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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, February 14, 2012

New Poem: The Engine Turns Over posted for DVerse and Beyond...

 To participate in DVerse Poets Open Link Night, live at 3 p.m. EST, click here.


 

 
The Old Engine Turns Over

The mind is hungry, lonely.
Follow it:
it goes out into the twilight
to nose the lashing wind.

The hands stay behind.
Into a stoneware bowl
butter and sugar.

What comes next,
if we but imagine it?

ii

Toweling off after a shower
I think it is the human brain
that separates us from the rest
of the living

And the clothing we put on
causing us over time to shed our hair

Although now and then something hirsute
slouches among us,
readying itself for love and war.

iii

Abyssal cold.
The animal nature:
prophetic, this hibernation,
how tendrils of ice lock us away
from each other.

On the radio a man describes
someone with a year to live
becoming a wilderness guide
in the North Woods.

A year!
I remember those woods,
an infinitely deep lake,
the granite coals of a sauna,

Canoeing the headwaters
of the Mississippi.

The impulsive bravado
that kept me in the world.

iv

Forty years later,
cutting the pills in half
in a surge of volition,

I forget to put away the yogurt.
I return it to the refrigerator,
praying that the good bacteria prevail.

Were there such follies in the garden?
Who would not eat of an apple--

He who ate the ripe plums,
called the asphodel a greeny flower,
was never damned.
v

Falling and falling,
O troublemaker.
Feral wings of cold,

Dark angel of winter,
Clutching at the heart
with Carerra hands.

Frozen harp of telephone wires.

Stalled hellos and good-byes:
blackout
in frigid Calabria. Dark ships
in the port, holds packed with
brokered opium,
beached on the ice.

vi

Twilight in the cold.
The old truck grinds and the engine turns over,
ice thick on the windshield.

My blood in a frenzy
of craving,
I back out and wait
in my tomb of frost
for the heater’s warm breath
to clear the pane.

Here, on every hand, 
an hourglass
prismatic with late winter light.



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

13 comments:

Kerry O'Connor said...

It is always fascinating to read your work.

Audrey Howitt aka Divalounger said...

Beautiful, beautiful write!


@AudreyHowitt

Brian Miller said...

love the progression in this jeanne, from the cold beginning to the hot outh of spring...and the allusions within as well...also the difference in dream and reality...

Pat Hatt said...

Like how you weaved the seasons into your verse, really brought it alive that much more. Nicely done!

Lady Nyo said...

There is so much in this work....haunting, haunting, and so evocative of life....everylife, if we just look.

I have to read this over and over, because it is so layered...not so straight forward, more undulating, spiralling, but all to the good.

A complex poem, that holds together well. Your imagery is mesmerising.

Lady Nyo

Unknown said...

Cool a trip of sorts told so poetically ...thank you x

Ann Grenier said...

All I feel is icy cold, darkness, isolation. But the old engine still turns over even when it's covered in ice...keeping hope alive. I feel this deeply every day.

Anonymous said...

This is amind with tendrils sprouting in all directions..... Where does it turn next? The unexpected becomes expected.... That's the mark of a true writer...

ayala said...

Lovely how you weaved this verse ! Nicely done !

Mystic_Mom said...

Your words always draw me in, and show me another world of sights, sounds and thoughts. Thank you for this my dear! It is a wonder to read.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks to all who've commented on my work recently-- xxxj

Anonymous said...

lots of interesting things here like

I think it is the human brain
that separates us from the rest
of the living

Manicddaily said...

Yes, another wonderful poem. Sometimes I am not certain about all the parts--they do fit together beautifully, but it is much to sustain--for you and also for today's reader. They work well! And in this one particularly, but you make a hard task for yourself. K.