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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.

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Poem for Thursday and Friday Poetically



I have recently become captivated by some images of the young Eva Braun.  I have wondered what made it possible for her to end up with Adolf Hitler.  By all accounts he abused her but she surely understood what he was.  She has found her way into a little of my work: stay tuned.  





Both of the images are from the Getty collection, public domain, Eva Braun. First poem written from the second image, second poem from the first.  xj 


Shadow Song for Narcissus

“When Fraulein Braun first met the Fuhrer,” she writes, “she was seventeen and fresh from her convent school, attractive but not beautiful, not by any means stupid but limited by the tastes of her class and age; quite unsuited to bear the weight of history… Their relationship is worth investigating because his treatment of this one young woman -- first enthralling, then dominating and finally destroying her -- reflects in microcosm the way he also seduced and destroyed the German people.”  Angela Lambert, The Lost Life of Eva Braun.


Long before the Fuhrer kissed you beneath
the gaslights of Munich
You went alone down to the inlet in the Tyrol
Laying a blanket down in the salt flat
And in your white bathing suit, bent your back
Arching toward the sky.

The photograph then is of a girl glad to be alive
Like other girls, tan and muscular thighs
Surrendered to an auguring brevity of sun

All you knew before winter’s curtain fell
Over Europe--  the cove’s lulling haziness, that you 
were safe there, untainted by the monstrous hands
That would wake you and make of your heart
A shell closed against itself and love for all time.

Oh weight of infamy.
That you who were at his side with your red mouth
and diamonds when he ordered
Massacre on massacre, death march and gassings
More than a fact of history: an artifact 
terrible as an eyeball leering from black velvet--

No pealing carillon, no Bach reverberating peak to peak
Redeems any of this, the fine bone powder
That is ash, the sorrows annually turned over
In Bavarian loam—the Isar ribboning through Munich
Lit with the civility of the lamps

Along a civil path—as if
No one nearby had the shame-soap
In the cupboard, an onyx swastika
In a drawer in a silk handkerchief.
.
What of the girl you were,  follies
That led you away like a gazelle into the forest
Beset upon by Herr Wolff, in his marrow-heavy pelt
of need and loneliness

Perhaps the photos themselves are embedded
With fine dark cyanogenic powder
Occluding the sad premonitions
Of  dreaming mountains,
Thinning clouds.
-
To see that you exulted there, canoed those shallows
Let out like a fine Arabian mare from her stall
To cartwheel on the shore,
Narcissus among the water lilies
He, watching you from the Kehlstein eyre,
Waiting for you, your own
Sniper in the tower.

May 20, 2011

(AH used Herr Wolff as his name)



Evensong

A face is streaked with lightning and then volcanic 
with rage.  Whose face.  Whose hand 
claws at the light-- someone drowns here.  Drowns

In sorrow over fallen robins and the orphans 
of spring.  Someone's word breaks.  It is that person's
face, the face of a liar, a good deed doer, a Christian 

And a scholar, a maypole and a martyr, a frivolity.  A stone 
black with guarded water.  A philistine, a shell 
arms amputated, love of salt unrequited.  

Clustered lemon-shaped lights over 
the bridge the wide bridge the city built 
to distract from its sins, fiascos, and snafus.  

Dylan sings in China to a bouquet of faces,
pale with obeisance.  A commune
and a thousand-year broken promise; felled

Sugarcane reprisal.  We choke on rice.  We divide
the fish among the multitudes; eyeless 
we wander forth into the hills. I was forced

To the roller coaster and made for terror.  I could
not cry out.  In the sacristy I hovered over the Host.  I
took God's body Into me and I retched with fear.  

I gave you my heart and you bent it into a mirror.  
You fractured the mirror and your face splintered.  I rose 
up over you, a lascivious vindicator, thinking

To annex you.  Die I begged of you, before
The Lippizans performed their caprioles for
the Eva Brauns of the night.

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews, Fellow, National Endowment for the Arts in Literature, 2011

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am blown away but how well you write =)

Dawn Potter said...

I like what you are working to do here; these are indeed compelling pictures, particularly the second one. Have you ever read Symborska's poem "Hitler's First Photograph"? It's chilling.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks, Dawn-- I'll look up that poem. best-- xxj

Victoria said...

Jen, your poetry is outstanding and the stories of Eva fascinating. I guess I'd overlooked this tragic figure and now I want to know more. Thanks for these.

Kerry O'Connor said...

Two excellent poems, coming at the topic from completely different angles. The second, for me, could stand alone, but the first evokes the picture so brilliantly. You tone and choice of word and image is exceptionally well-suited to the subject. I thought these lines superb:

What of the girl you were, follies
That led you away like a gazelle into the forest
Beset upon by Herr Wolff, in his marrow-heavy pelt
of need and loneliness...

Strange how even monster-men have women who love them.

James Rainsford said...

Whenever, I read your work Jen it is obvious and reassuring that I'm in the presence of a considerable intellect and very skilled poet. Both these poems are challenging and significant. I felt the first, was for me, the most accessible, but I'm sure the second will more than reward more careful reading. Thanks for your visits and comments upon my poems. They're truly appreciated. James.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Victoria, Kerry, James-- in turn I must say that it means the world to have your input. There are so many of us deserving to be read, lingered over. We all keep each other going, yes? xxxj

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Re second poem-- it's in my new vein of being more allusive and elusive in my work-- to loosen up the narrative arc or the imagistic field or something-- I don't like to get to technical or fall into MFA-speak re my work-- but the goal in poems like the second one is to let meaning emerge from the accretion of images-- to stop making literal and linear sense...xxxj

Anonymous said...

your words sing.
keep it up.

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