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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.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

New Poem: Allowing Her

 
Allowing Her

She leads me back, down the path beside
The adobe, where the hollyhocks
Drink the sun
To the yard next door, the neighbor’s lilacs

And crawls under the bush, near
The neighbor’s house
And within the neighbor-mother
Is singing
The mother in a red bandana raising
teacup puppies, who never gets angry.

The girl longs to play with the puppies
but guards her secret cache of snails
Grouping them into a family.
Near the mother-neighbor who is safe
She thinks of nothing else.

ii

On another day she transforms herself
Into a sheriff with a badge and
Cowgirl hat and goes out on the trail
On her stick horse, past the graves
Of her run-over dogs

To the ditch bank, the comforting
Green water.
She calls herself the Rios Rider
The Rider of the Rivers
She has power, she is someone
Entirely different
Than who she is when she is the
Daughter-wife;
She is not a girl at all.

iii

I do not want to believe the story
She told me one night
About our father. 

I do not want to have this broken child
Within who can’t feel safe
In the world
Who has driven everyone away

I do not want to be the grown
Child who has fortressed herself
Into the winter of her life

Who now believes that no one
Is trustworthy
Whose dog sighs in boredom
From the crate

Just like a child the dog sighs
Looking out forlornly
The ball between her paws.

Iv

The day wears on.
The air thins and cools
A front is moving in
That will make it difficult
To walk tomorrow

In the aluminum walker
The short bad leg in a brace
The powdering spine
In its corset.

But I need to know
What happened—that he
Kissing me that way
Did something.
What did it do

To have a father kiss
His daughter
His tongue down her throat.

v

I had invited her confidence
Using a little broken doll
From the Salvation Army
When she told me the memory
Of an afternoon

Alone with him in
the Ponderosa pine stands
where the dwarf mistletoe
his specialty
was bursting forth its seed
tree to tree

When I thought perhaps
It was her little voice
From long ago, deep within
Breaking its silence to tell
Me about his hands
And weeping need

I took her outside
And offered her to
The heavens.

vi

She lives on within me
Looking out of me with my eyes
She wants me to stop now
Throw the ball for the dog,
Cheer up.
Cheer us up now
She says, behind the chipped harp
Of my ribcage.

She remembers
And so I remember
The long and dark days
In the adobe living room
Where no light came
In the next room an angry
Drinking mother

In the night,
Out on the desert
A lonely father
Who taught her
That men are to be assuaged
Held, taken within

That it was a little girl’s job
To play house
By playing wife.

vii

The dark child
The small dark child and I
Live together with our dog
In a place where we have hung
bright paintings
Where we play a choir singing
Because it is beautiful

And we want to paint the world
In beauty
We want to sing but we cannot.
We don’t want to be ashamed
To live in a house of shame and exile:

We are ready now for the storm
The wide wings of the snow
To carry away the memory of
the wet mouth
and its dark man.





A few thoughts...

It is quite difficult for me to post this poem.  Like many childhood abuse survivors, there is the matter of shame around the circumstances I describe,  as if I somehow brought them upon myself, that someone to whom such things happen must surely be defective in some way.  

And there is the matter of not wanting to alienate the readers I am so grateful for, whose encouragement has meant the world-- that such a poem is too shocking, too impolitic, too risky in a host of ways.  Then I knew I had to, if I were to be true to my mission to continue to "allow her", the inner girl,  a voice and to break through the shame-infused fear that in turn puts a huge stop sign in front of self-disclosure. 'Tis the season here, it seems, of disclosures of all kinds of things; perhaps subconsciously I was given the courage to write this by the various psychodramas playing out in the national news..  

I have written a host of "post-confessional" poems trying to set down the truth, the heart of the matter, sometimes constrained by my lyrical impulses to pretty up that which should be rendered with simplicity, dignity, nearly as a statement; to me the best confessional work is the least adorned and makes no apologies either for its declarations or imperfections. 

cc

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

7 comments:

Zoe said...

Jen, I am speechless. Dear friend, for I consider you to be just that, the courage it takes to give your child the voice she deserves is enormous. Daughter-wife spoke ice into my soul. You capture the dissociation perfectly, the shattering of the soul, yet throughout, you offer hope and cleansing. I have read many poems that speak on this subject, but in total honesty, never have I read one that touched me so deeply, never have I read one so masterfully crafted and yet so honest. THANK YOU for letting her speak so eloquently, for not shrinking from those painful memories. Give that precious girl a hug from me. Zoexxxx

Maureen said...

That it is "least adorned" gives the poem its power, impels one to read, but not as voyeur or with pity; rather, with admiration for the courage to write with honesty about those life experiences that make us who we are. It cannot be easy to carry within such knowledge, or to carry it in secret. The latter holds its own dangers, just as making the secret known does. To take away the power of the secret by exposing it allows space where healing and finding the self begin.

Victoria said...

Jenne, my heart is racing as I read this. There is so much to comment on: the feeling of shame and blame, the dissociation that allows the child to separate from you, your symbolic incorporation of the dog images. I am so glad and grateful that you shared this because as secrets are opened to the light, it gives others the permission to do the same. The courage it takes to survive, and then share such horror commands my respect. I need to read it again, if only to better understand those I love who have experienced such abuse, let alone for the power of your expression.

Mystic_Mom said...

Hugs for you, and for her. Sister survivor we made it through, it is not our shame but theirs. Thank you for your words Jenne, and your courage. Brava my sister. Brava.

Patricia Singleton said...

Jen, thank you for breaking the silence of childhood sexual abuse and for releasing the voice of your own inner child. In doing so, healing can take place within her heart and yours. In speaking about our childhood sexual abuse, we give ours the courage and support to speak out also.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

I never expected any comment, much less such supportive and loving ones, validating not only the catch I have in my breath today but again my work as a fellow poet.

Thank you, with much love and returned admiration. xxxJenne'

Sheila said...

I think when we do what we need to do to heal, nothing else matters. I hope in some small way this is but a stepping stone for you (and others who read it)across the river of recovery.