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.
16 comments:
I know few who can write lines like "Late sun kindling the knotty pine", "A waltz that was like a baby aspirin/For a death-throe fever", "the oxygen cord/Like a blue vein", and "I needed a will/And an inner mother / I could forge in time/From the clay buried/ In the fault-lines/ Of
my own half-fledged heart." Then to come to that incredible "Who wants to weep anyway/Weeping makes you blind"!
I'm pleased you took up the challenge.
Thanks, sweet Maureen. Long busy day, yes? Cold here...heading North.xxxxj
Dear Jenne
How incredibly rich your poems are. There are so many clever beautiful sentences here...all of what Maureen mentioned. Breath taking.
Cheers
Padmavani
"Essere essere you whisper
Mater pater
Pater noster."
like a final breath. this was exactly it.
This is an incredible poem, so many lines--too many to list!--struck such deep chords. Bravo!!
So painful to look back under the ill-fitting sheets and see the bloodstains and the mess of a life one never asked for but got anyway--still, 'who wants to weep' A fine exploration of the dark we carry with us from the past--and the lines Maureen quoted are all the ones that shine for me, too, along with '..lost as foundling owls.."
Mm, a very rich and vibrant piece, both witty and carefully constructed. As Maureen pointed out, your own unique voice and craft comes through in the construction - the ending compositions are simply things most never think of for elaboration. Good analysis, and a very strong ending note, for life, and for the work alike...
"Abates:
Essere essere you whisper
Mater pater
Pater noster."
Gave me a shudder.
I could quote each line and that wouldn't say much of what I wish to say about your poem--richly textured, drenched in half light the kind where lives turn into poetic forms, where gestures are no mere wave of hand but grandiose embraces that lead to ruin. I love it all, this poem. Thanks so much, Jen!
Seriously brilliant poetry, Jenne'! I'm counting this one among my faves of yours. Rich, dreadful, beautiful--everything that makes poetry...well, poetry. You slay me with "Lying in the dark conjugating essere--to be, to be." And then to come back to it in the end was another tiny death. Amazing!
Deep and layered with beautiful imagery and linguistic nuance.
"And I fell, as I freefell
Through those years never
Seeing I needed a will
And an inner mother"
Heart-wrenching, concise, and thought-provoking poetry.
thank you for your overwhelming comments---each of you is very dear to me and I pray we continue to infuse our work with the light of our souls. love, Jenne'
I always love your attention to detail, your command of language, tangible and sincere. "I couldn’t get the corners to touch"--such a simple sorrow with deep reverberations.
Thanks David-- thank you for your book-- I'll be reviewing it soon on my blog-- all best to you! xxxJenne'
Wow, powerful and lyrical work.
'Who wants to weep- anyway
Weeping makes you blind
All that water blurring street signs
You skid through a right of way'
very powerful...and not just this, but this is what struck the deepest chord...thank you for pouring so much into this.
Thanks, Abby! xxxj
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