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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, August 30, 2011

New Poem: And So Do the Bones..Rilke Variation..for DVerse Open Link Night

To participate in this worthy meme, go to DVerse Poets Pub...


And So Do the Bones Comprehend

If the bones know more than the flesh because they are covered over,
a body moves with its writs of gratitude once death is bypassed again. 

Floyce Alexander


When will the blade
pierce this iron sheath,
the undeserved and liberating blade
that will fetch me from my hiding place
where I've been so long compressed—

so that, at last, I may stretch my limbs
and hear my full voice.

The Knight
Book of Images, Rilke

And so then late summer’s proclamation
of gratitude
The piercing of the will’s iron sheath
Life pouring forth and singing still
Into the early autumn

Even with the coming of the death of light
The re-emerging branches like the arms
of the exulting in a milky sea of paling air.
Of course we are compassed to the turning year
And yet, mind burning in its bony housing

In a truancy of will, alienated from matter,
the long and parched grasses
The temporal blackbirds in the decaying willow
Unable not to discern how and when
they fall, we step back

Into the manifold distractions of morning.  But there is
Another writ, that one that says live consciously here
In the moment, it is all we have, this cloak of flesh:
We too may scent the wind for coming storm
Provision ourselves, slapping down the great sack
Of apples for winter

Celebratory in the animal nature, the deep
Way of living. We hold ourselves
Apart and yet we bud and bloom and turn
To striated scarlet, break from the twig
And cascade in thanksgiving 
to the darkening earth.


15 comments:

Maureen said...

A line I especially like: "... mind burning in its bony housing // In a truancy of will". Deeply evocative and thought-provoking.

I also like the contrast between the lyric, gentle "We too may scent the wind" with "slapping down the great sack / Of apples". It keeps us attentive.

Unknown said...

A cry for our truth of a acceptance in our absolute symbiosis with all things. Enjoyed your expression ~ Rose

Pat Hatt said...

"alienated from matter" great line, very nice write!

Unknown said...

Ah, yes, Jen...
in the moment
then into the earth
ashes to ashes
followed by a new birth

Jannie Funster said...

I'll cascade in thanksgiving if the last knife comes in my sleep and I do not feel it. :0

The death of light and falling willows, I wonder if I shall ever witness. maybe. But not at this moment, and that's all that matters to me. :)

Such a wonderful write! so many diverse words woven into new tapestries ot thought. wonderful to witness where your heart and mind got to.

Tashtoo said...

Celebratory in the animal nature, the deep way of living...this alone, for me, speaks volumes! Let my mind run!

Timoteo said...

How wistful I feel upon reading this...the changing of the seasons, and the best poetry can do that.

Ann LeFlore said...

Thank you so much for sharing on dverse I so enjoyed this poem

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

This poem invites re-reading and keeps getting better each time!

Claudia said...

ah now you had me with Rilke...and ...cascade in thanksgiving
to the darkening earth....wow..what an image..

Anonymous said...

"In the moment, it is all we have, this cloak of flesh" This image really moved me. Wonderful work, Jenne.

Dawn Potter said...

So much music in these lines.

Sheila said...

oh, yes we do. My bones are intuned to the seasons as well "SAD" but true ;)

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks to each of you-- heartening-- esp thanks Sheila, Maureen, Dawn! xj

signed...bkm said...

yet we bud and bloom and turn
To striated scarlet, break from the twig


lovely to think we are such a part of this world call the natural ...very nice..thank you..bkm