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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.

Friday, September 9, 2011

Autumn Poem for Fellow Trauma Survivors....Commemorating 9/11

Posting as well for DVerse Poetry Challenge on loss/healing..the first poem went up yesterday 9/10 and seemed appropos the challenge. The second is a draft to do with correlated violations:  rape and 9/11. xj 








Amphibian

The last time I walked
I played with a golden dog
carefully inching sideways
down to the slope to the creek,
unrolling the training lead
while she plunged in overjoyed,
her tail a semaphore in the rain of light


The last time I loved
was in the stillness of candlelight
and breathlessness
fingers brushing my nipples
unfastening silk strings
hands running down my thighs
I was strong and flexible in my joy
the taking into my body
of an errant golden boy
lost in the same ways
in the aftermath
holding his head against me.


The last time I took action on a dream
was to buy a white mare huge with foal
lugging redolent mash—
flaked corn, grain, molasses
down to the corral
where she stood in dangerous beauty,
waiting for me, eyes round and dark
with gratitude.

And the last time I yearned as deeply
as one may yearn
there was a seahorse floating
in the night of my womb
whose name I dared not speak,
A  tiny and uncommon thing
that slipped from me
a dream gone back to grass
a personhood absorbed by night
the kiss of a far existence
a fluttering away into thin air.

ii
  
And the last time I made a record
of an uncommon life
is this time, of an index of illuminations
in a house gone to ruin
moths in the window sills, in the cool
silences of morning

Brought awake by the imperatives
of language, mind burning
in the crumbling house of a body,
launching myself in my walker
out through the bedroom door
turning down the sibilance of the radio

To hear the swell within
of, you could say
the lyrical nature of living on
in spite of a surgical failure
to weld my bones together:

In making myself try
to walk again however I could
the weight of daily life curved my leg
like a scythe,  until like anything
going from water to land
I became other than I had been,
a tilted person
one leg shorter than the other, a rudder
attached to a once comely woman.

I go out, throwing the walker
into the back of my car
to see the mare down the way
come to her feet
newborn paint filly sitting up
in amazed languor
emerald field populated
with similitude and otherness,
each mare with an undaunted foal,
dancing into life.





The great stallion Halim Shah







The Violable


The first taste of a man,
The salt seas of him
I was eighteen, creeping to the bedside
Of a near stranger, thinking
That if I pleased him
I would be cherished.

One abandonment, cursory
Gratitude not enough.  Down
the decades down the metal stairs
into winter on winter
Reckless and gunning 
for presence

Feeding the being I hated
to them, letting them
Pull at my breasts like stoats
Ache themselves into my body.

This was not the order of love
And not the living night
Parked in someone’s van at the edge
Of a reservoir, choking and degraded
Held by the hair.

I forgave that girl whose desperation
Led her into the underworld
Whose fallen lamb she became

But then came sufficient madness
For all and all time: Planes flying
where they should not
great clouds of smoke, shattered 
glass, melting girders
Bonfires from windows

"Jumpers," widow-cries
Orphanings, barrages of vindication
From automatic weapons
In a mutated sun’s swelter.

How then shall we re-order the world
As if a cedar chest of clean linen,
A white dress appliquéd with roses
would ever again
Mean anything

Or that the scar of terror
Adorned now by willow saplings
waterfalls, marble engravures
could convince a broken-winged bird
to take again to the air.








After Reading Poetry Commemorating 9/11

I am swimming out of a nightmare
Swimming through a sea of dust
Among others drenched in ash
Confounded and running

And the soul is tired
Of its own mission to fathom the meaning
Of the collapse into rubble
Of trust

How on earth death to the innocent
Means martyrdom:

--Islam, be ashamed and wear your shame
In blood.

Here in the autumn a decade later
The heavy turning boughs
The Dona Nobis Pacem

Of the Bach B Minor Mass
Takes a fettered heart
Into the clouds building
To the north
To be mothered
by immortal light—

Et lux perpetua.

Each who watched our brothers
and sisters freefall to the street
Who heard the cries of those on fire

Climbs now into late summer’s
Runnel of hope-making
Takes refuge in the requiems
Of the sundered day

Where we may anoint these wounds
Together, press closed
One another’s serrated flesh.



Jenne' Andrews 2011   jenneandrews2010@gmail.com




10 comments:

Mystic_Mom said...

You paint with such richness, such texture and you draw in the heart and mind...I love your words Jenne!

Anonymous said...

Jenne.... how do I even begin to explain the emotions that just heralded through me as I read this insanely intense poem? How does one choose a single stanza as a hallmark to the beauty and sheer umph that invades each of them? Let me start with the simplest: #2, I'm a man. I think my hand just touched Jupiter because it shot me pretty close to there. Or "to buy a white mare" who stood waiting in "dangerous beauty." She's the one, isn't she, who threw you last. Jenne there are no words, the emotions conveyed there are just so completely life stifling. "Moths in the windowsill," unable to do the things that once kept you busy in unwelcome work, now a forgotten pleasure. "... mind burning in the crumbling house of a body," "living on in spite of a surgical failure to weld my bones together," that rehabilitation would steal the years from you, and not only leave you older but less than what you think you once were. "...a rudder attached to a once comely woman." And yet you still are just an observer of the depths and beauty of life: "with similitude and otherness, each mare with an undaunted foal, dancing into life."

I don't know what to say to these things but this and please forgive me: I love you. I love your strength, I love your resolve, I love your memories, I love your passion, God I love your passion. I love your ability to take a handful of words and string them together in such a beautiful way as to make me love you. And I love your poetry. I never knew you before Jenne, barley do now, only through this forum, but I can't imagine in all my years that you, this incredibly young, beautiful poet, are anything less than you ever have been. Thank you for these wonderful, beautifully extraordinary moments spent devouring this most pleasant, tender part of you.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

John-- you have me in tears... for the second time today. Thank you for this; I can't tell you how much it means to me. I'm certain we'll have a rich and resonant association. Love, Jenne'.

Mark Kerstetter said...

John's right, this is gorgeous poetry. "Brought awake by the imperatives of poetry" - indeed, and the reader burns with you.

Sheila said...

definitely a life changing memory you have written eloquently (as always) about. Thank you for sharing your pain with us.

Beth said...

Gorgeous with impact. Your imagery pulls the reader through the poem while the repetition adds force to "the last time"

Beth

Anonymous said...

A tilted person...

Such intense beauty! Such vivid imagery! I just don't have words! Beautiful doesn't begin to cover this and anything I say will just sound stilted or contrived. So I will remain in silence to go back and re-read this again!

ayala said...

This is gorgeous. I love it!

seasideauthor said...

luceat eis, I really liked this write. Thank you for sharing all of you memorial page here.

Unknown said...

Stunning poetry, your sensual and evocative imagery really pulled me in. ~ Rose