep, when it is assured
that something calculating
and omnivorous catches up to us,
with its exulting dark mouth?



cc


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

14 comments:

Maureen said...

From "heart-shaped flowers" in "riotous bloom" to "withered/and brown, like a dried starfish": wonderful imagery, as is that strong visual of "testing the crust" of "the icefields of being". How we slip and slide!

signed...bkm said...

Agree with Maureen...can feel November pulling back...nice work...bkm

Timoteo said...

Very much like: "...winter's quiet ruin enfolds us..."

Unless we learn to ice skate!

Pat Hatt said...

Truly wonderful imagery at every turn, a great write.

Brian Miller said...

i figure one day i will fall through that crust...i might should stop dancing on top of it...smiles...some really wonderful imagery through out this jenne...

Mark Kerstetter said...

Plenitude and loss - how full and beautiful is life, almost too much so sometimes, and then, with little or no warning, a glimpse of the fragility of our perch here. We must remember to step lightly!

Claudia said...

wow jenne..just love the imagery in this..and yes..with mark i think..we must remember to step lightly..

Lorenzo — Alchemist's Pillow said...

Striking imagery and I like where you took Rilke on this; he gives us the lonely vastness of the plain and you have us ponder the thinness of its crust. I see myself adopting your wonderful image and notion of "testing the crust" as my very own.

Heavens2Betsy said...

I found your poem so beautifully moving. It really touched a deep place within me. Your use of words is so feeling - not an emotion wasted. penny

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Lorenzo-- mille gracias-- tenia muchos delores de cabeza en escritar este poema pero espero que horita se hace bien...besitos y abrazos, J

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

perdon...en escribir...a veces estoy pensando en Italiano y no recuerdo mi Espanol....xxxj

Anonymous said...

Exquisite imagery and great flow, another fine write from you.

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

Oh, what a brilliant poet you are!

'so shamelessly alive with itself', 'the ice fields of beng', 'its dark exulting mouth' — oh, yum yum yum!

Maxwell Mead Williams Robinson Barry said...

winsome work.