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.
14 comments:
Jenne'~
This is romantic and intoxicating. Your imagery carries the piece, inviting the reader to travel and enjoy.
This is a fine example of what the dVerse post was all about - how images, well-constructed and associational carry meaning far beyond what cliched language can convey.
I like a lot the contrast between those two words in your title.
As always, your images work together beautifully to provide a lyrically heightened narrative. The experience is rich.
Life has kept me away, so I haven't been here in a while. Coming back again today, it's like arriving from a desert to an oasis of your words - beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Thanks to Maureen and Sam-- your words particularly meaningful and encouraging. love-- j
I luxuriated in the passionate words of this poem, but kept worrying about the title. Was it the relationship that was a beautiful ruin? I do hope not - the expression of love in the earlier stanzas seemed utterly inviolate.
Thank you for your visit to my blog.
Jenne, this is an amazing example of Julie's discussion. The metaphors, details you painted...it left me with a feeling of sadness mixed with hope and the undertanding that in the end we are alone and responsible for ourselves. Not sure if this is your intent, but, wow!
I was thinking the same thing regarding your intent as Victoria mentioned.
The way each stanza reflects a different metaphor is impressive especially since they flow well together but also could stand alone and shine!
I'll have to learn some pointers from you on how to develop this skill since most if not all of my poems carry the same metaphor throughout which is rather boring compared to doing it this way.
Thank you for your suggestions on my poem. Hope you have a good weekend.
I wish I cold have stayed in the first half of this serene time until the big change in direction when you drive away.
I, too, love the different metaphors in this - they flow one from the other and add a richness to the imagery and therefore depth of the poem. How *do* you do it?!
Jenne - I appreciate the beauty that lasts even as ruin eats away. Like the image there is discoloration and yet a memory...
You were always strong enough (it's easier to see it from the outside, and I mean no offense), you (or the you in this poem) have just never known it before.... It'a beautiful description, but if you read it back to yourself I think you'll find many more stratas and levels to what you've described here.. Then again, what do I know? Beautiful!
Your words flow... I was carried away by the images of love on a voyage.
The emotion I get from the last verses is one of sadness, drifting away from the love and beauty in the earlier verses.
Great example of metaphors working more to add depth to your tale ~
Jenne, this is so chest-aching...you really brought to the fore the great loss that comes with such situations, even though so much was gained for a time. All those years, and such beauty in your lines. I so enjoy your writing. The part that got to me, I hurt in my chest, was the stanza:
"that I drive away while you watch
from the porch, the moths frenzied/
above you in honeyed light" --I was so there with you in that moment that must have froze, it really did in the poem. And then, the last stanza/lines "...losing a million and one blossoms" oh my oh my
beautiful, beautiful work
Amy Jo
Thanks so much once more to each of you for your heartening responses. Isn't it great that we can each touch each other and inspire one another...xxxj
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