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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 15, 2011

Taboo Poem for DVerse Poetics: The Swells

Ah, ye poets-- ye have opened Pandora's Box, launching truth or dare this way; check out the challenge at DVerse.   See also my posts on the Conrad Murray trial at Loquaciously Yours.  Book reviews coming up there as well.  xxj 

Update:  I must say that the surfeit of delights in the responses, i.e. all of the sex poems have gotten under my skin.  Please feel free to either read my lament below, or scroll down to the second poem I wrote for the challenge.  

The Swells

What will they think of me
If I say I have little hope for myself

Or for humankind?  That I endure each day
Like a boxer on the ropes
A diver whose ship has left without her

Rocking in a dead man's float
in the swells for how long.
Yes I see us all on the Cross
Sweating blood
Crucifying ourselves out of habit.
I see the chimeric golfers out on the green
And I think what do they know
Of poverty

Or of inner darkness, self-abandonment's
amputee angels
parachuting through eternity?

I am the habitué of a cloister I make
To seem like a home.  I used to live
In the whole world
To get up in the morning with a song
At the back of my throat

Go down to the old buildings
The fragrant coffee shop.

But it’s too hard now, my wings
Clipped, my body easing its way
Down the stone steps of gravity

And my heart with it.
Only song keeps me going, only
Glimpses of the trees leaning to the east
For the momentary light
And then to the west

And then trapping the moon
In their branches
Eating little bits of moonlight,
Little infusions of honey.


Like This, You Would

How I wanted you in those seas of time
How I longed for us to shed our reserve
And let the half-light make our bodies
Young again

For you to surprise me in the shadows
Kiss against my neck
Tease me awake with searching hands

And find the pulse between my legs
There where the blood beats
With lightest touch
Make me ache, wake me there

You’d feel me fill with blood
Come to life for you
If you slipped your fingertips
Into me, you would feel me clench
And swell to take you in

And if I said, longer, here
Like this you would
You would kindle me, unafraid
And unworried
Until no turning back

I could pull you into all my need
And you would surge, and touch,
Within and without
And speak my name
And tell me I’m taking  you
To heaven.

But I am reticent; you don’t yet know
That we could lie on our sides
Eyes to eyes,
Become incarnate hunger
That your hand, your cock
Your mouth, your voice
Would take us there together

In the ripened sacraments of the body
Faking it out of the question,
In all the rumpled seas of bliss.



 cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews  2011


13 comments:

Anonymous said...

As always, so many beautiful lines and images here, and sharp juxtapositions, chimeric golfers after crucifixion, amputee angels, stone steps of gravity (I especially love that one), the bits of honey from the moon, the leaning of the trees to sun. Throat still has an awfully lot of song in it. K.

Beachanny said...

Always the poet, Jenne. I knew that yours would be a feast and so it is. I am living with the man and his scythe outside the door waiting for my friend of fifty years. We put up the pretenses of normalcy, watch the light, comment on the birds outside and the cat within. It's a slow sunset. I loved, so loved your last stanza.

Brian Miller said...

some nice textures here...particularly toward the end...but its felt more than anything...know it is a challenge personally but also with the state of our current world...the next 10 years will be very different from the last...its hard to think that far out but...things will be changing further all the more...

Scarlet said...

This is a depressing and sad voice, despite the song at the end. These lines resonate with me:

"And I think what do they know
Of poverty

Or of inner darkness, self-abandonment's
amputee angels"

I say we all have these moments of despair and self-pity.

Anonymous said...

I also resonated with the lines Heaven chose, I once wrote a letter to my cousin that said I hate self-pity but I have some.

Sheila said...

beautiful lines - I couldn't help but smile a bit when I saw that one of your labels said "more self-pity" not "self-pity" but "more." At least you're not in denial - that's a good first step ;) I don't mean to make light of it - I have had my many fair shares of this poison - it is a monstrous oppressor.

Mary said...

Your words may be filled with sadness, but your self honesty and bravery come through loud and clear! I admire that.

Unknown said...

Jenne- both of the pieces are very good, each in their own ways. I love your piece for the prompt, some of the lines in here are just hands down wickedly wonderful- great job, thanks

Anonymous said...

Jenne your first poem, "The Swells," is magnificent. Of it's own right it is simply a beautiful, aesthetic piece of art..... it rolls from the tongue and its images are just divine. It is so sad to think that the issues you spell out there, sadness, and poverty, are seen as taboo but they are..... I really enjoyed this part:

self-abandonment's
amputee angels
parachuting through eternity

And your second poem? "Like this you would?" I just want you to know that I will be coming to your place for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter.... And any available weekends in between..... and Thursdays. Fridays too..... Wow!

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

thanks to each and ev'ry-- and John, were you free to fly away I'd love it; we would make our very own holidays..xxxj

Brendan said...

Yep, this is one of the worst writerly taboos, to write on without hope. Shakespeare could stare into the human abyss - so did Melville -- but it takes almost as much bravery as refuting God or Love. For what does the reader dive for, except a nugget of something to pay one's way through another day? Yet there's a saying that things get so much better when we give up hope. And poetry can arise from the rot. Fine job. - Brendan

hyperCRYPTICal said...

Excellent poems and the second brought back memories!

Anna :o]

Claudia said...

the trees leaning to the east for light, trapping the moon, bits of moonlight and infusions of honey..fine images all jenne...felt..