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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, April 5, 2011

Poem for One Shot Wednesday - Idolatry

As if anyone had spare time, I'd like to invite you to read my blogged memoir, Nightfall in Verona-- good feedback thus far.  Scroll down for One Shot Poem, for the One Stop Poetry meme. 


Idolatry

For sca

More your mother than your sister for a long time
I look at the photos you take of unfurling distances.  Yes
I still weep for us, how we have woven durable lives
from years that scythed our volition down to stubble---

Marauding mother, withered father, and the green shoots
we were,  pushing back up in the aftermath. There you are
proudly displaying a cutthroat in its sun-latticed net, on skis 
a fleece-swaddled blur in a spring storm, and with your third  


Lab, a tuned-in  pup who loves you by returning what you 
throw into cold vastness where instinct kicks in early.
At least we have windows now—cyber panes through which
we can see one another to know that we are alive


Carrying on-- and at times those windows
doors to a star-scape for disembodied contact.  Nothing 
has arrested our song or how it is to paint light.  How you
have mastered filling a canvas with  sunrise


I will never fathom. 
Alleluias rise to the tongue to think of it, and I wonder why
I have sentenced myself to watching you from a stanchion
of not walking-not living.  But we make dawn within ourselves


To step into, the black coffee softened with cream and honey. 
We trek on, around the inner switchback road cut into the green
cliffs, our own Rockies in their sapphire towering, with our
frontier intensity and will, sometimes looking down, veering


And catching ourselves. In a dream, the dream that Spring
becomes when one wonders how many more might be waiting around
the crook of the years,  I walk a corridor, a long brunette braid
down my back.  It is a long way to the courtyard of roses, my idea


Of  heaven at the last, where a whole geneology awaits, wavering
there like paper geishas to take us through 
but I hold on, urging myself over a disintegrate path, 
in my hands a silver pewter dish, a pale yellow candle it is my task


To keep burning—for us, for you, and the wearing down 
now on its cusp. 

xx
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 all rights reserved 

6 comments:

Marshy said...

i like the flow...the read...and the way you have used words in this...fallow, cuthroat, marauding,fathom, switchback...these are great words to pull off in verse..cheers pete

Brendan said...

A fine, fine verse missive, speaking from the heart of a place that survived and then made a shared garden of it. So many delightful lines, but I especially resonated with that lab pup

"...Who loves you by returning what you have thrown
Out into cold vastness where instinct kicks in early ..."

Stellar work as always. - Brendan

Semaphore said...

You write some of the most exquisite poetry I've ever read, whether on paper or online. The precision of your words, the innate rhythm, the accessibility of emotion - all of these are things I strive for and read in your work. So wonderful.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Pete, Brendan, Sam, mille gracias-- xxxj

Luke Prater said...

Interesting piece; enjoy quality quatrains that intentionally leave out any rhyme. These are such. Appreciate your depth of knowledge of the craft, it shows here unequivocally. enjambment used very nicely (though the caps at beginnings of stanzas when running over stanza-breaks impeded the flow a little for me).

Strong write, Jenne'

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks, Luke-- I revised accordingly. xj