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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, June 8, 2011

New Poem, On Meaning/Being....


Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon, from Boheme





Last Notes on a Day of Babble

Over and over when I mean to enter the field
I fly into the window.
And behind the window there they are,
The madly gyrating flowers of the field,
The babbling petals the swiveling dusky heads.

They have come to ask the meaning of the lyric
They want discourse, to step outside
The eerie business of being flowers.

No one can tear the petals off and not know
He is destroying a flower, leaving her asunder.
No one can return from ash as a full blown rose.

Enter the sky’s river as a swan, pierce the nucleus
Of the rain cloud, breaking forth its water--
Eat the red strawberries, one bite from each

To make known your mouth was here, asking
Questions amid the rallying of birds
On every hand—little flag-wearing
Nationalists in humid fervor--

Why not step through to the river?
The body loves water; it is a returning,
Where we float and sing, lilies
in a private language, unto ourselves.


.




5 comments:

Maude Lynn said...

Beautifully written.

Maureen said...

I like the dual meanings of "Notes" and, via its sound, "refracting pane". Strong opening with the image of collision with glass, the contrast of seeing through what should be clear but not really seeing; something of this also gets picked up in the images of "sky's river" and water, clarity and purification. The "babbling petals" bring to mind gossips, or a kind of Greek chorus, nicely relating to the insistence conveyed by the verbs become, fill, enter, enter, eat in the 4th stanza, which flows into "one bite from each / Your signature" and then opens out in "the day grew". "Of birds from every hand - little flags of love and hunger" is lovely. The "throw in the towel" seems a little jarring given the poem's overall lyricism. (Perhaps "Why not step through / give your body to water"?) I also like "ourselves spilling / beyond the need...." That final "and wordless" after all the babbling, swiveling, tearing, destroying and other active noisy words is nice, also because it relates back to last notes.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thank you thank you, Maureen-- I agree with you and appreciate your comprehension so much of what I was trying to do here. I was quite tired when I put this up, so made a few mistakes. Thank you too to Mama Zen. xj

Anonymous said...

dear jenne,

realizing you may never find this comment i apologize for being late, yet i am still grateful to have found your poem as it is stunning and beautifully expressed...it stirs ones emotions, it ponders, it seeks resolve, it sees a world in trouble and weeps for the flowers knowing "no one can tear the petals off and not know he is destroying a flower leaving her asunder, no one can return from ash as a full blown rose"...i've read this many times and with each contemplation i see the levels of meaning your words take on and i feel a great sense of loss...

water is healing... as you say to return to our true element while "the restless mouth was here" asking questions amid the rallying of birds on every hand- little flag- wearing nationalists in their humid fervor"...perhaps in all the babbling our mouths are searching for a better way, and you've been lead to river "gorgeously defeated" and alas, "wordless"...

i sure wish that with all the babbling i do, that it led me to creating a poem such as yours...one in which the more i read it, the more i feel your desperation to see the flowers unharmed...to see our lives, our hearts, most importantly our love prevail...

a beautiful, profound and brilliantly expressed poem...

sincerely,

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

What a fabulous comment, Janice-- I tried to find your blog, but? Thank you so very much! xxxj