All night long in my fevered sleep I caught glimpses of the resurrection capsule "Phenix I" bringing the miners back up to the Chile that is not dark and underground. Assuming that any of Chile is not dark and underground...stay tuned for new draft at Loquaciously Yours.
But one advantage to half-sleeping at odd hours is that I often am privileged to tune in to Morning Joe on MSNBC. This morning's interview with Condoleeza Rice was worth losing sleep to catch.
It is always nice to have a break from chest-beating Joe Scarborough, who brings any discussion, no matter the resume' of a given guest, back to himself and his few years in Congress, while heavy artillery assembled at that ungodly hour seethes on the sidelines-- Mark Halperin, Mike Barnacle, Jonathan Capehart, Norah O'Donnell et al..
Subbing for Mika and Joe this a.m. was the smooth Willie Geist, generally host of Way Too Early, which airs at 3:30 a.m. on MSNBC my time, while Scarborough is in make-up. Today no one was sidelined in asking cogent questions.
I've found Geist generally impressive and especially so this a.m. as he deftly drew Dr. Rice out on her new memoir, Extraordinary Ordinary People, A Memoir of Family, that launches today. I hope that at the very least most of the Washington power elite tuned in and that those of us who for better or worse are Morning Joe regulars out in the heartland took heed.
When Geist asked her what she thought about the U.S. Occupation of Iraq sans WMD, Rice vehemently affirmed that we needed to go into Iraq to keep SH from an alliance with the Iranians. That personally gives me pause as it's clear she isn't just any policy wonk; no one on set had the cajones to try to shoot her down on this one. She weighed in on the status of race relations in this country at this time: shitty. She was in Alabama in the 60's as the child of two black educators and made the wry comment that in 2010 there are places in the country where she may still not comfortably go because she is black, despite having been Secretary of State up until two years ago. She effervesced, stepped up and showed up the panel-- in response to the spot-on question: "Why Haven't We Gotten Bin Laden?"-- "Fly over the mountains of Afghanistan and the Southwest Frontier of Pakistan and you will see." One can only imagine how many times she has made that trip and had that thought. We don't want such a simple answer and yet out of her mouth it's a bit more palatable.
She was eager to talk and to be heard and it's a shame that we didn't get to know her before we went off on galloping horses of rhetoric toward the four winds in the frightening divisions that have hamstrung the Obama presidency, and get a grown-up's view of US foreign policy. I would imagine she gave some pause to appearing on the show, as it's a den for the liberal media, but after the past twenty-four hours, love is in the air.
This takes me to my own weigh-in on the Miner story. Rarer than hen's teeth these days are events that make any of us feel like we are one world after all. With the sweet stories of the white butterfly in the mine, the sweet virile carrier pigeon handler giving his girlfriend a five minute kiss, and even that one guy's mistress showed up while his wife stayed at home, with the Chilean government making a huge show of concern and empathy for the miners, the courage of the few returned miners who dared to say to Mr. Goodwill du Jour, the current president of Chile that they hoped such a thing would never happen again--fat chance-- we all momentarily set aside our differences.
Today, though, will be its own, and our lovey doviness will take wing.
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.
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