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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, November 1, 2010

To Love a Mockingbird

Hallelujah!  I'm decompressing after spending the whole fall working on a manuscript of poems.  I sent one version off at the end of September-- haven't heard-- and then I had an epiphany which prompted me to completely redo the book.  I wrapped all up yesterday around noon and had that glorious "Look What I Did" feeling when I hit "send" to a major poetry publication prize.

I've written many poems that draw on imagery from opera and other classical music, as well as having it in my mind and alluded to in several poems that my poetic soul identifies with the mocking bird-- that it is plain, yet with a spectacular imitative repertoire-- thirty musical patterns, in sequence,  from other birds in addition to its own song-- that it sings at night, especially when the moon is full (I have insomnia), and that it co-parents with its mate, generally mating for life-- I like these things about it-- and I no doubt would have mated for life and co-parented had I had the option..
. .
I had been in a quandary over the title of the mss and struggling to achieve some unity among the sections when several things happened at once to point me in a new direction;  one was the death of the great diva Joan Sutherland, an idol and indirect mentor of mine in terms of the fact that I am a closet coloratura soprano.

The other was that I discovered that Walt Whitman and I are kindred spirits; he loved bel canto operatic singing which was in an ascendancy and very popular on the East Coast when he was writing, he strove to duplicate singing and the lyric in his work, and, lo and behold,  he was inspired early on by the mourning of a bereft mocking bird..

If I had ever realized this, I had forgotten it; it had been years since I had read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" which has a mocking bird holding forth in it, with numerous references to song and singing,  and not until I searched for titles incorporating "mocking bird" did I run across a reference to this magnificent poem. I found his poem so moving that I decided to use part of it as an epigraph, dusting off a draft I had written a few months back; it is now the title poem of my collection-- "A Mocking Bird Sings Bel Canto" (see below).

Yesterday the manuscript fell into place after all of my four-hours a day hard work; suddenly I saw how the relationships among the poems and the sections could work.  I told a friend that this book is my love letter to the world.  I am very aware that lyric poetry even in the open line is not in vogue in the literary establishment. But I wrote the book that was in me to write, and I hope that at some point it will fall on the right ears and eyes.

I have mentioned off and on at my main blog Loquaciously Yours that I have returned to serious writing-- most of each day-- after many years raising Golden Retrievers and being caught up in other things.  I had to give myself permission to start a blog that day last January.

Since that time I've written a number of essays/posts about all kinds of things, one memoir, a novel and now pulled together with new work and from my M.F.A. thesis, two collections of poetry.

I have felt the press of time; I turn 62 this week.  The past twenty years have flown by in the proverbial twinkling of an eye.  It turned out to be a good thing to write and put things away and then return to them much later, but I wouldn't want to sleep away the time I have left!  Please do visit me at Loquaciously Yours as well as stopping by this blog; my new "title poem" follows.


.                                                A Mocking Bird Sings Bel Canto

"Demon or bird! (said the boy's soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue's use sleeping, now I have heard
you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for, I awake,
And already a thousand singers, a thousand songs, clearer, louder
and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me, never to die."
From "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman

You came to singing
As a child, voice made
Of light and air
caroling and plain
In the mirror
Little imitative bird
Velvet snare of impulse
Binding you to vision

Now, Puccini at twilight: 
two voices
Rising and falling 
in the depths of the Met’s 
red brocade mouth--Pinkerton 
and that princess
Gheorghiu, together
In the background the pyre
Of conquest-- 


Butterfly dies for love
Beautifully: at the apogee
The moon shatters 
in her throat

The critic next to you nods:
Please, tremulous diva
Die again—your hair a mane
Down your back, the knife
Glinting in your small 
ivory hand

ii

You leave the opera 
replenished
Arms in your silk jacket swinging
Freely, clutch with its rhinestone
And the cheap single ticket
Drifts away into the river 
along the curb

You do not see
That the sidewalk 
is underwater, 
that lamps glow at the bottom
In a bistro you drink a glass
Of forgetfulness
The stranger next to you
Looks, looks away.

Back out to the street
You reorient yourself
By the few visible stars
Unbind your hair; you walk 
quickly


There is someone you know
Too well 
In the undulating windows

iii

Placer y lagrimas, pleasure 
and tears
You retreat to your lair
Stripping yourself of that tasteful
Boutique suit, those low-heeled
Dancing shoes
  
And then some light rain
Within, a scrim
Of batik trees leaning 
out of the past--
Branches ghosts of loves
Only half-forgotten

Voice rising
With unfettered and unscored
Yearning that measure 


For measure
Cascades like jubilant water
Through the dark.
 


4 comments:

Maureen said...

So happy for you, Jenne, that all came together like this.

Your title poem may be the most lyrical you've written. It's stunning.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

thanks a bunch, Maureen- you're the only one who's seen it thus far and I thought it was good, but not sure...xxxxj

Anonymous said...

This is beautiful,
I would love to hear the bird sing.
enterprising and entertaining piece.

Anonymous said...

How are you, friend?

Glad to land on your exciting poetry land here.

Welcome linking in a poem to our potluck today, Thanks in advance!

http://jinglepoetry.blogspot.com/2010/11/poetry-potluck-buildings-landmarks-and.html

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First time participants can simply submit an old poem.

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