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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, May 8, 2012

New Poem, Volley, Revised, for DVerse Open Link Night

To participate in the Dverse Poets Pub Tuesday meme, click here.





Volley

Van Gogh wakes in the grave, leaning into a green
cemetery silence, listening with the tuning fork

filaments of his residual ear. Insomniac ghost, he sees
everyone running, whispering  “Je ne sais quoi!”

into the dark.  He billows off, the hem of his shroud
trailing in the bend of the voluble Seine, looking up

to see a luminous ball on the tip of the Eiffel Tower:
great sentinel moon rebuking all of Paris. Now Sartre

and Toulouse-Lautrec gather at the foot; it takes all three
of them, Van Gogh calling the plays, their white wrists

extended, to spike the ball loose; in unguarded awe
they watch it make its way east through molten skies.

ii

In St. Petersburg, something tugs at a Dostoyevsky long
entombed within piling snow and dreams of forbidden love.

He finds himself in his dark carriage, driver lashing
a lathered team through the frigid and dormant city

where, like the face of a vagrant revolutionary, the great
moon floats above the Winter Palace. He summons

the Brothers Karamazov from their peripheral graves; once
more, a determined volley, and opalescent and immense,

broken from its orbit, the moon travels on west, through one
time zone then another, over alpine ridges to Verona.

Iii

On the redolent piazza, dreaming in his mantle of forlorn
pigeons, the Carrera Dante notices an ascendant

luna errante over the square. All Veronese lamplight
is abruptly quenched in deference. Sitting at a sidewalk

bistro table after hours, one expat had been saying
to another, “… but St. Thomas touched the stranger’s

wounds-- explain that away,” and the other person
could not, except to say  “We see what we yearn to see—

look:  Dante himself comes unto us now, broken from
stone, holding a wayfaring moon by a filigreed strand.”



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

9 comments:

aprille said...

Amazing slant on things, such an original concept, having them all rise all over Europe under th same moonshine.
I will come back to reread.

Brian Miller said...

ha...this is fanciful in all the dead playign a bit of volley ball with the moon...very interesting final stanza though in dante turning it more ballon...and the questions of the Christ...interesting...a very enjoyable piece jenne...

poemblaze said...

Would love to hear any of these masters. Thanks for bringing them to us via the moon.

Anonymous said...

An inspiring lunar trip through time, art and faith. Painted with a brush specially made with those filigreed strands just for you. Beautiful.

chris said...

A complex read with a lot going on. Great ending.

ayala said...

An inspiring and interesting write !
I enjoyed it :)

Kerry O'Connor said...

Hands down, I think you are the best poet on the blogs - and I fervently hope that this is not your only forum.

Mystic_Mom said...

That is such an interesting idea, to have them all come back! Well done!

Al_One said...

That moon was tugging at my brain, that's for sure.