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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.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

New Poem: The Wide Hands of the Wild, for DVerse OLN and Beyond

In my insomnia-related ennui last weekend I missed out on Mark Kerstetter's fabulous challenge to write "of the Wild."  Hence, this poem, for DVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night... zj




The Arab Tent 1866  Sir Edward Henry



The Wide Hands of the Wild

The heart wishes to return to the wild
the Open
the Eden of not knowing so many
painful things.

The hurts of love, how something
you’ve nourished complains
in your hand as its pulse flickers.

The fruitful, violent anarchies of
the wilderness:
displaced wolves trotting through
the snow curtain,
penetrating it with
the lamps of their eyes.

But what untamed thing lives within? And what
is our means
of feeding our own souls?

I took a train down the coast of
another country

I gave a horse her head and let her
race along the railroad track

I let the animate one inside me out
To dance, laugh, make love

My white flesh spread over
the jubilant lover who
whispered his encouragement

His mouth like a searching
infant’s at my breast.



cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

12 comments:

Maureen said...

So vivid that opening, with the image of the heart's pulse flickering. Love the title, and how you expand your poem to encompass what we try to tame but sometimes must allow to be wild.

Kerry O'Connor said...

Oh you had me from the first words.. just a wonderful capture of the wild brave heart in all living creatures: man and animal alike.

Thank you for your kind words on my poem today. Much appreciated.

Brian Miller said...

wishing to go back to eden before we knew so much (esp the pain) really like that...also the giving the horse the head and letting your wild one out to play...we need to do that more...

Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne,

This is really lovely, one of my favorites so far. All of the parts seem disparate but then, of course, fit closely together in an actual lattice. The end if beautiful, but so is beginning and middle. Especially like the inside outing, and the soul nourished towards the beginning, again at the end. K.

Beachanny said...

Your words left my pulse flickering. And wild are the winds of your words as the horse given her head outraces the rails and turns to the treeless hills where the landscape flows into the sky and onto the moon. Wildness on high! Wonderful.

Scarlet said...

Enjoyed the imagery of the wild journey... let it all out...the ending lines are sensually stunning ~

Tashtoo said...

Fantastic! I too missed the awesome prompt, and it's presence is still lingering in my writes. Thought this a wonderful run with it, the language simply enthralling...

Timoteo said...

Our wild instinct lives, despite the collective attempt to turn us into proper boys and girls. What I like about you is that you've given it its head, (so to speak) as have I, and we both know we'd do it over again.

brendan said...

What so many fine wilderness poems like this tries to find are doors into the wild interior, a place we best only imaginatively reach and yet by so doing find leagues and leagues nd leagues of womb-water, giving birth to all manner of vitalities -- horse-hooves, lovers' flesh, the pure white gallop of joy. Without rising from our lonely writing chairs. Great job, Jenne. - Brendan

James Rainsford said...

"My white flesh spread over
the jubilant lover who
whispered his encouragement

His mouth like a searching
infant’s at my breast."

Very sensual and authentic. Love it, especially the above.

joanna said...

yes, we would all be a little better off giving the inner wild one her head every now and again. :) introspective & profound. thanks for sharing this.

Maggie Patti Barbara Frankford-Walton said...

powerful one.



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