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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.

Sunday, January 16, 2011

For One Shoot Sunday






Challenge:  photo of infant w/ dog tags, Katherine Forbes, at One Stop Poetry.  

 
Wake Not Our Dream


"Guten Abend, gute Nacht, Von Englein bewacht
Die zeigen im Traum, dir Christkindleins Baum
Schlaf nun selig und suess, Schau im Traum's Paradies
Schlaf nun selig und suess, Schau im Traum's Paradies"*

Lullabye,  Johannes Brahms


Wake not my dream
my dream in its infancy
of return from war
the last dream a man has
with his last breath
medics loading him with morphine
making the sign of the cross
on bloody coats
pulling out the IV's

It is every warriors' dream
of homecoming, flesh intact
but for the heart with its bruises
from the burial of fallen friends
sequestering
the photographs of their wives
and sons
and daughters

ii

We often save nothing
but memorabilia; we often
must bury chaff
we imagine to have once been human.

But what of the rage
that destroys all
and the eyes of All
that wait upon thee?

In the Taliban's cave
men murmur around a fire
they pray at dusk
they walkie talkie to their own
on the far ridge
is my family all right
did you see that drone

A dark haired young father
comes weeping from a bunker
carrying a child.
A wife in a burkah keens
on a grave of stones


iii

I deployed in the night:
In the name of victory
In defense of what I believed
a good cause
I killed a Muslim fighter
a father and a husband
with my bare hands

Then I knew
Gethsemane.
I was one of the despised
I was called no name GI
and spat upon
in the POW camp

In a bright red flash
from an RPG
in the carooming of a humvee
into a ravine
I fell.

iv

Now someone retrieves
my daughter's picture
My dog tags
from the chaff
where I was.

The tags were sent home
as was I, in my cold
flag-draped bed.

I lie in that bed
in the hanger
that warrior, son and father
I had become
dissipating like fog--
where there was a man
a bone cage with a heart

All around me the weeping
of weary angels.
My effects and I are processed
on the assembly line of the dead


iv

Someone prays here.
The Lord Is My Shepherd--
He maketh me
To lie down in green pastures.

What has come to pass
may not be undone
by human hands
and I am not stilled
or comforted.

Weep not for me
sing not one kyrie
at a high mass
never extol my deeds

And wake not her dream.
speak well of me
to her,
The half-orphaned angel
who sleeps

Yea though I walk
through the valley of the shadow
of my sins and indiscretions
I loved her unto the last--
And this is everyone's war.



*Lullaby and good night,
Thy mother's delight,
Bright angels beside
My darling abide.
They will guard thee at rest,
Thou shalt wake on my breas
t.



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
January 16,2011

5 comments:

hedgewitch said...

You tackled a topic that many would prefer to leave under its rock, the 'assembly line of the dead' that is this endless war, clothed in bright flag rhetoric. (Very glad you used the photo you did, which I found somewhat repellent...but to which you've given a grace.)

Maureen said...

I just read at The Guardian a post about a Palestinian doctor whose home was shelled; he lost his daughters and niece and, it goes without saying, his home. (He lives in Canada now.) So, reading that, thinking about Tucson, and then coming to see your poem responding to Forbes' striking photo of that child asleep, with dog tags that represent her loss, yes. . . we all lose and what we leave behind is deeply broken.

Your use of the word "chaff" is powerful, and this line stands out for me:
"dissipating like fog /where there was a man" .

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

thanks hw and M-- know it's dark, but... i know that the photo in a way shouts sentimentality and dictates as in thou shalt feel horrible about war. But the facts so harsh when we look beneath sentiment. thank you both for such support. i'm on dial-up today which for a writer is a kind of constipation-- will make the rounds to each of you and others later...xxxj

Brian Miller said...

ugh...a hard story, but you play it very nicely...when will we ever learn as we send off to war our sons and expect them to come home unchanged or even alive....nicely done...

Anonymous said...

This photo caught my eye as well as my heart. Your words especially the lines about infancy bought an added depth. Talibans caves care not for our daughters or our sons. Hard hitting write xx