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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, October 16, 2012

New Poem: Russet-red On White, for DVerse and Beyond




Russet-red on White

Every month I would swell and ache.
The seedling would make its way
down the river in my belly
to the vine-damp gate.  My heart would 
extend a witching stick, a willow limb
whittled down with a point to make,
sending audacious inquiries into the night.

This body became a cave with an embered
hearth. The globes of my breast would fill
with moonlight, the hunger in me
dropping to all fours, calling out
in a sea of sweat.

Once sated, the angel of the mind sang.
My hands went wandering for skeins of wool;
out in the fields of spring the mares’
milk came in, the blood-bag burst
and foals arose from the grass
on trembling and spindled legs.

Once the moon waned, and passion’s furnace
cooled, how I had tilted myself
to a lover’s urgency,
urging the life milk on to reach
what this could be in time,

the storm of famine
would abate and garnet drops
of blood tell the story
of the heart leaching absence.

A womb in mourning drags the will
down spare furrows:
I thought now and then I could see
something infinitesimal with a tiny
tail, tadpole, a seahorse shape
in the russet-red on white.

ii

Once the bleeding didn’t come;
the moon waned and I made wax
at the nipple-tips, yearned and slept; 
a test showed a one-ring Saturn,
an eye at the bottom of the tube.

I did all I could to keep her there,
in the spongy hollow where I would
feed her as she grew;  I sang out
names, drank milk, brushed my hair,
walked the lawn’s length by starlight.

The night I bled her out of me
sweating and fevered, I thought
of my grandmother,
her petticoats pulled around her hips
her bodice restraining her breasts,
taking in my grandfather’s seed
with the oil lamp trimmed,
each time carrying until the infant
shot forth into swaddling and her arms.

My zygote, my archangel child--
had I not shed you again and again,
I would have suckled you
beneath the Pleiades;
I would have kept you close,
away from the dark songs
life sings, all peril and ruthless lack.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

9 comments:

Maureen said...

Strong imagery that heightens the deep and pervasive sense of loss.

"My heart would extend / a witching stick..." carries so much meaning here.

Unknown said...

I have known intimately the longing for a child and the desire to protect her from 'dark songs'. Your poem is gorgeous, true, courageous, and I admire its conception and birth.

Tashtoo said...

Oh my...you leave this reader with goosebumps and a crying heart...I was glued to every word...and did not realize I was holding my breath until your finish...this was amazing

Victoria said...

This is so replete with both sensuality and sadness. You plumb the depths of longing and barreness. I stand in awe.

Brian Miller said...

gosh jenne, this is so sad...i have had friends that tried and tried and without...each time, its so painful...

Unknown said...

Strong, forceful, intense, mournful. I am sorry.

PattiKen said...

You've written so much pain and loss into this. It leaves me saddened.

Anonymous said...

Terribly sad and beautiful poem as all have said. It really is very moving. The imagery strong - supple fervid fertile rich and then this terrible sadness and loss. Very well done as poem, but so sad. k.

Claudia said...

wow jenne, this is a powerful and intense write with gorgeous imagery