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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.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Poems for Saturday....







The Literary Nature of the Lioness

I see the lioness bereft of young
Mothering a new gazelle

I see that one raised by men
returned to her habitat
Go running to them,
Knocking them down in joy

I see the great Hemingway lion 
Macomber gut-shot
Crawling toward the maw of Wilson’s rifle
And then I despise my own kind

I see the lion-head death mask
On the wall of a hunting lodge
Hung there by someone
Who thinks he is brave

I see the she-lion fishing 
up to her shoulders
In the savannah stream
I see twelve lions
Bring down an elephant
To stay alive

I see the lions of time
Guarding humanity
When they range and hunger
Desire and long
Pace and cry

We say how fierce
And unbelievable
When there is some tenderness
in us that belongs
to the lioness.

  
ii

Of the lioness
I know little
Only that to the very end

She mouths her cubs to safety
Hiding them in the cave
She drags in a rotting carcass
They tear at it.

She lies down
Leaching blood from an old wound

Her cubs cry in the grass
The hyenas hear them
She lifts her head
They retreat and wait
And return

The pride watches
From far away

As we watch our own
Out on the Sudan
Flailing in the sun
Without bread or water

Shrinking up around their own bones
On time’s burning tether.





Second Poem for Today  




Unbound

By the time you realize you have made numerous
Wrong turns, the moon has disappeared
Behind the hills.  You are alone then at a dead end
In the cooling truck.

You had been dreaming along, following
What appeared to be a road, old sayonaras
Unwinding in your mind
Ignoring the warnings of sliding rock

There used to be a ghost town
Here, you murmur to yourself
Looking out to the edge,
The rim of the canyon

Broomstick trees rustle
In the cemetery
Light from a weak moon
Sifts down on the ruins
Where you played as a child.
There were wild horses there
Only you could see.
There were magnanimous uncles
Thinning, paling
To scarecrows

You take the wing suit
Out of the car and put it on.
You step out to the rim.
You focus, squaring your shoulders
As the others did
You put your feet
In their footprints.

You turn and fall back
Into the long, lavender stillness—
No seraphim appears
To catch or welcome you;
The rushing air
Closes your eyes
Appropriates your breath.

4 comments:

Maureen said...

Visions of "Thelma & Louise" but lonelier and more forsaken.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

are you talking about Unbound? perhaps... I know. I am feeling very lonely and forsaken. It's good to hear from you. xxxj

Kel said...

Jen your 'unbound' poem grabbed my attention this morning - what a way with words you have - painting vivid pictures in the air

may you feel less alone in the company of another whose heart resonated

Maureen said...

Jen, I commented before the second poem when up.

Just read your poem on fierceness. Glad you were inspired to take the prompt at the Abbey. I'm posting mine on Tuesday. I think you and I will have the most different takes on the prompt.

I was on safari in South Africa in 1997. It was an extraordinary experience. We did get to see a pride on one of the outings, as well as a lion taking down a kudu. Your poem has some searing images, especially at the end of section ii.