written on a theme of "reconciliation"--
We Must Speak
What must I do to join you to me,
Say there is no distance
That we are of each other's
Flesh, that worlds apart
I am your mother and you
Are my child
That when you are slashed open
mutilated
When you are stirring ashes to life
To make tea
I bleed-- that we are the same body?
I do not want
To come to you
Whose oppression terrifies
With your men's martyrdom
The hieroglyph of jihad
Written in stone
But because blood flows
Like water there
we must reach for each other
Before the moon shatters
Into the sea in grief..
We must barter for bread
With an open hand
unbound,
breaking the codes of silence
.
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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17 comments:
I like this very much, Jenne. It's visceral and evocative and provocative, and that last stanza is stunning.
Also, post this to One Stop Poetry for One Shot Wednesday. I think it deserves to be read by many.
Beautiful poem. "Hieroglyph of jihad, written in stone," "barter for bread with an open hand" -- just lovely. It's like a town on the southern or eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and two women, on the verge of talking again or "breaking the code of silence."
"Before the moon shatters / Into the sea with grief" if only we could hurry and put what is between us, behind us. 'Painterly words' packed with emotion.
Thank you, everyone! xxxxj
Very strong and moving, and I agree with Maureen, this has a lot in it that really needs to be read by others'. The impact...compounded by that last line, "breaking the codes of silence" so necessary. Incredible writing/heart-wrenching truths to a struggling placement..very very well done! ~April
Perhaps the space between us leaves room for us to grow? Nice One Shot, Jen!
love it...raw and gritty...and hits home...
It would be interesting to me to hear you talk about your approach to designing a free-verse poem. How do you decide where to break lines and stanzas? Is your progression through your lines primarily sound- or image-driven? How much weight do you give to the elements of grammatical structure? When you revise, what tics do you zero in on? For instance, do you tend to overuse words or phrases? I'm always curious about these things in other people's work, probably because I spend so much time thinking about them in my own. And everyone's poems are so different!--which is wonderful.
Thanks everyone once more and great questions, Dawn. I'll give this some thought and put something up at SW on my thread but I can say initially that it seems to vary a bit poem to poem-- I think in this case I break at times syntactically-- clauses-- and at other moments to denote a suspension, pause, breath-- regarding your gorgeous "Exile" I have similar questions! xxxj
powerful words
Very soft and flowing... I enjoyed the image that you have created with your words... Your first line caught my attention.. "We must speak" and then as you moved on to give reason, I was deep into it... thanks
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
Twitter: @VerseEveryDay
Blog: http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com
this was a wonderful read...and well done maureen for the recomendation...thanks or sharing pete
Striking, political, effective.
Powerful! Thank you for this.
So glad so many from OneStop came over to read. And Dawn, too. I always feel honored when she visits a post of mine. I admire her writing.
empowering..
divine message, YES, we must reach out and touch each other to feel the warmth of human race.
keep it up.
xxx
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