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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.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Posted for One Shoot Sunday






This photo by the UK photographer Fee Easton.




Psalm for the Body


This is what it is to be me, a woman writer.  I am my body.  When I say I, it is not a conquering with language.  It is a dispersement of intensities and energy over a vast white field.  Lidia Yuknavitch

I am the body dwelling in the night’s green world.  I caught a glimpse of a foaling mare in the headlights and I leaned against the fence, pressing down with my body, my pelvis aching, urging her on.

The foal slipped from her in its white sac.  At the sac’s tear, the wet head, and then in the dark, the mare’s voice, a low fluttering and humming, a greeting. 

I knew all would be well there and I drove on over the black asphalt, the moon shining in each window.  Body in motion.  Body

In orbit, lifting over the emerald seas of the fields.  The mare, the arcane bay mare in the moonlight, has lent me her power. The body and the night and the I, the personhood, the unified one--

It was never about estrangement, the body divorcing her brain, the divided being—the body is restless and kinetic; it feels the rain; it hungers for life—  

So that language emanates like light from the body.  It has always been that song is the fruit of the pysche’s womb, in the furnace of the body.

A poem then is not a gilded pear on green velvet in a gold frame in the drawing room of Louis XIV.   It is not a list of conceits, overheard innuendos, politically safe choices.

The body risks everything to disclose that it is a moon of song, like Schubert Lieder.  That everything it does consecrates the world.

Ii

The speaker’s, hands, her gnarled hands, that an hour ago tended and made order in the kitchen, drying off the old wooden spoons. 


The spoons of fervor, and the limber fingers of retribution. The searching red poppy of the heart.

In order to live in the world, the wound of the world of the night, the Being who is the I who is the Speaker must elaborate upon herself; the poem then is the battle cry of the identity.  

The feminine night, the mare coming into her milk.   A woman caressing the foal with her voice,  with grey-hair, a body that has adapted to injury. 

This voice has had to make its way like a Magi out over the fires of darkness, to be heard.  To orient itself within the body of the world: the stars, the slate sky.

Now I know who I am by igniting the white page and how it is the night’s womb, its field of being, the place to telegraph to the fingers, the electricity there, to speak.

iii

Some have tied the women up at the center of the square, lashing them for claiming the power of the First Person, the heretical power of the I. 

But together, sisters of the body, we castrate them.  We neither write nor live in the patriarchal literary Valhalla.  Our poems breathe and burn; they take wing. I have one song to sing and it is the song of the body, her hungers.

We should stop saying ”speaker” of a poem’s voice, its heart and eyes.  We should say “singer.”  For it is the body that sings, the songs of the body that spill with their truths and blood and milk from our mouths.


visit one stop poetry to participate in this meme.  

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

8 comments:

moondustwriter said...

As a woman I appreciate the unity of the mare and the woman. As a writer I hear the song and want to join the song

Jenne love the way you speak to the red poppy

Kerry O'Connor said...

How could you not write of the red poppy?
And what a master piece of poetic prose this is - I'm quite blown away by its musicality and powerful imagery of womanhood and poetry and the deep connection we, who take a female form, must share in sunshine and on the darkest night.

John (@bookdreamer) said...

Cries out to be read aloud

Reflections said...

Love the symbiotic nature of your piece... the relativity floats on the emerald seas, gallops from the nights being. A wonderful piece.

Ann Grenier said...

Absolutely gorgeous poem Jenne.

"the poem then is the battle cry of the identity"

This and so many other lines are truly like a psalm in their potential for reflection.

Sean Vessey said...

Jenne, your poem reminds me of Walt Whitman's I Sing the Body Electric.
"As I see my soul reflected in Nature,
As I see through a mist, One with inexpressible completeness,
sanity, beauty,
See the bent head and arms folded over the breast, the Female I see. "
Your poem is beautiful in your voice and emotion like Walt Whitman's.

hedgewitch said...

You keep improving this new form you've adopted. This one is especially vivid, dealing with the poetic, yet measured as an essay, wild as a song sung outside at full throat.

Unknown said...

perfect piece.
you are amazing.


check out short story slam today. hope to see your participation.