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.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Touched: A Prose-Poem

Note:  someone recently suggested I stop worrying about how my content affects my readers and fuming over the publish or perish issue.  I think this is good advice.  When I post poems of loss and grief, or that reckon with difficult circumstances, otherwise known as the human condition, I am not looking for psychotherapy or pity.  I am posting imaginative writing, formerly known as creative writing.  So feel to respond poet to poet...xxxj





Today I tackled the dust I never thought one person living alone could make.  Chaff from the unpreserved dried flowers from the bouquet given to me when I traded a golden retriever for a mobility scooter that now sits on my porch, battery dead.  Clumps of fine hair from the golden retriever someone I no longer speak to gave me, she who is mythically beautiful, a gilded swan planted in the midst of my life.  Her fur and my grey hair, ever falling like hints of rain, commingle in the corners. 

Somehow over the weeks I had been sliding back into depression, staring at my own dishabille, consuming things and throwing them aside like a madwoman-- and averting my eyes, turning then to save an overripe banana, churning it up with eggs and sweet milk and baking the whole as a hybrid flan.  Where I took pleasure in nurturing the place that nurtures me I began to resent the demands of the dust, the hair, the chaff, the powdering flowers.

How dare everything decay like this.

Meanwhile the worst of it;  my own teeth and their wearing down, as if they are tired of being teeth.  Terror when I look into my own mouth and see cycle-shaped cavities at the gum line.  And the leg that didn’t heal and deformed and the other leg and knee and their strain.  The infernal house of the aging body.  The demands of the aging body and the rotting of the subflooring beneath the carpet and the wind tearing at everything.

In my bedroom, dolls forever asleep in dust-caked blankets, like little mummies.  The nightstand I stole from the Joder Ranch years ago and painted mauve, next to the bed I bought on Craig’s List because it was from the Denver Mattress Company, that sagged already on one side so that I felt betrayed… the vials I cannot bear to leave out because they take me back to everyone’s illness I fled from.. The painting over my bed of mauve orchids on a dark background given to me by an old lover.. a lover who ages among the fallen plantations of the Pacific.

These things that claimed the eye and heart and that own me and that help me believe I am like anyone entitled to exist—and how quickly the talcum powder I sprinkle over my breasts and belly floats out of the bathroom to coat the lampshade, the dark drape over the window. 

So it is with a lair; I live in this lair, I dream and weep and touch myself to rapture in this place and close its door against any further re-wounding.  Let me count the lovers:  impossible. 

This is not the age of Aquarius but the age of a resurgence of distrust of women and a laying claim to the wombs of women by pale white men.  It is awful.  Too many hands have roamed over this body; I have succored a legion of the undeserving as if I were mother to the world.

The chaff is that which is left.  That which scripts the hours of a life, littering itself along the baseboards, proof that someone of blood and bone dwells here with the soft-voiced radio and the mnemonic television and the blender waiting with its lucent eggs, for my touch.


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

7 comments:

Zoe Francesca said...

Oh Jen, I am weeping. For the cruel twists, for the inevitbality of time, but most of all for the crushing of a soul whose worth cannot be measured.

Audrey Howitt aka Divalounger said...

I am taken by the chaff in the corners and by the chaff of the life lived--consuming and then tossing an object, a person, oneself, aside--

such an effective piece of writing--

Timoteo said...

You are not just the poet. You are the poem.

Pat Hatt said...

This was a tough read, you really brought the terrible acts to life.

Brian Miller said...

time catches us all...and in it the remeberance of all that has come before...the turning to not getting hurt or not opening again to it makes me sad a bit...as if we are giving in....

Unknown said...

I don't know who told you that you needed psychotherapy but they are wrong about the role that poetry in a person's life. This prose poem reveals someone with both imagination and deep awareness of themselves and how life has molds its imprint into out bodies, our psyches, our selves, whatever the latter might be. I do sadness here, anger, but not resentment. I see intelliegence grappling with what life has dealt it and making a song, not so much of lament as of a map of territory explored, boundaries seen and crossed, new frontiers ahead.

Beachanny said...

I always find a part of me if not all of me lurking in the corners of your poems. Usually the part I keep covered in dust, something only you can make poetic, something I think needs trashing, but as you state here even though it's something small like some mardigras beads that someone tossed me at the end of one sunny St. Pat's, I keep them thinking to give them, wear them, use them another sunny day. This poem speaks of spring and the American spring which politically speaking is feeling repressive. Thank you for the freshness of your words.