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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.

Monday, May 30, 2011

New Poem for Monday

Borders without Frontiers

Consider each day a lesson.  The asphalt a slate
Where the unseen chalks the canniness of the fox,
the nocturnal lumbering of the raccoons
how the tar shines after a hard rain
how hot tears streak a cool face after rain
the face of the road
the white lines leading you on
as if there were an arrival waiting
at the end of the line-- as if you didn't envy
the fox her liberty, this wary obliquity coming across
this kenning of a train; what must be heard
and understood so low to the earth
the moaning in the graves
the sighing of a reptilian heart
the death of conscience there in the grass
when it falls as the ordinary bearing up and up
that was a sparrow, that grey and small iniquity
on the pale skies of afternoon

It was indeed a terrible day of hard words
of giving power to the Other to strike rage
into its blue flare like stone on stone
the sparks of words meant to assuage
The earth one long history of misinterpretation
redundancy of every genus unto itself-- too many
too many wild bees too many hearts flowering
from one stem in the dark woods and too many
children gone hungry, on the border

ii

You, you went to comfort him and to sing and cook
But you were born to marinate a heart in gall
Your defamations made a stand-off in the living room
where living stopped
and the BBC war reporting on the radio
was an ashen cascade of voices
telling truth on truth intolerable
even as the war between two abated
to the blue silence of the calm room
the room that brings calm to the body
the bed that moves beneath itself like a whale
the welcoming darkness
  
iii

You keep portaging the whoring, wounded Self
from point to point
sailing full on with a cargo of lies and nails
and the mast where someone is flayed out
the last lover a Crusoe who floundered
and spewed sea water when you hauled in him
thinking he was the trophy, the marlin that would buy
you a house on the hill and that the doors
would fling wide like heaven and healed parents
step forth, their mouths ovals of approbation

All of this comes from a mere inference of owls
the flash of wings across the bridge
the thought that you in spite of yourself profane and wither
and cause to wilt, to die back--

Useless the accolades of the lilacs at the midnight hour
useless the heavy bodied love of the raccoon mother
her unquestioning bearing of burdens, cubs on her back

You know what you would do
if you were brave enough.
Off in the night on the edge of time
someone is burning tires
so that the acrid air is alive
with prognostication--
O dilettante: someone is slaughtering a fatted calf.




 For another new poem-- for Memorial Day, please visit Loquaciously Yours.  

 copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011



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1 comment:

Timoteo said...

"...useless the accolades of the lilacs at the midnight hour..."
Not sure why that line stands out for me, except that it surprises...and delights...

And then there is your description of the sparrow...

Too much here to try to gobble all at once--I must nibble and savor...

Another tour de force.

May 31, 2011 at 1:58 PM

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