WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

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.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Written for the DVerse Poetry Prompt this date to work with repetition. Strictly a draft.


No More Maggie’s Farm

Thanks to public radio
vestiges of Dylan embroider afternoon.

Whose life is this, I ask my restless dog
she who would steal me from my work to play.
her tail a pulsing plume

And then I ask it of the blank and unshaded
day--its toiling ants and hoarders in the trees

Its fresh-washed laundry and few low-flying
desultory bees.

Whose life is this
I ask myself, steaming vegetables
too far gone to sell

The urge to fly through the window
Alive in me and brimming,

It is the damnable longing for home
And the treason of my deeper self

That she should want and want
So that I recant the vow I made

To stop looking back and live
boldly through my solitary hours
with a truant heart, a will that evades.

The black phone calls me
From its black desk

How did it know my name?

In Civil War taffeta 
my ancestors fade

Into their gilded frame.

Why do I have them here?
I never knew them and they seem
So somber
Under the smoky boughs of ragged summer.

Whose life is this?
Now the agitating dog dozes
Her heart beating against the earth.

Does she feel it turn?
Is Rome burning?
And why do these long days

Afflict a graying dilettante
With such foolhardy yearning.

 xx

copyright Jenne' Andrews 2011

8 comments:

Mary said...

I like your poem and sometimes wonder the same thing: Whose life is this anyway? It is perhaps a question we all ask at different points in our life. As for the old ancestor pictures, I'd say...put them in a drawer!

Claudia said...

is rome burning...? somehow it always is..intense write here jenne

Timoteo said...

The imagery. The longing. The yearning. The ever poignant, skillful mastery of craft. The YOU! And I must ask: How is it that you break my heart so easily?

hedgewitch said...

I like the short couplets that hold so much, the contrasts and images, with the repetition underscoring the recurrent question that refuses to be pushed away by the details of living. Very clean and clear work for a draft.

Anonymous said...

The treason of my deeper self--such a wonderful way of phrasing something we all deal with. Really interesting.

Mark Kerstetter said...

Hmmm, it's almost like you've turned that song on its head, like: why shouldn't I be happy to labor away on this farm? - why the yearning for more? Dylan had a head full of ideas that were drivin' him insane, but he just seems to keep tumbling on, never at rest (just thinking out loud here).

Beachanny said...

I think of Dylan as setting the stage of "our times" - his words the folk designation, the stage sets for our life. I was listening to him with Traveling Wilbury's earlier to Clean Dry Place which is masterful in its way and as questioning about what to do with a life full of amps, guitars, and "electrics" as your piece is to do with what to do with a lifetime of memories that won't stop haunting you. Ancestors with snippets of their lives left in the dust of journals, pictures, bits of history remembered incompletely. Yet the mind bends itself to sort the erasures, the empty spaces as if knowing what they experienced would make this life of ours (yours) make more sense. I fell into this so easily, walking through long halls of shadows, smelling the end of summer through wooden sashed windows. Lonliness winds through here as an errant breeze. Beautiful language as always. It's always a privilege to read your work. G.

Sheila said...

The longing, the questions, the restlessness - all come through in this strong piece of writing.