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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.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

A Poem for One Shot Wednesday....

Posted for One Shot Wednesday hosted by the wonderful One Stop Poetry.  

I do think it's appropriate to call this a ballad, however unorthodox the theme and of course it has its personal elements, hopefully eased by use of the second person.  And, it doesn't rhyme-- but to me, a ballad nevertheless...xxj





The Ballad of Highway 14

You were shattered enough
Clawing at your arms in withdrawal
To lie for a scrip of Valium
Buy a gallon of wine
And head down Highway 14

It was raining hard enough in you
For you to stumble to the clerk’s desk
At the Motel 6
Grab a key and check in.

Then you sank into the naugahyde chair 
The ghastly stillness
Against the muffled thrum of semis
Cruising at warp speed along the highway

You’d forgotten how it felt
To feed a cat or boil an egg,
Poured your booze down an ant hill
Detoxed from benzos

Only to have the Fourth of July
Explode in your mind
All those synapses firing
For the first time in years

With it the rolling panic attacks
That drove you out of bed
To doze on the edge of town in your car

AA gave you the snowball’s chance in hell award
And you fled the Serenity Club
With its crowing dilettante women
And their cagey pronouncements
The dark men in ball caps sucking
On cigarettes with their surly tongues

A husband who bore down on you
Like an angry pecking owl
Get well, get well, get well.

How you wanted to believe
You could.
Days passed like a waterfall
Of waking dreams
You came and went from the admonitions
Of one time friends
Bolstering yourself with the Big Book
The Bible, anything

Hugging the dogs
By then half-afraid of you
How you would scream alone in the house
And throw the furniture out into the yard
At midnight

So you thought
It was past time
For a mercy killing
A self-euthanasia, and took
The cheap room on the truck route

And sat in the quiet
Looking out at the blue blue mountains
At the grade wine with its
Taunting gilded label

And the valium valorum, both together
The means to get some sleep

For eternity.
But something in you
You thought had died stirred
With lifting wings
Something that tasted
Like hope, some grateful salt
In your mouth: the mountains called
Over and over to the eye
And the nights of lovemaking in the fields
And the geese keeping on
Heading into the cold

Like your nomadic heart
Or the all-enduring will
of a polar explorer.
  
You rose and gathered up your things
And left that place to its peeling paint
And its stench of smoke
And lonely masturbating traveling salesmen

Homing, heading west,
Into the welcoming dusk
Your surer self waiting open-armed
For you, at the end
Of  Highway 14.



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011
All Rights Deserved....

13 comments:

Maureen said...

Your imagery never fails to create pictures, like watching movie scenes, but doesn't get into the gore. It's the rolling out of the details that cumulatively add the punch, especially in a line like "A husband who bore down on you/ Like an angry pecking owl".

A few lines require stopping and taking a breath: "It was past time/ For a mercy killing".

Then that wonderful turning in the piece that resolves in "Your surer self waiting open-armed / For you", which concludes this so positively.

Brian Miller said...

you can call it whatever you want...i thought it was great...you took us on quite the journey and i was feeling the hopelessness of the moment when it burst in and saved the day...beautiful heart felt...

Anonymous said...

Piffle on rhyme. It need not rhyme to sing, to elicit the creative spirit in the soul. Ballad or no - this is a powerful piece. You build it, line-by-line, this powerful progression of growing hopelessness, the sense of giving up and giving in and encroaching doom, only to, in the last instant, spring forth hope, salvation - a stirring reminder, brought vividly to heart and to mind. Splendid bit of writing, this.

moondustwriter said...

gosh a little Hitchcock, a little Hotel California, and a little fireblossom rolled into one.
Excellent non-rhyming ballad

Thanks for sharing with One Shot

Ami Mattison said...

Really powerful, Jenne'! Your baring of heart and soul makes for one beautiful ballad. Such strong images as usual and this line: "So you thought it was past time for a mercy killing" absolutely stopped me in my tracks.

I can't help but wonder what would happen if you shifted the point of view to first person. Perhaps, it wouldn't be a ballad anymore, something more confessional (post confessional?), but what a song to one's self it might become.

Regardless, it's fine writing.

hedgewitch said...

So glad the ending was what it was--I get so tired of death being the highly dramatized answer when it hurts too bad. A serious and stark delving into chaos, into the power of darkness--how it effects everyone involved,even the dogs--and the unkillable desire to be free...and into what it takes to bring the falling rain of resolution to the storms of the heart.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Your comments are so very heartening-- thank you! J

Fireblossom said...

I liked the pecking husband get well get well get well.

I'm extra grateful to be sober after reading this today.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Me too. xj

Claudia said...

think some of us know this highway 14 - a road, no one wants to travel and good if we make it back home again...this was an excellent, breath-taking write jen

Steve Isaak said...

Again, great use of imagery, offbeat lines (or at least different from others' poems).

Steve Isaak said...

GAH, meant to put this comment on the next poem, not this one. Ah well, this one was solid, too.

Shashidhar Sharma said...

Dear Jenne

Your painting with words make me feel involved and being there feeling.. your words like...
'You rose and gathered up your things
And left that place to its peeling paint
And its stench of smoke
And lonely masturbating traveling salesmen'
are so vivid that I could almost be there and travel with you to your highways end.. thanks for sharing..


ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com/2011/02/whispers-another-kind-of-valentines-day.html