La Parola Vivace: jenne andrews lyric 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 lyric poetry. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

New Poem: Errata-- posting for DVerse Poets Open Link Night and Beyond...

this is the poem for 50th DVerse OLN-- thanks to Brian for fixing it up. xj

Errata

I understand the kind of mistake

that led to the fire, seeing a plume of smoke

via a binocular sighting, pushing it back, saying

It can’t be that. It must be someone

cooking on a griddle over mesquite

chips at dawn

up in the back country timber.

I have made the same kind of mistake

at night, nodding off in my chair

taking the extra Vicodin

I don’t need. Just now I startled

awake, the remote flying from my hand;

I didn’t know who I was, the fan behind me

pulling in smoky air from the charring of the hills
to the northwest.

I wanted to go home. To the green acreage

on the edge of town, to hear

the comforting sound of the animals

breathing, to know that someone

I love was nearby, merely across the house.

But instead I lay in the dark alone

calming myself, running my tongue

over the pain and rot

in my mouth where I haven’t been able

to surrender to the excision

of my teeth, part and parcel of me; mouthful

of porcelain what it costs, this nightly

opioid eucharist,

like saying there isn’t a fire

when it is evident:

an unattended smoldering plume

always becomes a conflagration.

Now, the wholesale absence

of the familiar, teeth gone,

years lost. Aching for home

when home burns.

In the near hills-- not enough

time or water, but plentiful

tear stains on the libretto,

errata in the manuscript.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

New Poem: Nomad, for Magpie Tales and Beyond...

To join Tess Kincaid's Magpie Tales meme click here....

Image: Manu Prombol

Nomad

My first instinct, when I see that you

are once more immersed in reading

Lonesome Dove for the tenth time,

is to call you to me.

Live, don’t read, I say;

don’t run away from me into that

long and winding story.

Then I remember the years

alone in my bell jar bedroom,

where the hard-bound frontier

sagas were thick oak doors,

their pages a sheaf of jailer's keys;

that I could bandage my wounds, slip out

to the patio,

throw my great-grandfather's Calvary saddle

over the adobe wall and race then

toward the pinon smoke scenting

the indigo distance—

Apache campfire, braves drumming home

a prodigal rider.

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Posting for DVerse Poetics ...Reworking of Myth/Fairy Tale....

A Myth Profaned

The priest’s pallid hands hover over consecrated

Bread. Vested in white flame

Candles flare in the dark nave.

I take God upon my tongue, take Him in

The Puer Aeternis, divine boy, sacred journeyman--

His very body.

I meditate upon this one on the crucifix, reading

Ecce Homo; Behold, the Man.

I kneel and take the cup to my lips--

Consecrated blood, the blood

A yearning for homecoming sheds

Within the soul.

So was I seduced, appropriated,

My girl’s heart won over, my own voice

chanting Credo in Unum Deum, ascending

With the Ave Maria,

Petitioner for mercy.

But Divine Figure—

It is too mortal here in the thorny gardens;

It is all profaned

By the father who binds his girl child to him

In the long and weeping night,

The mothers who turn upon their children,

The dispossessed, who starve in the desert.

I cast myself upon

the ground, for this, penitent:

I return your sackcloth and your ashes,

Your Good Friday and the allegory

Of your rising,

And lay them at your feet. Clearly

Like deer running blind from a forest fire

it falls to us

to free ourselves

from every shroud of barbed wire.

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

New Poem: Intermezzo, Posted for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond...

Photo, from the Mosorrofa archive shared courtesy of Alessandro Niccolo...

Intermezzo

..e a parlare d'amore mi sforza

un desio ch'io non posso spegiar.

...to talk of love fills me

with a desire I can't explain.

Cherubino, La Nozze di Figaro

I remember walking with Giuseppe

through the streets of Rome, how

he put his hand on my arm,

quietly and proudly stating:

We are a people of scientifici,

artisti, filosofi.

Ma che memoria crudele—unkind

remembrance:

we stood before Vivaldi in the wax museum;

Pepe said we should cast our embrace

in paraffin.

Fountains sang all around us,

sunlight bathed the peeling walls

of villa on villa.

We passed two mute lovers at a table,

their gelato melting, and he said to me

“Due morti,” – two dead ones.

So much tenderness and sorrow

in his eyes that day,

my departure a week away.

But we trekked on, as I thought

I should drink the last Valpolicella

of the Roman evening.

until only shadows tinted

my chalice.

Today a photo falls into my hands

of Calabrese before the war

gathered in the stone-paved street

cut into the dark hills

of the Aspromonte,

on the Festa of San Dimetrio.

Those dark eyes, dark hair,

sepia multitude dreaming

of loaves and fishes--

supplicants of fading light.

I remembered the photo in the train station

that captured l' ultimo baccio—our final kiss,

now lost to me in a move.

I can still conjure his face

but how ancient those hours feel now,

like a Pompeian fresco time

relentlessly abrades—

Our lovemaking that night to Mozart,

the rain of tears in its key

of parting, staccato coda

on the terracotta roof.

to see more of these amazing photos click here... xj

draft

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

New Poem: Reckoning in Winter, Posted for DVerse OLN and Beyond....

Reckoning in Winter

We are whittled down now

like worn kindling sticks:

Oh spent coals.

We two, so once voluble

laughing and connected

in a dance we can’t acknowledge--

disentangling now our very limbs

Like the triplet goats I saved

reaching in to match legs

to heads.

You read the barometer:

Snow is not to fly today

but in my Colorado bones

I hear it coming

As do the crows, omniscient

and everywhere,

their heads cocked,

their sequin eyes burning.

We two. Have begun

our way down diverging roads

the thick and snow-packed trails

of winter

one cold tributary beckoning me

one carrying you out of sight.

What will I do

when I can’t see you anymore,

or discern your shape

in your coveralls

out in the snows of amnesia,

Bucking the bales,

breaking the ice.

iii

We can’t put this need down

like we did our two old mares

whose eyes sparked with gratitude

as they fell.

Oh fear of love. Dearth.

How the Cheval d’Or nearby
penned all day in the barn

looks out at the world

Turning away from the calling stretch

of the dormant pasture

that has pierced his side like
a Cheyenne arrow

with the yearning to run.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

New Prose Poem: Psalm of the Shadow for DVerse OLN and Beyond...

Revised...

Tropea di Isola Calabria

After Listening to a Requiem in February

In rooms overrun with

chimerical skeins of dust

the heart and soul lift off

on spangled currents

of morning.

What great loneliness it requires then,

what an expanse, polar,

with its blue tinge of death

To release even one note of such music

as a great mass’s Rex Coelestis

dark birds calling and ascendant, one body,

from the splintered tree.

Rising February wind,

Union Pacific sounding a call longer

than night

Daylight and memory are the afflictions.

The ablative absolute of language—

Spreading their wings, they were aloft--

salves the soul.

But how unredeemed we are!

The warring in the desert

where the Great Spring is asunder:

the soldier’s foot on the corpse

of a girl.

Iii

Perhaps long ago

we should have migrated

to another stone warmed

by a different star;

For it is the matriarch arctic penguin

leaving the egg on the feet

of her mate

Who swims off, to feed,

cascade of mothers taking

to the frigid water

in a clamor of agreement:

‘E vivere: it is to live: and to gorge:

‘E mangiare!

And then in a mandela of feathers

the fathers, eggs tucked under their bellies

turn their bodies to the storm,

one and then the next on the outer rim

cycling back into the pulsing thicket

Of the flock:

Look what they have to teach us!

iii

Even so, the matriarch elephant

leads her family over the savannah

in the drought;

she weeps over the fallen calf

her tears rivulets in the cross-hatched

leather

Of the one who discerns

the precise location of the spent marsh,

the thorny stubble that bruises the mouth.

And behold the snow leopard,

the hours it takes her

to drag her kill up the sheer cliffs of Everest

back to the lair where her survivor cub

languishes in hunger:

they ravish the meat, their blood rewarming

in an instant.

What has become of our will,

when we were a people, working one

for the other--

What do I leave at your feet?

What of your hunger aggrieves me?

We are the leaves of the oak tree

with its roots embedded in fathoms

of dark mud:

indelibly mortal, quick to bud, open,

drink in the sun and dying back,

surrender.

We do not want to leave the ornate rooms

of the grand estate where

the imagination roams, corseted

into privilege

or Salzburg Cathedral

where a jubilant choir sings a requiem.

But who can bear the beauty

that pierces the skin, abrades the heart--

our own heavenly clamor when the goodness

In us climbs to its apogee, and we

come together singing in petition,

like all the garrisons of the star-cast night.

Thursday, February 2, 2012

New Poem: The Body Leans

The Body Leans

For Cary

This body lists and leans,

a galleon come through the tradewinds:

What is its port of call?

It has dreamt of an island,

Gilded apples heavy, spangling

the bough.

It has not forgotten one ember

of the love that singed its skin.

It yearns to come home

to set sail, jettisoning

The anchorage of memory.

It has been drinking cup on cup

From the waters of Lethe.

It has sent its soliloquies out

In pale blue bottles.

It has made its heart transparent

Like a glass swan burning on high

in lonely starlight.

It moves from room to room,

task to task—the coffee, the bread,

The paint, applied, pounced, softened;

It wants this done to its own flesh

By a loving and prescient hand.

It circumnavigates the waters of morning

Back into its lair, a sea cave for

mnemonic rocking, where it is safe

From the relentless eye of the sun,

beneath a moon engorged

With eternity’s weeping,

high in the night rafters of the soul.

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

New Poem for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond....

Photo New Mexico View, Tom Sheldon

The Flight-Path of the Soul

Sometimes the soul is a wild and starving thing

trapped in a storm drain,

falling in during a night flight from the family,

its predator, its perpetrator.

Cajole all you will, it wishes to remain there

however hungry and cold and tired and thirsty,

for it is safe

out of the reach of anything’s long arm.

It has no scent, it leaves no tracks for the bloodhounds

of social services or a search party of evangelicals,

even a contrite and withering mother

her dugs swinging beneath her haunted face.

The soul and the wounded child are one

and the same;

they belong to each other and time

is not on their side.

They have learned how to self-forsake,

keep low to the ground when traveling,

disguise themselves as shadows.

Oh these broken two, hoping to fuse

into one functional thing, a healthy

and radiant girl, unafraid

to return to the living.

iii

Someone called 911

and 911 came and he lay down

to look into the drain.

He saw the soul looking at him

coughing up bile, trembling, wet.

He reached in with his long and masculine

arm, his fingers,

And she gave forth the low, desperate

growl of something with its back

to the wall.

I was painting when my soul

jettisoned itself from my body

like a monster bride breaking a lantern

over her own head; I could see

she had been longing to self-destruct.

I spun a sling, a cocoon, with the silver

skein of the twilight; I called to her.

I will sing you lullabies, I’ll rock you,

but she fled and melted into the winter trees

stranded in their hoar-frost salutes.

I worked on and a kyrie eleison

traveled like a zephyr through all

my tungsten silences. What is a body

dreaming along, seated in the moment,

but a desperado soul on the lam.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

New Poem: for Magpie Tales: Sand and Boat

image by Mostafa Habibi

Scroll down to read revisions and then draft, which was posted first-- if you like.

Sea and Sand

One morning she looked out

At the tossing sea and cloud cover

And noticed a small boat with one oar

On a sandbar

And saw not ten feet away

Someone buried up to the shoulders

In the sand

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.

Say he doesn’t wear my face.

Is she triune--

Daughter, spirit, goddess?

Can she save herself

Or one of the selves,

The one desperate

Willing to die

If necessary

To once and for all

Vacate the trap

The fortified mirages

At her back?

iii

I work up my nerve

I go to the woman stuck

In sand

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her.

Imagine you can

Find your way.

I know where the boat

Will take me

To the villa on the strait

Where the salt and sun

Might heal my wounds.

Then what stays me?

Is it the qualifier?

Or the salt?

Or the familiar womb

Of night?

We see the man trapped in sand

And realize it is a mirror

But, who has sent the boat

Who rocks the boat

In the rippling water?

What master of illusion sends

The rescue vessel

Into our dreams?

Rev. 2

Of Being and Sand

One morning she looked out

At the tossing sea and cloud cover

And noticed a small boat with one oar

On a sandbar

And saw not ten feet away

Someone buried up to the shoulders

in the sand

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.

Say he doesn’t wear my face.

Is she a triune being:

Flesh, spirit, goddess

Can she save herself

Or one of the selves,

The one desperate

Willing to die

If necessary

To once and for all

Vacate the trap

The mirages of happiness

At her back?

iii

I work up my nerve

I go to the woman stuck

In sand

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her

Imagine you can

Find your way.

I know where the boat

Will take me

To the villa on the strait

Where the salt and sun

Might heal my wounds.

Then what stays me here?

Is it the qualifier?

Or the salt?

Or the familiar womb of night?

We see the man trapped in sand

And realize it is a mirror

But, who has sent the boat

Who rocks the boat

In the rippling water?

What master of illusion sends

The rescue vessel

Into our dreams?

Revision 1

Sand and Boat

One morning she looked out

At the tossing sea and cloud cover

And noticed a small boat with one oar

On a sandbar

And saw not ten feet away

Someone buried up to the shoulders

in the sand

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.

Say he doesn’t wear my face.

I know where the boat

Will take me

To the villa on the strait

Where the salt and sun

Might heal my wounds.

Then what stays me here?

Is it the qualifier?

Or the salt?

Or the familiar womb of night?

Iii

I work up my nerve

I go to the woman stuck

In sand

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her

Imagine you can

Find your way.

Is she Trinitarian

Flesh, spirit, Goddess

Can she save herself

Or one of the selves,

The one desperate

Willing to die

If necessary

To once and for all

Vacate the trap

The mirages of happiness

At her back?

We see the man trapped in sand

And realize it is a mirror

But, who has sent the boat

Who rocks the boat

In the rippling water?

What master of illusion sends

The rescue vessel

Into our dreams?

Draft:

Sand with Boat and Man

One morning she looked out

At the tossing sea and cloud cover

And noticed a small boat with one oar

In a foregrounding taupe sandbar

And saw not ten feet away

Someone buried in the sand

Watching, looking

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.

Say he doesn’t wear my face.

This one up to the shoulders

In wet dark sand.

What is this new element

Where I have planted my life?

Why have I come here—

To bury myself alive

To atone for the sins

Of doubt and rage?

I know where the boat

Will take me

To the villa on the strait

Where the salt and sun

Might heal my wounds.

Then is it the qualifier

Or the salt?

Or the womb of night

The sand of indecision

Becomes?

Iii

I work up my nerve

I go to the woman stuck

In sand;

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her

Imagine you can

Find your way.

Imagine there is a purposed

Crossing to be made.

Does she have

DID?

Developmental

Identity

Disorder?

Is she Trinitarian

Flesh, spirit, Goddess

Can she save herself

Or one of the selves,

The one desperate

Willing to die

If necessary

To once and for all

Vacate the trap

The lost cause

The failed marriage

The mirages of happiness

At her back?

If we see the man trapped in sand

And realize it is a mirror

Something to show us

Our predicament

That we bear up

In a living death

Entombed

By our need for the familiar

By our fear of assent

To yearning

Who has sent the boat

Who rocks the boat

In the rippling water?

What master of

illusion sends

The rescue vessel

Into our dreams?

Pages

WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Saturday, March 17, 2012

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Thursday, February 2, 2012

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Sunday, December 11, 2011