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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, June 14, 2011

Poem for Wednesday/One Shot...




 Meditation -- Rodin

My Invisible Arms

Je trône dans l'azur comme un sphinx incompris;
J'unis un coeur de neige à la blancheur des cygnes;
Je hais le mouvement qui déplace les lignes,
Et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris. *

I enthrone myself against the sky like an arcane sphinx
I marry a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans
I hate the movement that displaces the lines
And I never cry, never laugh.  trans. jra

From La Beaute’, Fluers du mal—Charles Baudelaire
Photo—Meditation-- Rodin

In the night I dream my arms have been taken off
By the doctor I have avoided.
You’re staying up too late, writing too much
He says, unscrewing them
And handing them to his assistant.

I reach for my clothing with invisible arms
The will to move my invisible hands
The will to speak moves my mouth
And no words cascade from my throat..

I wake, from the nightmare.  I make coffee
A rose-breasted, blushing bird alights on the fence
The green lace curtains lift and fall
Like the skirts of a soiled dove.

I enter the virtual world, invisible
Hoping to write,
To have something new to offer
In the new universe in which everyone
Wants their poetry
As fresh kill.
.
My hands scatter over the keys
like white crabs scuttling
into the surf.
They gather up nothing
These hands, this mind, all
Has been shut up, stilled

As if I have spoken my piece
As if I am empty.

And if it were true I am mute, dumbfounded--
If someone has severed my arms
If someone has castrated my muse

Should I not leave the house
And feast my eyes on the green hayfields,
Those things ablaze with light?


The poem in very literal French:


Mis Bras Invisible

Dans la nuit, je rêve mes bras ont été retirés
Par le médecin, j'ai évité.
Vous restez trop tard, trop écrire
Il a dit, en les dévissant
Et de les remettre à son assistant.

Je sors mes vêtements avec bras invisible
La volonté de passer mes mains invisibles
La volonté de prendre la parole se déplace ma bouche
Et pas de cascade mots de ma gorge ..

Je me réveille, du cauchemar. Je fais du café
Une poitrine rose, se pose oiseaux rougir sur la clôture
Les rideaux de dentelle verte ascenseur et à l'automne
Comme les jupes d'une colombe souillée.

J'entre dans le monde virtuel, invisible
En espérant que d'écrire,
Pour avoir quelque chose de nouveau à offrir
Dans le nouveau monde dans lequel tout le monde
Veut leur poésie
Comme tuer frais.
.
Mon disperser les mains sur les touches
comme les crabes blancs
Le sabordage dans les vagues.
Ils ramassent rien
Ces mains, cet esprit, tous les
A été enfermé, apaisé

Comme si j'ai parlé ma pièce
Comme si je suis vide.

Et si c'était vrai que je suis muet, stupéfait -
Si quelqu'un a rompu mes bras
Si quelqu'un a castrés ma muse

Devrais-je pas quitter la maison
Et plein les mirettes sur le vertes prairies de fauche,
Ces choses envahi par la lumière?



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 
Rodin permitted this piece to illustrate the poem quoted of Baudelaire…


6 comments:

hedgewitch said...

A frightening place to be, always, when one sits to write and the words won't come. Some wonderful lines in here--the reference to fresh kill is very apt--a pressure to be always producing--but the dreamlike quality is what I like best.

PattiKen said...

This is when you remind yourself, it was only a dream. Only a dream. Only a dream...

Unknown said...

Any of us who writes can relate to this sense of silencing, the "elusion" of the muse. Nice write.

http://www.kimnelsonwrites.com/2011/06/14/letting-go/

Brendan said...

If the words won't come, it's probably the wrong poem. But the poem you end up making of this is still gorgeous for all the silence that falls off every line. Loved the image of the armless statue; it also speaks of time's erosions on all art, maker gone, made fading, all that passion measured as armless reaches. - Brendan

Other Mary said...

Oh, yes...the nightmare of the blank page. And too, the virtual world, where everyone wants more to be heard than to hear. You express these so well!

Anonymous said...

You really capture the desperation, despair, and fear of not being able to write without writing I'd be crazy as hell