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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.

Saturday, October 1, 2011

Poem for DVerse Poets Poetics Prompt: Pop Art

Posting today for the D'Verse Poetics Challenge to write in some way about pop art.  As we are in the throes of a trial itself a 3D production in the vein of pop art, about someone acclaimed as an artist,  here is my elegy to the memory of MJ.






Meditation on the Death of a Pop Icon

And so was the manchild flung into death
As if off a building but not by intention
So that he lay on a white shore
Spread-eagled, arms wide apart
Eyes god-ward, mouth parted
As if he had tried to embrace
And reassure the sky

At the bedside the poison drip
The line to the catheter in the leg
The pump bringing not sleep
But oblivion

And so sadly, the o.d.’d and weeping penis
In its plastic coat, its tears collecting
In a household jar.

Forget the Caribbean medic and his foolish
Greed.  This death
Was written into time on the first
Of a thousand and one injections
The first of a million and one tablets
Under the tongue.

The lost boy tattoed on
A red grimace
ranged far and wide
From his fairy land of trains
And lonely elephants

To Bahrain, to Ireland, toiling
Through denial’s arid kingdom
Bearing his fears on his back
Like a dwarf his hump.

It’s all right now; life has put all aright
With its broadly artful death
How we may send ourselves up and out
of this world

Like smoke, a fading writ of many sorrows
And delusions of redemption and windfall
that falter at the last like wing-clipped doves
from a magician’s frayed sleeve.



copyright Jenne' Andrews 2011

12 comments:

Claudia said...

thinking of michael jackson always makes me sad - when i see his early videos, listen to his music - i think he was an incredibly talented singer and artist - but somehow couldn't handle the pressure or whatever it was...esp. your last stanza sums up that sadness masterfully

Brian Miller said...

i remember on hearing of his death...i enjoyed his early work and lost him later in life...but he was one of those icons that on hearing it was hard to believe...intense imagery and gritty a bit..the catheter, yeah....nicely spun jen

Victoria said...

Jen, I believe this is the most effective poem I've read on his tragic, useless death. It saddens me to see such talent go to waste...same with Amy Winehouse. He was a child who never had a chance to be a child. Beautiful.

Mary said...

Jen, I am impressed with this poem. I thought about writing one about him, but I decided it was too big a topic for me right now. You did it justice. You have captured the 'lost boy' and his death. So sad, so very sad.

Brendan said...

The "broadly artful death" is perhaps what saved this aging pop star from the oblivion not only fell into but made his final white mansion... To have this all writ so large before our eyes made it hard to feel much surprise at the event, but you re-enter it here (as the Doctor is tried for his role in assisted suicide) with a deft, undaunted touch. It's masterful. - Brendan

Unknown said...

His life examined within the pop culture influence done so well in your words. ~ Rose

henry clemmons said...

a fading writ of many sorrows ... what a line!!!! I too think Jackson's death was a shame and a loss. Can't judge about things I don't know, but he was a hell of a performer. Great write.

Unknown said...

It's so sad when this type of needless death occur. Makes me sad to the bone that no one could stop this needless end. Really gripping piece about a tragic icon.

Maude Lynn said...

That last stanza is gorgeous. This is really moving.

Maxwell Mead Williams Robinson Barry said...

some striking imagery here, enjoyed your poetry.

Glad to meet.

Scarlet said...

A nice tribute to the talented but lost boyman of our time.

I like those lines about his death...injections and tablets .. so sad that he ended up this way.

Anonymous said...

Some people have a culture of their own... maybe we're all dreamer?