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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 29, 2012

Poem: Paraffin, Posting for DVerse Poets and Beyond...

 To participate in the weekly DVerse Poets Pub meme, click here.  
Feel free to check out my poem A Rumor of Uranium, first antiwar poem I've written in many years.  xj 


Eva Braun as a Young Girl

 
Paraffin

We are troubled that our cheap candles burn down
so quickly.  There are many lamps in the house
but we for sometime now have preferred candlelight 

not one side of your face light, one dark. Then we both
go dark and it is too hard.  I need at least to see your
outline, that of the window and the cats lumped

and dreaming on the bookcase.  Old love should make
a spontaneous flame between us or kindle us within
but it cannot.  Finally you dig out the red buffalo

kitsch candle from twenty years back, Sears in Boulder,
when we ran a horse ranch together, rarely slept
fought in sandstorms and I watched you on the green

tractor off in the distance.  On match-flare then I see
what is temporal:  Easter night. Our hands, knotted. 
the years in such velocity the breath catches when

we speak of it.  The buffalo has been behind glass for decades
and now within minutes is sway-backed, a flame wavering
in its shoulder.  I tell of you of the auburn bison that came

in spring, dotting the fields on the hill overlooking
the alabaster Never Summer Range. And of the wings in the dark
rising up in front of the truck on the dirt lane.  And of the mule deer

in the front yard in the heart of town. Now we are reminded
of the demands around us, the yellow cats, the dogs.  You
pull formula for the lagging kitten into the eye dropper. 

I had thought to hover here, in the darkness of my old room,
but abruptly evening wicks down to midnight—so it is 
that you were there, I was and then the verging tide

of half-lit tallow, the final minutes of our imperiled
choreography, when we are wax defectors
from a Russian ballet poised on the sea-cliff’s edge.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 

10 comments:

Maureen said...

Wonderful image of the buffalo-styled candle burning down, becoming sway-backed (I think of burdens here, what gets carried into the future, leaving us with memory, half-worked possibilities, what's pressed into darkness but not forgotten).

Beachanny said...

Juxtaposition of the American West, rugged and working, beauty on the large scale juxtaposed with the delicacy and perfection of Russian ballet - one has the sense of the candle in the china cabinet resting next to the delicate bone china. Beauty here take a spectrum of forms.
Well writ!

ayala said...

A nice capture with some lovely lines!

Anonymous said...

Lovely! I especially like the last line.

Anonymous said...

Yes - a great choice of image - easy to relate to but vivid, and the evening wicking to midnight - beautiful description of how it in fact works. k.

Tashtoo said...

Absolutely stunning write! It's been sometime since I've visited, and I should be ashamed of myself. The easy voice of your pen allows me to fall into this time, this place...I should be so lucky as to write like this.

Charles Elliott/Beautyseer said...

This is lovely, and at the same time poignant. The sense of things relegated to the past, of decades spent together, of candles burning down too fast -- as life itself does. The image of the swaybacked buffalo candle!

One wonders whether if candelight is really preference or a need for economy that motivates the candlelight, but even sadness on inadequate Social Security looks better in candleglow. Enjoyed this!

Louise said...

Beautiful language and images you use here...a joy to read :)

Jessica said...

There is really beautiful narrative here! Reads lovely.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks to all-- deeply appreciated; we who write in isolation cannot know what chord we strike unless we put the work out there... have not been all that sure of this poem but thanks very much! I am slow to make the round these days but do eventually...xxxj