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.
15 comments:
Another very lovely Rilke variation, Jenne. Some marvelous images: "the shadowy hips of the mountains/Resisted in the way of a tree stump / That will not submit to the axe", "the widely pigmented/Sunset that gathered up my dreaming each night", "the skills /Linger like flames set in a blue candle".
The imagery of the physical - "here / In the body are all the songs we heard /..." - underscores what's to be found in the Present of which Rilke talks endlessly.
Some nice irony in that title, given that what we find on earth we lose.
we are in the heavens of present...great line jenne...i have no problem seeing heaven, i just wish we brought it more to this place...
i like your passion and vivid words....i do agree in living and striving for the here and now.
your last verse is superb...
Wonderful poem Jenne, love how you weave your words!
More unparalleled excellence.
In solidarity, my poem...
FORGIVE ME
It is said
that in all
the dimensions
that we
here
cling to one
of the lowest
rungs
with our constant
craving
and our ceaseless
desire
and yet
we pour the wine
the music plays
I gaze
into your eyes...
Forgive me
for loving this life
it is all
I know
or can remember
Hi Jenne, lovely poem, the heavens of the present, the skiff in the blue candle, the last burden of the wind. Really very lovely. K.
Truly wonderful and a testament to life Jenne.... I'm of a mixed sort.... life is fleeting to me, and although an eternity in Heaven sounds absolutely pleasant, sometimes I think it might be better to just not be at all. Heaven is like an albatross to me..... and life is like 80 years in grade school.... Every week the teacher tells us "You're going to be tested on Friday so study hard...." And in life we're tested everyday and every way, "Oh you can't get to heaven if you do this or that or think about this or that." So really, is all the testing going to stop once we get to Heaven? Or is it just going to be like a whole other level of intensified testing? Like, if we don't learn how to play the harp in six months will we get demoted to the soprano section of the choir? And end up following
God around all day just singing praises to Him? Do think He is really like that? I just don't know Jenne. But I am tired of being tested. I would much rather just rest for eternity......... smiles
Just dropping by to say - thanks for your lovely comments and for getting into the heart of my writing - we are imperfect in loving and living ~
Gosh both are good, but the second kind of ripped into me in a good way: to be a follower of flowers, one who listened to the call of her own body; it is so life affirming and pensive at the same time. I love your work.
Jenne, I couldn't get past the beauty of the first piece! So many layers of imagery, such rich emptiness. Love the transition of
"And she drives on
Until the road becomes a lake
Of shadow beneath a white sea..."
Oh my goodness, both of these poems are absolutely GLORIOUS. I am FEASTING this morning, with my cup of tea and such rich words. Timoteo's poem is wonderful too. All of this is a TRIP! Too many wonderful lines to single any out.....but I felt every line in my heart.
Jenne, I feel a bit tipsy on the beauty of your poetry as well as Rilke's. You are truly a word-artisan. Thank you.
Hi, again, I just read your "about" so have a new understanding of your skill. But something that jumped out at me: JRT's and Goldens! My soul-mate dog was a Golden and we've had JRT's for 22 years now. Ahhhh.
I don't know how some people can skiff through poems so quickly and deftly. I've taken 45 minutes so far with the two poems here. I hardly know where to begin to comment, wouldn't consider a critique. I have come to expect the high level of poetry, the high quality of thought in your work. What excites me here is your hinging, or possibly unhinging, one metaphor stacked on another with the ease of a transition like this:
"And she drives on
Until the road becomes a lake
Of shadow beneath a white sea
Until she is in the grotto of memory". In sport, or dance it is not the technical elements well achieved that make an act good, it is the ease of motion, the transitions that make those elements seamless. You always exhibit that in your work. I am still striving for that grace. What else can I say!
Many thanks to all and Gay-- what a compliment! I think of a draft as a cascade of images and let them come as they appear and then begin to shape, move things around, etc... don't know how else to describe it..xxxj
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