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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, May 3, 2011

New Poem for Wednesday







Fugitive


I have been running ahead of a thundering storm of crows
for days.  Years.  Multitudes of owls with piercing
eyes and talons.  Blizzards of infuriated snow that want

To be ash, sky that would like to go dark or swallow itself.
Yet,I sang and sang last night to Handel and Mozart and then
we stabbed each other with our tongues. On the radio, manifold

Voices spoke of the take-out of the patriarch terrorist, how
the late day sun irradiated a gull as it soared from cliff to white
cap to prow.  What is a mortal wound, a hit to the brain by way

Of the eye. Or a blow to the heart quivering in its silver casing
like a Derringer in a cupboard. I fled over the washboard road,
the bridge poised to fall, past ancient trees, wary neighbor, dogs

Milling at her gate. In his run a golden horse looked out at the
newly green field.  We together populated the rutted hours, our
ears pointed forward, as if a stranger were working her way

To us from farm to farm, the night blooming dusk. Now my jaw is
tarnished, my spoons misaligned. Have you ever believed yourself
to be a mistake. What would you pay for a reprieve?   This useless

Chattering of sparrows in the plum blossoms-- who will love us.   
does it matter.   Write to live.  Paint to burn down the wormwood
of day. A priest claimed I don’t believe I’m loved and then

My windshield was pitted by gravel and I slid from the white
dress of my flesh. Our fugitive bodies, washed, swaddled,
“eased” into the sea. Only then the fields on fire with lavender.
.



1st draft:

Jeopardy

The whole-body ache of profound exhaustion.  Day at its equinox and now grey afternoon.  Embers flare again and again on the heart’s periphery—Last night I saw cheval d’or with a girl on his back.  I had come in over the washboard road, the bridge poised to fall, past ancient trees, wary

Neighbor, dogs milling at her gate.  I have been writing down everything’s bones but today, the body resists. I have been running ahead of a storm of thundering crows for days.  Years.  Multitudes of owls with piercing eyes
and talons.  Blizzards of snow that want to be ash, sky that would like to

Go dark or swallow itself. In his run a golden horse looks out at the newly green field.  We together populate the rutted hours, our ears pointed forward, as if a stranger were working her way to us from farm to farm, the night blooming dusk:  manifold voices speak of the take-out of the

Patriarch terrorist.  The body washed and swaddled on board the ship after the skin-matches and the intonations, the sanguine photography. The sun irradiates a gull as it soars from cliff to white cap to prow.  The body was then placed in a weighted bag.  Unarmed.  They say now-- Does

It matter.   Write to live.  Paint to burn down the wormwood of day. We had a moment of rejoicing; now fire in the streets: rage spills forth in manifold countries.  We are exhausted from sewing one moment to the next, the being of a self-wearing down.  I have a leg I haul through the

World like a dead raccoon swinging from my hip.  I half-skate in the screeching walker and I avoid mirrors. I am a one-woman spectacle of life on the dole, no heirs or heiresses. I am obliged to pull up stakes and get out of your life—what is volition.   I inherited this—body, these eyes that

Look out at the unfolding purple iris.  For a time there is an opiate lift but then you must rest, no matter how lonely. Who will love me.  The priest claimed I don’t believe I’m loved and then my windshield was pitted by rocks and I slid from the dress of my white flesh.    I have a house, not a

Home—a realm of music and light.  Storms find me here and bleach the hours of their color.  This beloved, might be depression, and the weltanschauung of Eliotian weariness.  I sang and sang last night to Handel and Mozart and then we stabbed each other with our tongues. What is a

 Mortal wound, a hit to the brain by way of the eye. Or a blow to the heart quivering in its silver casing like a Derringer in a cupboard.   I am entrapped by the quotidian, I cannot leave him and my spoons are tarnished—the family silver is scattered—I should not have sold everything

Of theirs: they haunt me now. My jaw is tarnished, my spoons misaligned. Have you ever believed yourself to be a mistake. What would you pay for a reprieve?   This useless chattering of sparrows in the plum blossoms.  What do they want? I have nothing left for them, no stale bread, bits of

Cheddar.  Give me your tired, your poor but what do we do with them, these dark agents of guilt.  We are left with many questions.  What is appropriate action.  Who knew about this.  For God’s sake, release the

Photos of The Corpse;  give us the risen Jesus, give us our Ambien. I lie in the dark with an imploded brain, murmuring in a private language, and yet you have said you cannot hear me. Wrap me in white linen but do not bury me at sea.



 xx
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011



8 comments:

Brian Miller said...

a finely layered piece...with a good bit of social commentary as well...very well played jen...i figure we will get photos eventually

Fireblossom said...

What a fascinating mix of the timely, the topical, the tiresome and the mythic. And all of it expressed in your usual striking language. The clouds swallowing themselves. The sparrows in the plum blossoms. The golden horse. Even when there is a heavy weariness in a piece you've created, it still has such a charge.

PS--thanks so much for visiting and leaving the marvelous comment on "Dining Car."

hedgewitch said...

Almost like a journal entry, this form, and packed with substance so densely, like old dresser drawers, where one just keeps pushing the new on top of the old. The way you've woven the dismalness of reality into a private hell is seamless, and coherent beyond emotional incoherence.

Reflections said...

This is so densely written, vivid images float upon a surface, transforming from one to another like a blending image. Beautiful.

James Rainsford said...

A tightly packed poem, full of intelligence and insight. It will take quite a few reads for me to unpack all the meaning and allusions here. Thanks for sharing such a deeply compelling work.
Thank you also for your comments regarding my poem.
Kind regards to you, James.

Unknown said...

I love how frantic it is, as if the speaker is sprinting ahead of their cohesive thoughts, into a lucid dreamstate. I'd like to see a short film of this. :D

Alegria Imperial said...

Line by line by line an explosion of images in a world so deeply layered, your poem is perfection what else! It's your mastery that works on the crows and sky to divine what only the spirit through the senses and a textured heart can make this poem work. I love it, Jenne! Thank you!

luke Prater said...

fine craftswomanship, Jenne'. Always appreciate that i your work

Kind regards

Luke