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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.

Monday, September 5, 2011

Poem for Magpie Tales and DVerse Poets Pub










Clunker

Gonna buy you a Chevrolet, buy you
A Chevrolet
‘cause I can’t get enough of your love
Babe, can’t get enough of your love.

-- Donovan Leitch

For a time I drove 
The old three-on-the-post
Blue Chevy 6 cylinder pick-up
Ending up on the roadside
Unjamming oil-caked gears
With the screwdriver we kept
In the dash.

Another time I left it there, 
Called the tow yard
And changed my mind;

Then some appraiser came
To look over the place before
We decided not to sell, said it was
An eye sore we should haul off

To the rust-drenched garden
Of crushed and fire-gutted
wreckage up at the corner
Where the ospreys nest 
On the telephone pole,
But we couldn't do it then either.

That heap of scrap
Is the last thing we have
Speaking to someone’s steadiness
Battered Coleman lantern dimming out
While he walked the fence

How he pulled an invisible
Cart behind him in every
Season, portaging Mother’s

Sapphire tears, a gunny sack
Of bruised and rotting apples
One could say were the harsh
Words among us.

Today, Labor Day
and sun.  I’ve made three pumpkin pies
For the freezer; you’ve been
Choppng and stacking deadfall. Late,
You come to the door, cock an eyebrow.
We go down together

To the junk pile along the creek,
Where he tinkers on unseen
His head under the hood
To kneel again in frosty grass, 
Confess our love.


As I've greatly revised this poem from its first appearance yesterday, re-posting.  Thanks to Tess Kincaid of Magpie Tales for the photo and here is also my offering for DVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night.  I highly recommend both memes to assist you in your writing practice.  xj 


cc







copyright Jenne' Andrews
jenneandrews2010@gmail.com 

5 comments:

Helen said...

Whatever you do is great! Love the title 'Clunker' ... I've driven a few of those! Happy baking ....

Mystic_Mom said...

I like them both, but I think this one a bit more. Great images and wonderful feel Jenne! You rock!

Kay said...

i just found you....plucked from a list of names on magpies tales, just to say i loved you poem...it stirred something in me...it is a great talent to do that ..thank you.x

Chronicles of Illusions said...

I think the changes are good - though I did - well do like the original as well

Anonymous said...

Didn't see the original, but sure do like this one. All these old truck poems ring a nostalgic bell with me. I learned to drive in a blue--or was it green--'51 Chevy; starter button on the floor.
Here's my offering for this prompt: http://charleslmashburn.wordpress.com/2011/09/09/he-was-a-ford-man-2/