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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.

Friday, May 13, 2011

New Poem for May 13, 2011




Bin Laden's Wife

The exultant blue aphoristic dusk fades and the waters of time still flow green and deep, wide, like the weeping widow in the mosque, the seducee of madness. Suffusion of secrets.  Implosion of an archaic language, free-falling into the shattered texts. Our mouths run away with our dreams--  

A hummingbird lingers on a grave, witness-bearing mote. A violinist walks the yard at Dachau, where December burns on an unturned page. All ashes have bones in them.  When an owl dies it leaves a mark on the grass like a boot heel or the inference of a swastika, ineradicable.

The patriarch terrorist washes his hands, prays, and plays a video of himself exhorting death on death.  He bows down to himself, makes a god in his own likeness and some say they see his face in the clouds, a dark oxygen-eating bird with wings of black silk over the white desert.

When he was given Bint Nasmat at fifteen he said do not cut her.  I need her pleasure.  I will be love's apprentice; spare my bride.  When the Seals burst in she flew at them screaming his name, his Iscariot and so then they were sure. One fired twice--the sundial of history skipped a beat, like a heart of skulls. 

The vindicated stirred in the ashes beneath the newly poured concrete.  Did God lie back upon the Cross and say, "It is finished."? What then did Jesus say to Allah? This, the day after the pealing bells over London as if a another armistice-- stop the wars, stop time; let The Bride come, and The Groom

In his crimson uniform of state.  Let us eat the bread of love and feel the wine-burn in the throat, when we are re-married to each other, duly consecrated. O my Jordan, deep, green and wide.  My Lethe-- we send someone into the circle and set her on fire.  We project upon her how much we hate 

And fear ourselves.  I make you an enemy because I am enemy to myself.  We say the risen sun is the son of man and of god and we take this soporific in.  We crucify the androgynine man, the saints  and rise to ourselves. We revise the Apocrypha:  God turns a blind eye to the terrors of human kind

Of this we are sure, in the terror-awarding dream the truant dreams with their hemorrhagic mouths. We celebrate in our delusions and in the night the women mount the men and give their battle cry. O you know this self-hatred, this intense rage at the broken child within, the daughter of madness,

The Nasmat bride, burning herself alive.  The clouds had passed over the moon and it was time to load the Black Hawks, flash over the territory to the compound, descend the ropes.  Epitaph one; Geronimo-e KIA. We milled in the streets draped in faded flags. For a moment we were reborn.


from the forthcoming collection of my recent work, Paraffin.
Note:  I know not the name of Bin Laden's youngest wife.  Bint Nasmat is Arabic for Wind's daughter. 

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011


1 comment:

Samuel Peralta / @Semaphore said...

You captured me from the start, with the portentousness of the title. Then I was enthralled at the threads woven in the work - history's tragedies, Dachau and Afghanistan, the religious imagery, Christanity and Islam, the Wind's daughter as Iscariot. Self-assured, provocative, audacious - just amazing.