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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.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

New Poem: Pieced, for DVerse Poets Poetics - Draft

 To participate in the marvelous narrative prompt posted at DVerse today, click here

Star of Bethlehem quilt by R.L. Bates, M.D.
 
 Pieced


For we have seen his star in the east
and are come to worship him

Mathew 2:1-2

A 60’s winter, late in the decade
and we had brought in Elmer Callamer’s
pinon knots from the woodyard at the Y
where Highway 1 meets 287

(Old Elmer who had gone mad
and always told us the same story
of driving overland stage coach
being shot at by the Cheyenne
showing us the hypothetical arrow-hole
in his battered hat)

So that at sunrise on that one day
of the year kindled by love—in that house—
within that family

The fire threw up its golden exclamation marks
while we had our eggnog in Santa cups
spiked with a thread of brandy.

For a few hours when you looked out the window
it seemed that you were in Victorian England
on Christ’s Mass, that a proud patent leather horse
might trot by pulling a holly-decked carriage
at any moment

And lo, everyone was happy
Fully clothed and in their right minds.

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks
the heavy Anglican version, played
and slow tears rolled down Dad’s face

When we plied him with a tie, a shirt
a drawing.
She, the arbiter and grand dame sans merci

Sat in the brocade platform rocker
downing one eggnog after another
pointing at the Matterhorn of gifts
under her imperial tree.

We approached deferentially, like
children biblically trained up
with green willow whips
and seated ourselves for the bestowal.

After she signaled to a great wrapped
bundle in the corner
I went to it and tore it open
and into my lap unfolded and spread itself
A Star of Bethlehem quilt

Whose spectacular chromatic
geometry called out into the morning.
Even though, when I held it to the light 
and could see the faint imperatives
encrypted in its batting

I was swept away in a surging
and tidal adoration of her for 
thinking of me
equipping me for the world

And my own household, then 
a room in an old A-frame in Rist Canyon
with other flower-children.

“It’s all hand-done,” she said.  “Look,
at the perfect piecing.  It took them months
and it’s at least fifty years old--an heirloom.”

Read between the lines O Daughter;
Thou art blessed among women:
The Star of Bethlehem now graces
Thy existence

And thou shalt never wander far from it
Shall hang it on every wall
Of every house
Where thou livest poorly or well

And thank me for all of thy days
That I thought thee worthy of this.

I did that too, taking the quilt with me
to Minnesota
back to Colorado, ever its
conscientious steward,
hanging and rehanging it in each
ritual nesting, until it begged me

To let it fade as she had
one autumn day, in washed-up pallor
and became so torn, narrative-heavy
it turned into one more thing
I was done trying to save.


cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

For a few hours when you looked out the window
it seemed that you were in Victorian England
on Christ’s Mass, that a proud patent leather horse
might trot by pulling a decked carriage
at any moment

-> makes me wonder if this is a real memory or your fantasy :)

Mary said...

Jenne, that is quite a story you wove here. Such a lot of history in your poem, the quilt.

Claudia said...

such fine story telling jenne..i was right there - and what a gift.. then the ending...the turning into one more thing that couldn't be saved.. made me sad and yet...it's part of life as well..great write

Brian Miller said...

love your close...one less thing i try to save...great symbolism in that as we try to 'save' much but seldom to our pleasure...the story is woven very nicely you develop her character well as the matriarch

Mark Kerstetter said...

Wow.

This poem, this ending of this poem....

Wow.

Anonymous said...

Whoa. You have put a lifetime into this one (as was done in the gift.) Very well done. Wonderful ending. I love the infusion of each gesture with symbolic and endless meaning. Very Woolfian (as in Virginia), but with Western bent, wonderful. K.

Victoria said...

Oh, my! I have the chills. This is replete with so many images and feelings...a quilt in its own right. Magnificent metaphor. I stand in awe of your poetry, Jenne.

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

Beautiful quilt, beautiful story, beautiful poem.