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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.

Monday, October 26, 2015

New Poem for Magpie Tales.....


photo by Daniel Murtagh






Pasodoble, 1979

Unlike other moments of transport
I remember that day exactly.
After the drought between us
he had flown in; so much time
had passed, I could not still
my leaping heart.

I had taken over my parents’ house
after my father’s death.
I had inhabited their room
sifting through mother’s jewelry
for some time,
drinking the cold white wine
of summer,

erasing the bad years,
the disarray of cigarette-burned
furniture and floors,
all the chaos two drowning people
leave behind
when death comes,  circumspect
as the mail carrier—

Suddenly Father was gone and Mother
wouldn’t speak;
she was face down on her bed
in the Golden West,
where broken people are deposited
like a check to a teller
to be fed and dressed
and wheeled in to the lounge,
parked under a donated
clock with slow hands.

That day my lover
stood in the doorway,
his brown eyes dancing;
he was my height, not tall,
with a dazzling smile
that made you think
of Caribbean beach fires…
His English was lyrical,
assonant with  Spanish.

I wore a new peach peignoir,
my hair down. 
When he stepped toward me
there was no stopping it—the wet
deep kisses, his hands deftly
sliding the gown from my shoulders
until it pooled on the floor
like a wilted orchid
someone had forgotten
to place in a vase of cut glass
that could refract its pale luster.  

Then, kisses and whisperings,
 the beautiful clench
of mutuality, how we had taught
each other the horizontal
Pasodoble—
I, pulling him into me
with those deepest muscles,
he, surging, his fingers
massaging the hot opalescent
pearl-slick node there, 
with its long sensate petals,

So that I pulsed, and pulled him
down into the hungry fathoms
of my womanhood--
clenched, and burned;
my heart fracturing
at the beauty and glory of it.

We two lay awash and weeping
in that stillness
of absence and summer;
He said he was in love with me,
and I said I wanted to carry
his child.

Years later I sent a letter
in Spanish in care of a church
listing his name among its congregants
telling him I regretted my hurts,
had forgotten nothing between us.
Of course that good fellow the pastor
passed it on to his wife
who sent a curt greeting to me
and said she had given it to him;
that he had read it, lifting one eyebrow,
saying nothing.

How I wanted to open the floodgates,
Somehow revive the past.
Not long after she wrote again,
saying that he had died,
heart giving out at eighty-three,
refusing oxygen.

I wondered what had happened
to me in multiple
collisions with other men
over the years, a hardening
of the heart that had given him
so much lyrical tenderness. 

When the news came
I lay down on my rumpled bed;
in afternoon light; our old rapture
poured over me;
his semblance kissed the small
of my back;
I whispered, “Gracias a la vida
che mi ha dado tanto; *
my grey hair spread around me,
a field without flowers.


*Gracias a la vida che mi ha dado tanto = Thank you life, for giving me so much."

6 comments:

Bekkie Sanchez said...

That was so lovely! I am "that age" where my gray hair spreads out around me. It's a real mind fuck.

Tess Kincaid said...

Delicious write...and oh! that last line. Always fun to see you at Magpie, Jenne...

brudberg said...

You had me close to tears reading this.. what a story of passion and loss, really a piece of art.

Kutamun said...

Oh but it seems as though the flowers are most certainly within

The Blog of Bee said...

I have just been blown away. Such a story in so few words.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Three years too late, so grateful for these comments. Much has transpired since then and I write most recently in love's vernacular....yet again. xxxj