WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

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, July 5, 2011

Poem for One Shot and Beyond....



With many others, I've been caught up in a recent trial around the death of a little girl.  I've rendered a number of unsolicited opinions on my other blog-- see links above-- but I wanted to try my hand at something of an elegy.  This poem may strike some of you as macabre-- it is graphic, but tender, I feel.  xj









Tattletale

 In memoriam

Miss Polly had a dolly
Who was sick, sick, sick.
The doctor came
With his bag and his hat,
And he rapped on the door
With a rat-a-tat.tat…..
 - from a nursery rhyme

No body no crime they say.
Yet, a body speaks. A small body speaks
With its bones, where it was left.

Journal entry 2011

Lovely singing bones
Under the crooked tree
Sunlight bathing them
Moonlight shielding them
Rain calming them

The bone-music
Of the thing that was unwanted
The thing cast off
In the lost and found
Of the deep dark woods.

Flesh turned to bone
In the simmering wood
The small fingers
The little, grasping hands

The round head’s home
A bone flower
A mushroom knob of silk
With teacup eyes
Concertina teeth.

Where there was a song
An echo
Like a wood pecker,
An s.o.s.
A rat a tat tat

Who said that?
Who found the bones?

The man in the moon.
The hurrying tribe of owls.
Midnight eyes
In star-spangled branches

This little item in a wounded wood
In its tattered clothes--
Born again
From the hot wet womb
Of a plastic sack.

Find me, sings the thigh bone.
Play me, says the rib-harp--

Thigh bone, shin bone
Knucklebone, teeth.
The loony June moon
In the swampy wood:

I am a weeping metronome
Set to the telltale clatter
Of her xylophone bones.







One Shot Wednesday is a weekly meme sponsored by One Stop Poetryhttp://onestoppoetry.com.  Join up and  join in.  xj  


cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 




 photo Getty images:  little girl is Eva Braun, baby is her sister.  


6 comments:

Timoteo said...

Ironic that your style here is a bit more lilting, considering the subject matter--which, in fact, makes the poem all the more effective. I couldn't help but think of Caylee Anthony.

Alegria Imperial said...

Nothing macabre in it--it's poetry to the hilt, Jenne! I wish I could pick a line but each line is a golden chain to the next and the next. The tone is perfect for the subject--of little girls doing their 'nana-nana-na', to taunt or tease. And thus, the form works like a vise on the subject that you wrap in layered images, making it more gripping, heartbreaking so deeply into the soul. But of course, it's you, Jenne, of the laurel heights writing it! I love it!

Brendan said...

No one living down this way - not on this ship of fools -- could properly sing for this child's bones. Thanks for giving the task to the wind, and the moon, and peace of still things. - Brendan

Maude Lynn said...

This is really, really moving.

Ruth said...

It's chilling. To the bone. Almost more than I can bear.

Your language is very beautiful, and I admire your skill very much. Well done.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks to each of you for taking the time to read and comment on my work: it means the world. Love, Jenne'