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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, July 31, 2012

Poem: Assignment, Posting for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond....

 
Assignment

“Let’s draw your pain together; that should help.” 
--An anonymous  psychologist.

They said that healing trauma begins with the book
of trauma.  That she should draw the horse being

kicked against the shed that went down on her knees,
the foal stuck.  She drew this in the dust, with her fists,

her mouth full of ruin.  But healing is about cloud cover
ever-moving away from the sun, away.  She would not

draw the cars bearing down on her cat,  nor would she
draw a cartoon bubble for her screams that day. That

the cat had been trying to reach them and kept running
until the second car, that she put her small hands over

her brother’s eyes when its back legs were crushed.   
She would not draw the shape of a broken mother,

that she was a one woman ambulance for all the years. 
She could not.  She could not sing or write of it because

her hands would burn, her mouth bleed. She could not
say how it was that day to find the great dog in a pool

of  blood from the stitched pouch in his stomach,
where they took out the shards of fiberglass fence.

She would sing of the barn swallows because that is
tolerable but she would not sing of the fallen great dog

she loved called Fanfare. She would not write of the day
she foolishly sliced into her own wrists; she feels

like a fuel about to ignite when she thinks of it. She does
not like this assignment. We are out of crayons here.  I

need some of that milk, in the small carton with a straw. 
I remember the slipping of the cool milk down my throat,

where I hid under the kindergarten coats.  I remember. 
That is the problem.  If you can’t bake a cake of amnesia

and give it to me, I won’t cooperate.  I am the charter
 uncooperator; I refuse for a living.  Life has withheld

its golden fleeces from me and I withhold myself from it. 
Perhaps a cup of latte di mandorla then.  Perhaps a chat

with the young Eva Braun on the hillside when I was
innocent of what a man was. She remembers innocence,

and that is the problem.  She cannot remember angels. 
She remembers Oz, and her companion Quiberon, in

the emerald waters on the emerald day, the jade city
in the distance. She remembers the Von Trapp family

and the edelweiss-covered hills.  She saw the Allied
planes swoop through the Brenner pass, targeting

Allemagne.  She is Charlemagne, on a bay stallion
in the wind.  She is not her trauma.  She is not the dark

although she loves the dark and wears it as a cloak,
or turns it inside out to shake out its light. She loves

the vibrant starlight.  What touches seared skin
more tenderly than the light of the stars. 







 xx


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

9 comments:

Maureen said...

Reading this poem, I can't help but think of Muriel Rukeyser's statement, "I do believe that the forces in us wish to share something of our experience by turning it into something and giving it to somebody: that is poetry. That is some kind of saving thing, and as far as my life is concerned, poetry has saved me again and again."

The images seem to explode from every couplet, they are so vivid and see-able, imaginable and felt. And just when we think their power is exhausted, when we think we could feel or take no more, we come to those final wonderful lines that restore it all: "... She loves// the vibrant starlight. What touches seared skin/ more tenderly than the light of the stars." Hope still rests deep.

Brian Miller said...

this made me so sad jen...the golden fleeces withheld...and If you can’t bake a cake of amnesia


and give it to me, I won’t cooperate...i have known kids like that of the ones i worked with...so much they have taken on...all too real to me...

Anonymous said...

Oh I liked this.... To draw ones pain....and you painted such a picture here....full of melancholy....but from a perspective of the child (crayons) and the adult viewer - very clever, poignant and thought provoking

Maude Lynn said...

This is so powerful it shook me.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

so moved by your comments. I hope that the third person with the monologue in the child's voice works-- couldn't post it until I made those changes. Also still learning the art of couplet-making and find this form extremely liberating, forcing the poem to cascade down the page without making an issue of the form...thank you for your sustaining words-- in your own wonderful work, and in response to mine. love, j

Manicddaily said...

Yes, a very sad and powerful poem. Such an interesting mixture of child and adult, and adult mourning child, and child trying to salvage herself, as we all do and are. Very vivid images and progression and such an interesting mix of allusions too, from Eva Braun to Von Trapps, though of course, similarities too.

I stumbled a bit over the last line - which is beautiful, but I wasn't sure whether to read it as a question. I don't think it's exactly a continuation of the thought before, though that refers to starlight.

I am someone who gets stuck on punctuation but I wonder do you mean it as a question - what touches seared skin more tenderly than the light of stars? Is it too obvious to have question mark? I don't know - this was a stumbling point for me - but again, I am a very literal reader.

Wonderful poem. k.

Semaphore said...

With every image that she refuses to draw, with every memory indelible in her heart, you pull the knot of pain ever tighter until we cannot move, held tight in the bonds of your words... and then that inward flight, leading to a blissful relief from all that memory. As ever, masterful.

ayala said...

A sad and powerful write.

Laura said...

"If you can’t bake a cake of amnesia

and give it to me, I won’t cooperate." I can taste the strength and depth of this pain.