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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, September 16, 2014

They Know All, the Stars/ Sanno Tutto Le Stelle by the Italian Poet Maria Esposito




Immagine di Maria Esposito

Caro Amici:  questa nel Italiano e sotto.  It is with great pleasure that I post what will surely not be the first of guest poems by an Italian "poetessa," with my humble effort at a translation into English beneath it.

I had no idea there were a number of gifted Italian women poets--throughout mainland Italy and especially, on Sicily, in the spectacular communities of like-minded people on that storm-tossed island that has been home to the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, the Spanish, the Arabs-- multiple bel epochs,  each leaving its spectrum of influences.

I gladly offer the opportunity to the reader to try his or her own hand at a better translation, one that brings forth more of the intense lyrical mysticism that pervades this poem.  Please note that there is a translation link on the sidebar where you can insert as much as a stanza at a time to compare my translation to your own or others'.

Without further ado, a beautiful poem by Maria Esposito.  Thank you, beautiful Maria!
. . . . . . . . . .
È con grande piacere che vi do la che sicuramente non sarà il primo di poesie di un Italiano "poetessa", con il mio umile sforzo di una traduzione in inglese sotto di essa.

Non avevo la idea che fosse un numero di  poeti dotti Italiani chi anche sono donne--in tutta l'Italia continentale e, in particolare, in Sicilia, nella spettacolare comunità di persone che la pensano in quella  isola bellezza che è stata la casa per i Greci, i Romani, i Normanni,  gli Arabi-- più bel epoche, ogni lasciando il suo spettro di influenze.

Sono lieto di potervi offrire la possibilità al lettore di provare la propria mano in una migliore traduzione, quello che porta via più intensa misticismo lirica che caratterizza  questa poesia. mysticism

Senza piu de mi , una bella poesia di Maria Esposito. Grazie, bella Maria! Si prega di notare che c'è un collegamento di traduzione sulla barra laterale dove è possibile inserire quanto una stanza in un momento di confrontare la mia traduzione al proprio o altri".

Sanno Tutto Le Stelle

Sanno tutto le stelle
Sanno tutto loro...
Come indicarci con esattezza
le attese o imparare a maneggiare
il niente.
Come scavare nelle speranze
e andare avanti.
Sanno tutto le stelle
come raccogliere le ore
ed essere fedele ai segreti
a come amare con grazia
e senza egoismo o come
attendere il destino oppure
inventarselo.
Sanno tutto le stelle
finché restano somposte e
sparse nel cielo per la gioia di Dio
e sanno anche a come sognare
un immortalità ma che
non sia ben ancorata alla terra
quell'ordine scandito
che veglia come un guardiano
le sorti degl'uomini dall'universo.

They know all the stars

They know all, the stars.
They know all.
How to tell us in exactitude
our suppositions or how to manage
nothingness.
How to excavate our longing
and how to keep on.

They know all, the stars
how to collect the hours
and be faithful to their secrets;
how to love with gratitude
and without egotism;
how to attend to fate
or invent it into being.

They know it all, the stars,
how to remain affixed yet scattered
to the delight of God

and they also know how to dream
in an immortality
that is unanchored to the earth--
that order set forth
that watches like a guardian,
over humanity's fate in the universe..

Maria Esposito, Napolitana - translation, Jenne' R. Andrews, M.F.A.


Image provided by Maria Esposito

Forthcoming: poetry from the masterful Siciliana/Termitana Rita Elia, Rosalba di Vona, Prof. Santina Cundari, "Alla Pescatora" of beautiful Scilla, Italia, and others...
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