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.
16 comments:
Guilt, vulnerability. Tough to see, tougher to deal with. You brought this out wonderfully. An excellent write. I enjoyed very much. And thank you for visiting my page.
One of the most awful feelings in the world:
"the night severed
from its glittering possibilities"
by the kind of impasse you've described so well. Yes, and seeing it as an impasse is so important. Sometimes one of the two has to be the one to take the approach of ; 'right or wrong, let's just pretend it didn't happen...'
Powerful poem. You got me with:
Rather than old anger’s tide washing up
Around our feet and legs, pulling us into
The abrading swells.
I shouldered blame
Like mud-caked jugs of dark water.
"
Wow. Been there and understood every word you wrote.
At the darkest, most hurtful moments, I think we all "yearn / To become invulnerable" but how can such a state be desirable? It is when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable that we also open ourselves to trusting and to loving and to giving and receiving. The wonderful thing about our hearts is how much they can take and still beat strong.
This is a beautifully written poem that exposes your vulnerability. If you did not feel so deeply, you could not have imagined the taste of words become ash or to have experienced the burden of blame "like mud-caked jugs of dark water." Those kinds of images don't come from someone unfeeling, invulnerable.
Jenne, You choose such brilliant images to portray that unwinding of an event into a hurtful moment and the feelings of hopelessness that accompanies misunderstanding. I love what you did with the hard (cleansing) rain, and the Goldens. I'm assuming you mean dogs. My Golden (deceased for quite a while now) used to come to me when I was in tears in just such a way. Very touching poem and so easy to identify with it.
A lot of clarity in the third eye tonight. The desire for invulnerability is birthed by fragility, well-visualized and explored here.
I know the feeling of wanting to slip from the husk. Rapport starved of oxygen sums up this altercation nicely.
beautiful wishful poem.
ohhh, that last stanza especially. yes, we have all known it, haven't we?
xo
erin
Many thanks to each of you for validating this write-- of course Maureen is right that without vulnerability there can be no love-- so deeply appreciate support for my work/words, glad of us, sorry for the times some of us have been crosswise and thanks, for impressing that we are all human and know this dilemma...xxxj
Ennui the affliction here, for memory's granite shapes to become fluid somehow, alter their contours, heal a heart's wounds. But all we get is oblivion,
...a safe, distilled Otherness
The crystalline amnesia
Of late summer grass.
... Which is almost -- though not nearly -- enough. Fine poem.
I have said more than once this evening, reading through these works, that ignorance can certainly be bliss. So many of us chose to keep that third eye blind, for fear of what it may reveal. Thought this was a powerful, emotional write, weaved with amazing imagery...and a fantastic response to the prompt. Thank You!
Your words never fail to move me. I see this series of poems together in a hard copy collection one day.. That's where they belong.
I think it depends what you want to see with your third eye. The universe gives us a wide berth to explore this; I believe we see what we want to see.
Now to your poem - this is about relationships isn't it? The texture of hurt and misunderstanding are heavy in your lines. It does not escape me that you want to erase if you could the wounds and have an amnesia of a sort. Perhaps a sincere "I'm sorry" would suffice?
Wonderful words to share today... Happy day to you ~
"wow"..."beautiful"...are the first two words that come to mind as your words still soak in. a very touching and (in my mind) emotionally draining piece.
incredible.
Hello, how are you?
Glad to land in your lovely land of wonders. Excellent talent!
Hope all is well.
Appreciated your support to The Gooseberry Garden, your inputs add light to our place, we would love to see you around weekly…
Random piece or old ones are welcome too.
Bless you.
Happy End of August.
Hope to see you around!
xoxox
Post a Comment