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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 23, 2011

New Poem - Moussaka Making

 Posting for Dverse Open Link night...





Moussaka-Making in Summer

The tastes come from afar
and slowly grow nameless on the tongue.
Where there were words, discoveries flow,
released from within the fruit
.

Sonnets to Orpheus,  Rilke


St. Paul, late summer.
I lay my hands on the purple
Chalky bulbs of the eggplant.
Then my reliable Sabatier
Delivers up thin opaque slices
With its refined blade.

I layer these between paper towels
Salting them to make them sweat out
Their bitterness
Even as I follow suit--.
For what is cooking
If not an act of love?

I heat amber virgin olive oil
From Calabria
The pieces swim in the copper pan
Darkening small fish
So laden with oil

That when I spread them on newspaper
To drain, all over the kitchen floor
Into the study
Each makes a map, a shadow
Greater than itself.

I labor on in the heat, mixing fresh
Minced thyme, tomato puree
And browned ground lamb together
Until I am the seducee

Of the Greek Isles, then a lathered
Corsican crone, bent over
A bubbling Sauce du Béchamel

Laced with the aphrodesiac nutmeg
Returning only to familial Italy
When I garlic-rub my stoneware casserole
From The American Hand.

Now cold white wine crinkles my tongue
Takes the ache from my bones.
I layer the rich red sauce
With the aubergine

Sprinkling all with breadcrumbs
Spoon the insouciant nutmeg-laced
Custard over all.

Lo have I mastered
The world of the Eggplant
Have I made Moussaka!

I sing, amateur chef du jour
Sluicing off a thousand seas’ residue
In a rain-cold shower.








cc

copyright Jenne' Andrews 2011

17 comments:

Maureen said...

One of the best (if also time-consuming) dishes. . . served up here beautifully.

Timoteo said...

Only you could make cooking this sensual...

P.S. (Would love to say "ooh" to you too!)

hedgewitch said...

I'm sure there are as many layers as a moussakka here, the combining of all these assorted and far flung rich ingredients, but the joy of cooking itself is prominent as well; making a soul's dish from scratch, savoring each element, what else is that indeed "if not an act of love."

Pat Hatt said...

Wow cooking with you sure sounds interesting, nicely done!

Brian Miller said...

it sure is getting hot in the kitchen jenne...i actually enjoy cooking with my love...the act of creating together...

Maude Lynn said...

"Salting them to make them sweat out
Their bitterness
Even as I follow suit--."

I LOVE that!

ayala said...

Nice... You made me hungry :)

Tashtoo said...

Your passion for food is evident in your passion for poetry. Fantastic overload of the senses...wonderful!

Sheila said...

Whoa! Jenne, you make my banana split look like dog doo doo compared to this - lol.


Laced with the aphrodesiac nutmeg
Returning only to familial Italy
When I garlic-rub my stoneware casserole
From The American Hand....

Spoon the insouciant nutmeg-laced
Custard over all.

Who is this nutmeg one you speak of? :)

In a rain-cold shower.

nice ending. This was so fun to read.

Beachanny said...

As layering goes, my dear, you are a master cordon bleu chef! I ate your package of love up line by line! WOW! (and yum).

Scarlet said...

What a culinary delight... I love the flavours and smells flowing from your words...exquisite ~

Mark Kerstetter said...

Amateur? You had me fooled. I LOVE moussaka!

Rosemary Nissen-Wade said...

I too am seduced, by your delicious descriptions.

Ann Grenier said...

Beautiful Jenne...and I don't like to cook. I so enjoy reading your work...

siubhan said...

Now you've gone and made me hungry... and homesick for Sicily (which was never home but only ever felt like it)-- for me, eggplant will always conjure memories of there. A vivid write!

Jingle Poetry At Olive Garden said...

a delicious piece,

love eggplant related piece.

maggie said...

love, love, LOVE! This is awesome, Jenne'. Thanks so much for pointing it out to me!
xo
Maggie