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, August 31, 2014

Poesia Nuova-- Meditazioni del Giorno, trans. Signore Marco Giuffrida, Vicenza, Italia

DAY GATHERING

MEDITAZIONI DEL GIORNO

Mezzanotte, primi di agosto
ed è tempo di riordinare le Cose,
lavori delle mani, creazioni della Mente.

Per portare la giornata al seno
come fiori piegati
o morbido tessuto fresco di bucato,
è l’unione di piccoli oggetti
con altri della stessa specie.
Sale con il miele. Gusci d’uovo
con i fondi del caffè,
scorze d’arancia e frammenti d’osso.

Poi, alla Chiusa il corpo chino,
a togliere il sudore rappreso
per il pomeriggio febbrile,
così come le piogge hanno donato
il verde, con generosità,
ai giardini nella fine estate.

**

E’ l’ora
di piccole verifiche:
come la casa sembra apparire
in fondo al viale
fiancheggiato da pioppi ricurvi
o come il vecchio canile, all’ombra,
ora vuoto,
senza le ultime dorate cucciolate,
o per il crescere di teneri alberi
che coprono la vista del torrente
che circonda la casa
al pari di una folla di Gheise
coperte da fruscianti manti
di seta verde,
la stessa casa in una cauta serenità
si abbandona, dondolandosi e chinandosi,
alla pioggia e all’umidità,
verso la Terra.

**

Si fa davvero poco
per mettere ordine,
ed anch’io a mezzanotte, adagio,
mi abbandono  all’interiorità,
Donna sola,
chinandomi e riflettendomi
nella Danza delle Nutrici.
Ancestrali paure dell’Esistere
mi afferrano per un braccio
trascinandomi semincosciente
verso compiti più semplici,
forgiando un’alleanza
fra un’ora e la successiva,
tra il consumato per il piallato delle tavole
della panca dove noi ci sediamo,
nella ciotola cobalto del tramonto;
e come i deboli venti grigi del Tempo
noi rendiamo le cose lisce come cote,
cuscino fra noi e quel Paese lontano,
al di là del Miraggio,
di verdi campi infiniti.

Jenne' R. Andrews, trans.  Marco Giuffrida

Inglese:

Day-Gathering

Midnight, early August
and it is time
for the centering of things,
hands’ work, mind’s drift.

To gather the day to the breast
like the folding of flowers,
the soft fabric of the laundry,
the reuniting of small objects
with others of their kind.
Salt to honey.  Eggshells
unto coffee grounds,
orange rind and wishbone.

Then, to sluice the body down,
rinse away the dried sweat
of the fevered afternoon,
how the rains have imparted
a green generosity
to the late summer garden.

ii

It is the hour
of small recognitions:
how the house seems ever
appearing, at the end of the long
lane flanked by leaning
poplars, how the old kennel,
barren now of gilded litters
in shaded runs,
belongs to the overgrowth--

of advancing leggy trees, each year
coming in closer from the creek,
encircling the house like a throng
of geishas in rustling green silk,
house itself in a circumspect quietude,
yielding to the rain and damp,
rocking back against the earth.

iii

Little truly gives itself
to the making of order,
but even as I freefall inward
in midnight adagio--
woman alone,
bending and reflecting
in the nurturer’s dance,
old fears at existence
pulling at my arm,

this half-conscious way of giving oneself
to plain tasks forges an alliance
between one hour and the next,

between the wearing away of the hand-planed
boards of the deck where we sit
in a cobalt bowl of twilight--

and how the low grey winds of time
hone us like whetstone,
bearing us on toward that far country
beyond the mirage
of infinitely green fields.


Jenne' R. Andrews  August 2014


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