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.
20 comments:
ha not heard of this form jenne...abacus of the world is a cool phrase...there is def some shifting emotions in it, from the challenge to face the fear in the mountain to regret and ultimately grief...i like the mason jars at the end too...it leaves a very nice visual...
tight write jenne...
..the sky-blue moths collected
In Mason jars are neatly arrayed
in the bone-cellar...gave me shivers
You show your mastery with unabashed nods to your mentors, whether you've only read them or swum their seas. My most influential poet, Jack Gilbert, was married to Linda Gregg (for 8 years, I believe). His voice is very much behind my poem at d'Verse, so in the the strange confluence of tides we sing to, your poem resonantes with something my favorite poet clearly and dearly loved. He called it elsewhere "harm and boon in the meetings" -- meaning, I think,
...Permit need and its indelible
loneliness, so that
the sky-blue moths collected
In Mason jars are neatly arrayed
in the bone-cellar.
Masterful as always -- Brendan
Agh--Jenne--I wrote a long comment that then got lost.
The gist of it was--and I won't say it so well--is that I think is just a terrific poem--the beginning absolution necklace is gripping==the end is especially powerful, not just the bone cellar and the moths, but the Let Grief. Very poignant and universal and powerful.
My one quibble with the poem comes in the stanzas about the bread==particular the consecration coupled with the arduous yearning of the dormant trees. Each image is beautiful but you are building metaphors on metaphors here, and I think you want to be careful of not diluting the force of the others, or almost parodying your own style. I hope I'm not overstepping boundaries here--because I think it's a terrific poem and I love all your work--I am tremendously impressed-- but you are so powerful that you may want to check it at moments, to keep the full force.
Only a thought here. It's wonderful. K.
so many beautiful stanzas in this poem that I couldn't begin to name a favorite. Stunning write.
Beautiful words.. how magical is your pen.
I love the recasting of the bread and collecting sky-blue moths ~
so stark and sad.
i like the same lines Brendan liked
Many thanks and to K.-- your comments are absolutely spot on-- I had the same thought-- I think it's much better now. Very cogent observations and your taking the time means so much...xxxj
Thanks--I didn't mind the recasting of the bread--I just thought the consecration took us too far from the arc of the poem, which is really an ascent and then a deep descent. They were also good stanzas though, so make sure that the new version is what you really want!
I do tend to feel like I go on too long, so generally, in my case, cuts are good. But I can't say the same works for you!
K .
Hi Jenne,
Hard to say but I think I like the shorter version. I love the two new stanzas, but I feel like the poem is more concentrated without them, and more urgent. But I really don't know. The two stanzas are wonderful, and I understand that the consecrate somehow goes with the absolution, and I love the love and the psalm in the throat, so it really is very hard to say. All good. I'll keep thinking about it. k.
I like the thought of concentration and urgency-- thanks, k. xxxj
You writing always reflects on me so potently, and this is no exception. The image of the butterflies in the mason jar, and loneliness, is so resonant.
... this sounds like hard-earned wisdom... 'Descend imperfectly' is the centre of this one for me...the notion of allowing oursleves off the perfection hook is the best possible balm... Thank you for a refreshing and uplifting piece...
... this sounds like hard-earned wisdom... 'Descend imperfectly' is the centre of this one for me...the notion of allowing oursleves off the perfection hook is the best possible balm... Thank you for a refreshing and uplifting piece...
Every word . . . perfect.
I always look forward to reading your poetry. One of the things I especially like about this one is the use of the imperative at the beginning of each stanza. This evokes power, authority and commands attention.
Wonderful. I really like how you've revised it. See! You know best! No, but I think it works really well. (It always did.) But the movement here is lovely and the consecrate works really well now. The new stanzas run together are terrific.
K.
K.-- thanks so much for your help-- I kept the abacus of worlds because it seems to me to be evocatively ambiguous-- as are the mason jars of butterflies, I think. I greatly appreciate how much time and thought you put into an assist! You are a terrific editor! xxxj
I like the abacus of words! And ambiguity is good too.
I realize thinking of mason jars of butterflies, I have a poem about jars of fireflies, but of course, that is not very ambiguous. (Kind of commonplace.) Oh well. Thanks.
I am too tired to focus on the new one yet, but look forward to it. K.
this poem stirs something beyond my conscious recognition. at the risk of sounding idiotic, all I can say is that I get this but couldn't tell you why. is that weird?
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