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, October 22, 2011

Poem for DVerse Poetics: The Emancipation Song of Eva Braun

The Emancipation Song
Of Eva Braun

Many old sayonaras
Glittering in the trees
Dusty little lamps
No one likes
Asleep in their bags

Stille Nacht, Gute Nacht.
Holidays bearing down
Like trucks in a queue
Trucks that can’t turn
Over the bridge
Over the river.

A traffic jam
Metaphor for the world
Metaphor for the self

Stopped.  Held back.  Not on
schedule.

****

When I see certain names it comes and comes
You’re not enough will never be enough

Says the voice the denigrating voice
The screech owl dead mother voice

And I say to the voice I suffice
I matter, I reign within myself.

You have no business…
You have no right

I suffice
I was made I live  I exist
I am      not yours.

I am.  I am Love, on its boundary

It never knew the border 
not of wire
Never knew how not how not
To give itself so freely

That it landed in the wet, the wet
The heart a wet and oozing thing

Kicked to the curb.  I’m not I’m not
The dog you can kick to the curb

I hear the voice on the clinic steps
The hand on my arm you must accept
accept accept
              
Nein.  Non.  Nyet.  You do not define me I reserve
The right. I define me

And I will not will not let you do it
With your big black boots, meine liebling

Your antichrist santa uniform
And bag of hurts:

Your master’s of social work
Your med school ethos
Your betraying hands.

I will decide what fits
I will decide what to wear
And what to say
And to whom

And you may chatter at me
Like birds on a crumbling wall

Like black and howling birds
And scapegoat me and grind me to dust

And fill the big blue charts
With your ill-tempered notes
Cataloging all my faults

You may thieve my right
To make mistakes

But I will take it back

I’ll tear out the notes
The carefully cursive
Laborious lab notes on your case
I am not your case

Or your problem.
You are.  Your own
Problem.  Not for naught

Have I laid claim
To myself.  To celebrate
And sing of this Self

In this bow-legged and lost
And cut-short life

I claim myself
To sing.  I sing
To myself.
 
Ii
……  Silence rains in the Tyrol
And everyone gets wet.  Head for the hills
Heads up:

I will not will not will not let you
Break me

Or manhandle me
Or put your crass hands upon me
    Ever again and I will not

Let  you     in
To       trample upon and devastate

Me nor the child that was
And is, still

That was not   never
Should not have ever

Been ashamed to be herself

Her lovely glowing self
Like an ember on a hill

Like a moon in a pond
Uniquely glowing

Heap your insults
Upon me.  Scapegoat me
Crucify me

I know you, perpetrators
And self-anointed priests.  I know
What you are and you are not

You are not and never
Not for naught I say
what I need

You have to earn my trust
You have to respect this line
I draw with a plain little stick
A lipstick line on your
Old coupe’s isinglass

A line of light over the night’s dark earth

Iii

Bulletin.   Pronouncement.  Decree.

…. Today we said
We were leaving their country.
He said from his golden face
In glowing tones
The war is over.

But is it? Over?
Here?  Within?

Do not throw my sins
Into my face

Do not use my confidences
Against me
Or tell them to others.  Do not

Do it.  Enough is enough
Too much is not enough
For many of you

And you love to war and hate
And be right and terrify

Children in the night.  You are not
For godsake, not god, let it not
Be for naught

All of this:

Nor will I let you across the threshold
Into this house, this woman
Now handing you back your pretty
Ribbon-tied, cutting-tongued gifts

Iv

Now I take back the spoiled milk
Of my childhood
The rancid milk of maternal betrayal:

The shrieking in the night
The demonic mother bearing down
On me in my small bed

She who succored me
With her betrayals

Her mania
Her tremulous voice
Her shaking legs
When she heard the voices

She made up
So we would all
Rescue her, throw her
A life preserver out into the deep blue
Where she pretended to drown

I take myself back from her
And say you were no mother.
You were a liar.
You were as my child, meine Kinder.

I take back my body
From the old man’s hands
In the dark
And his tongue down my throat.

I take it back; I appropriate myself
I reel myself in like a weary silver marlin;
Still yourself: you belong to me

And I will love you
And I am all you need.

V

And it became so
Because the Word came first

The small chirping words
Of the pale little girl

From her high chair
From the antique potty chair

She learned her verse
She yielded in the night
They wrapped her in a cast
And carried her

And laid her on her back
Under the one-eyed moon
Under the sky
Like garbage
Like carrion

She heard the foxes on the  hill
She found a way to go
On bowed legs in plaster
From a chair to a bed

She found a way
To sing to herself
In the rank cast.

vi

Now not no but yes
It comes now this yes

This need for yes
This end to no

And lack and need
And loss and being impaled

On the thorns of loneliness
In the dusty room
Where the lonely dogs shiver
At the end of their chains

And the stars weep
This is not the land of Nod
It is not the land of no

We have come now into the land
Of approbation, the liberated
And restrung volition

The violin of volition
The golden harp of yes

Yes  I am she I am One
Who sings

I am one who falters
Who errs
Who sins

Who self-forgives

Worthy is She

Daughter of the night.

I must see to it that the nos
Were not for naught

And that the word yes
Is like an uprising
A human inland tide

Written in blood all over
The desert

Written in a sapphire alphabet
All over the sky

The great writ of gratitude
The great barbaric inner

Yes, I am enough.
I matter, I  I I I am
That word,  Yes.



*Eva Braun was Hitler’s Mistress, becoming his wife several hours before they committed suicide together at Kehlstein Eyre in the Tyrol; she took cyanide and he pulled the trigger. 

“writ of gratitude” swiped from the poet Floyce Alexander.  


cc


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

12 comments:

Claudia said...

was curious because you mentioned the german...so jumped over in rocket speed...haha
now you've chosen a difficult character with eva braun which most people would avoid..
rgd. your german words..only two small things..
Stille Nacht, Gute Nacht
mein Liebling
well done jenne..respect..

Brian Miller said...

wow. epic in scope and depth of emotion through out this...the battle to define herself was def intriguing and interesting to be juxtaposed against their cause...nice take on of her jenne

Mary said...

Strong writing. Everyone has to find their own way to matter. Sad though that she made this choice.

Timoteo said...

You could have made this twice as long as it was, and I still would have been riveted.

Beachanny said...

This was epic. Love the "stream of consciousness" and the way you approached her with a kind of odd rebellion with the repetitition of "not" and "naught" She apparently was desperate for some of that "yes". Really exceptional work here!

Anonymous said...

Well, you certainly picked a hard persona to empathize with, a call for self-possession for a woman so co-dependent she killed herself rather than live without him. A woman who experienced the finest things in life for years while others suffered, starved, were gassed, murdered, shot, dismembered, and more. Since this was her third and finally successful attempt to kill herself I can only imagine that she had an intense self-hatred.

Anonymous said...

Wow. This is epic. So many great lines; The violin of volition, the golden harp of yes. The heart a wet and oozing thing kicked to the curb--I'm not a dog you can kick to the curb. The mother. I don't really know very much of Eva Braun, but you've captured a woman caught in crazy times both her own and the world's.

K.

Mark Kerstetter said...

Eva Braun. That's bold. I wish I knew more about this woman. Surely you've read about her.

Was she really this defiant, this determined to define herself in the face of the most notorious dictator in modern times?

(and perhaps I'm not the only one who's had Plath on their mind?)

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks, all-- I imagined that Eva Braun in truth was eager to emancipate herself from Hitler and only under his spell. Her biographers claim this-- in the end she gave in utterly-- I wanted her to break out of it to save herself and so much of this is projected persona and an unusual direction for me, for sure. xxxj

Sheila said...

yes, unusual for you but a nice rallying call for all the Plaths, Brauns and such women, wouldn't you say? Like Gay, I too enjoyed the not and naughts and to see them transform in last part to affirmations, yesses, and I ams was a liberating emotional end to the journey through her psyche. Bravo, Jenne, bravo.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thanks, fellow wonderful poets. xxxj

Brendan said...

Eva's and interesting Other, perched on the poet's shoulder as a mask of self that is at enough distance to speak the truths that are so silencing up front. Her song perhaps the Furhrer's posioned and chained and buried conscience, a weird sister sacrificed to the Fatherland. Wrong goddess to screw with, I suppose, and Eva sings on with a bullet through her heart. Sing it from the Brocken. - Brendan