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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.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011




Sleep Was Not

The laudamus te fades against the verging shadows of afternoon.  The color of the day is gold, golden green and dream-blue. Sleep was not, in the womb of the night:  vigilance.  Muted calling of owls; daybreak birds.  Dawn made alabaster of the trees and you were for a time in Calabria again, then in the old adobe where light cascades over white walls—as an infant, tiny hands.

The mares are pendulous with foal; no fence contains their dreaming.  There will be first one stilt-legged colt then another, shaking wet heads, on the morning.  Will you buy a geranium and permit its red flames to release the verbiage of adoration, little choristers of the Vatican in a te deum.

You would sing every moment if the heart permitted it.  The old soul wanders in the garden, humming planting songs like the spent old poet who held forth last night in a stone church after sundown.  The man of the moon, in his old Peruvian vestments.

You see now that you banished yourself to the root cellar and sat there counting tubers, working up your nerve. But we have no seed here; this is not the year to turn the earth over, no turning over.   You buoy yourself up with the singing, spinning the day on until there is a new skein. Of honey, silk, salt.  Have you told the truth?  A lie is equally beautiful, lurking in the shallows, avoiding the gilded nets of the lost.


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For the virtual literati

This is not the frontier.  There is no compulsion to cut down trees or build fences.  This is the margin.  This is an apartment on a rainy day like other apartments on rainy days where spent poets sit and wait for light to bless the hands so that the fingers want to curl over the keys in an etude, a kind of survival music.

Out in the world of the hustle and the insult and the breach of good will, in the brownstone offices and in the coffee parlors, a few poets read from their own recently published books and laud themselves the refracting windows.

On the margin, you limp from room to room, cocking your head like a bird for a strand, a lyric true to itself.  You rise above, you transcend the verging terrors of the flesh-- something knots in the breast-- vertigo in the night.

You consider the rejections in the inbox as what they are:  matters of taste sent out into the void by the somnolent and the jaded. 

You, born to sing, make noise.  Laugh at the spectacle of the jaded little brown poets struggling to get the worms out of the ground and eat them before the setting sun returns them to the garden where we all go down into the loam.

Little brown poet in your mantle of gilded words, do you not see the struts of your cages above the clouds, do you not sense the tumor come to bind your wings?



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

5 comments:

Steve Isaak said...

Ethereal, beautiful (a word I rarely use, except in connection with my girlfriend), exemplary.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks very much, Steve. Really appreciate your words...xxxj

Fireblossom said...

"You, born to sing, make noise."

That's my favorite line.

James Rainsford said...

I simply love the imagery in these poems I particularly loved these lines:

"You would sing every moment if the heart permitted it. The old soul wanders in the garden, humming planting songs like the spent old poet who held forth last night in a stone church after sundown. The man of the moon, in his old Peruvian vestments."

Accomplished work, brilliantly expressed.

Alegria Imperial said...

...Could I add any more words or spin a new skein of moaning stolen from the soughing wind to both these gems of a dream? For dreams mean nothing unless spoken to and of. Like impish nymphs, dreams not made to speak puff away with a breath. And sleep unless to dream can never find a womb to lay its head unless to dream.

In dreams the universe blossoms to gain flesh in the daylight, the bird hopping among pebbles to find a grain of a song. But up in the trees, cawing and preened, little brown poets who have eaten of the husk mistaking it for the grain sing hoarsely and deafen the deaf while you, little bird, find the true grain.

Swallowing, you begin with a tiny note that soon rises to an aria from the deep to the heights and the wind orchestrates violins among twigs that stretch to blend with the high notes of the stars. Below among the stones, the little brown poets have gone back on hearing from the wind your song, realizing they had missed a wing, find a grub, tear it up among themselves, and eating its shreds strut about saying they swallowed a butterfly.

Meanwhile, higher up in the spheres, your song sheathes the galaxies in melodies so distanced no earthly ear can ever hear.

Jenne, what potion do you spray on readers like me? Look at what you've done! Thank so much for this moment with you.