La Parola Vivace: jenne andrews poetry

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.

Showing posts with label jenne andrews poetry. Show all posts

Thursday, January 5, 2012

New Poem in Draft

Fathom It

I once lived out in the open air

So wholly in the moment at

the barn’s redolent mouth,

Braiding my horse’s mane

Riding out, little dog trotting after us

Tethering the mare to the sapling

Slipping out of my clothing into the water

Back aboard and flying then home

At a dead gallop

Never have I been as at home in the world

As on a horse’s back

Or standing with her under the moon

Where she nuzzled me.

Now I live in a circle of rooms

The light invades. It breaks in

Like an intruder, making me look

At what I cannot do:

I lurch, one leg

Three inches shorter than the other.

I drag myself

From kitchen to my bed.

But tonight

After the light goes back into hiding

I will bear myself to my truck

To fly down the black roads

Of midnight

Anything…. To each day say

I have something here

I went panning for a nugget

Of truth and insistence

That I still inhabit the world

And this little aphoristic nub scrolled

within my hand is the proof.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Revision, Exile, posting for DVerse Poetics

Tera Zajack, Coming Home

A few quick notes: I was astounded by this image, because it looks so much like the seacliff village Scylla where I would give my good leg to live the expat life where Homer himself was so taken with the beauty of the Strait of Messina that it inspired the Odyssey!

In 1973 I was staked to a trip to Europe, met a southern Italian man in Verona and took a train down the coast of Italy alone to rendezvous with him..We took a day trip to Scylla and I lost my heart to the villas built into the cliffs. Clearly no poet could have asked for more inspiration than that experience. Moreover, vis a vis the image I selected today, the night before my train left my artist friend Julia Marshall painted me in a moon-balloon in a basket floating down the coast, being greeted by a little family. It was all very much like that, and this amazing piece resonates with me in all of these ways. One of my poems follows. My memoir of this experience is posted in its entirety: Nightfall in Verona .

Exile

Now I am in Rapallo, the boats tied

at the dock. My hair is dark again and I

climb from the skiff and stride along past

the mustard-colored villas. I sit at a table

back in the redolent shade where roses

embellish the blurred frescoes of war.

An old woman comes by, dragging sacks

of baguettes behind her in a cart. I buy a loaf

and lean it on the other chair, il dolce pane

and I together in the shade, the glittering

red geraniums in the window box. It is afternoon

but I write a chanson du matin, a morning psalm,

on a stained piece of paper, tucking it into

my pocket. Somewhere out there coming from

a long distance, the mariner. Within, the swan,

capable, strong, wide-winged and armed

for the distance.This is what I am,

not someone on the lam with

a bad leg and a crook in her back, few

years left with which to write more entreaties

to the moon, the sun, the stars.

Now the swan spreads her shining twin

rivers and rises, gliding off on the oceanic

currents, tears from the burning air streaming

back from her black mask. She flaps and glides,

settling herself then at the calling buoy, waiting

for all who come for the bread of love

rowing in from the lavender dark.

from my collection of Italy/opera inspired poems, The Listener's Delirium.

To participate in DVerse Poet's Pub myriad of weekly activities, click here.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

New Poem: The Wide Hands of the Wild, for DVerse OLN and Beyond

In my insomnia-related ennui last weekend I missed out on Mark Kerstetter's fabulous challenge to write "of the Wild." Hence, this poem, for DVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night... zj

The Arab Tent 1866 Sir Edward Henry

The Wide Hands of the Wild

The heart wishes to return to the wild

the Open

the Eden of not knowing so many

painful things.

The hurts of love, how something

you’ve nourished complains

in your hand as its pulse flickers.

The fruitful, violent anarchies of

the wilderness:

displaced wolves trotting through

the snow curtain,

penetrating it with

the lamps of their eyes.

But what untamed thing lives within? And what

is our means

of feeding our own souls?

I took a train down the coast of

another country

I gave a horse her head and let her

race along the railroad track

I let the animate one inside me out

To dance, laugh, make love

My white flesh spread over

the jubilant lover who

whispered his encouragement

His mouth like a searching

infant’s at my breast.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

A New Poem: Advances of the Sandman, Posted for DVerse OLN

The Advances of the Sandman

It is 4 a.m. and there in the living room

where I come through to get the dog from her crate

is my wheelchair like a dark stork folded into itself

and on the back a sign: Welcome to Your 63^rd Year.

I had forgotten, in the haze of half-consciousness
the chair was there or even how the singing refrigerator,

loaded with provisions, waits to fortify a body

imperiled merely limping the corridor from bedroom

To kitchen. In fact, I know little in this moment—only

that I have yet again rejected the advances

of the sandman and the neighbors slumber on

in their cloisters all around me, self-pleased

Like angels rewarded for good behavior.

How rich a torment, to prod oneself awake again

and again, just as the body veers downward

into deepening canyons of relief.

Each time, even as I let go, troubled past selves

abandon their telephone pole crosses like the ghosts

of Calvary, sail over my head speaking in tongues,

and deep within someone murmurs I want

To go home. We are home, I say to my own

voice, sipping cold water, parting the curtain.

Far off, a low-moaning Union Pacific comes in

like a garrison of tramping elephants, trunk

Hooked to tail, pleased by the fury of

their own cries, one car loaded with

dream-heavy calves from Montana.

Now it comes back that a few hours ago

I saw the flashing sign up: detour here; take not

the back roads that ease your fear of night

with their newly-oiled smoothness. Has the hour

come down now through the glass? Is there now

A cooling desert to walk through by fading

moonlight? Did I forget to drink the darkness

someone mixed for me and made to taste like nectar?

Shortly the first bells will ring out for Mass

Down at the corner, from the belfry

in the listing St. Joseph’s spire and the supplicants

will walk in, sleepers waking blessed,

remunerated with energy

And day’s blind eye will open. I summon

my dog; she takes a toy in her mouth and we
go in once more to the room where the blizzard

of my anguish wore itself to a thin sorrow.

I lumber again into the pale seas of the bed

among the five-dollar pillows.

Did I ask to carry the songs of the damned

beneath my eyelids? I cannot remember. I say

To the wounds of yearning, red and billowing

around me like the coal-furnace mouths

of district attorneys

Yes, I am prepared to confess, to tell you

Everything: I crave oblivion like oxygen

a few hours of it, if it pleases the Court

and satisfies the demands of the people:

I need it to stay alive.

Join a number of very fine poets for Dverse Open Link night.

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