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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.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

New Poem - Westward -- for Friday Poetry Fest and Beyond

Join us at Friday Poetry Fest-- link live now.  


Westward

My eyes meet those of a local drunk
Over the avocados, at midnight:
Beneath the super store’s unflattering 
fluorescence
An instant tenderness between us.

He smiles, gives a thumbs up, wanders away
With his vapor trail
Of Scotch.  I course the aisles in my scooter
Grabbing yogurt and vegetables

And then we meet once more at the register
Now he seems intent on an exchange, sidling over
Beaming down at me

I know that florid and unshaven face
The widened and bloodshot eyes
The moony split-lip grin

He is my father, my uncle
I have walked in his broken down muddy
Boots; we have walked together

Down the corridors of bedlam,
To all of the edges there are:

Someone is at an AA podium in my head:
But, don’t tell me what the truth is
She shouts to a crowd of sibilant ghosts

How old, broken I must appear to him
I’m sober but don’t have legs I can readily use

He’s dying and he has long strong legs
That carry him out of the store, into 
the wet night.

He vanishes or disperses
Until there is only the yellow line in the road
And the markers laid down by the paving crew

That catch my headlights like goldfish
littering the road
Confusing things
When I am merely trying

To stay in my own lane, get home,
Bearing the burden of the groceries in,
Portaging myself by way of my walker
to the nearest listing wheelchair.

And I can’t tell you
Or even myself, the true truth of things
I love avocados and the dark

And the surging train that swiped by
like a sentence on fire just now
Bearing the salvaged and glory-bound west.




copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

7 comments:

erin said...

jesus, jenn, it is all right here,

And I can’t tell you
Or even myself, the true truth of things
I love avocados and the dark


i am weeping inside of me for everything, for you, for me, the man, even the avocados so desperately green and here, so undeniable. it is all a heartbeat.

beautiful beautiful you.

xo
erin

Ruth said...

Good god this is powerful. You are incredibly gifted at this craft. I am humbled by your . . . everything: sight, insight, language. I think you're one of the very best top notch poets out here.

Mystic_Mom said...

Jenne I don't know how you do it but you richly paint such feeling filled poems that I can see, hear, taste, touch and feel deeply. Brava my dear, Brava!

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thank you, Erin, Ruth, Shanyn for such humbling and love-filled comments. Thank you especially for inspiring me with your beautiful work to carry on. xxxj

Timoteo said...

...a sentence on fire...

That describes your style to a "T"

Lisa B said...

This poem leaves me breathless...and speechless. Tremendous.

Semaphore said...

You have an ability that only a few writers have, which I aspire to - to take an ordinary circumstance, and to weave it into something extraordinary. Here then, a chance meeting at a supermarket becomes an evocation of relationships, of regret, of destiny, that elevates the ordinary above the fluorescent pallor of a grocery superstore. Excellent work!