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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.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

New Poem: for Magpie Tales: Sand and Boat

image by Mostafa Habibi




 Scroll down to read  revisions and then draft, which was posted first-- if you like.


Sea and Sand

One morning she looked out
At the tossing sea and cloud cover
And noticed a small boat with one oar
On a sandbar

And saw not ten feet away
Someone buried up to the shoulders
In the sand

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.
Say he doesn’t wear my face.

Ii

Is she triune--
Daughter, spirit, goddess?

Can she save herself
Or one of the selves,

The one desperate
Willing to die
If necessary

To once and for all
Vacate the trap

The fortified mirages
At her back?
 
iii

I work up my nerve
I go to the woman stuck
In sand

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her.
Imagine you can
Find your way.
 
iv

I know where the boat
Will take me

To the villa on the strait
Where the salt and sun
Might heal my wounds.

Then what stays me?
Is it the qualifier?
Or the salt?
Or the familiar womb
Of night?

V

We see the man trapped in sand
And realize it is a mirror

But, who has sent the boat
Who rocks the boat
In the rippling water?

What master of illusion sends
The rescue vessel
Into our dreams?

 Rev. 2

Of Being and Sand

One morning she looked out
At the tossing sea and cloud cover
And noticed a small boat with one oar
On a sandbar

And saw not ten feet away
Someone buried up to the shoulders
in the sand

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.
Say he doesn’t wear my face.

Ii

Is she a triune being:
Flesh, spirit, goddess

Can she save herself
Or one of the selves,

The one desperate
Willing to die
If necessary

To once and for all
Vacate the trap

The mirages of happiness
At her back?
 
iii

I work up my nerve
I go to the woman stuck
In sand

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her
Imagine you can
Find your way.

iv

I know where the boat
Will take me

To the villa on the strait
Where the salt and sun
Might heal my wounds.

Then what stays me here?
Is it the qualifier?
Or the salt?
Or the familiar womb of night?

V

We see the man trapped in sand
And realize it is a mirror

But, who has sent the boat
Who rocks the boat
In the rippling water?

What master of illusion sends
The rescue vessel
Into our dreams?



Revision 1


Sand and Boat

One morning she looked out
At the tossing sea and cloud cover
And noticed a small boat with one oar
On a sandbar

And saw not ten feet away
Someone buried up to the shoulders
in the sand

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.
Say he doesn’t wear my face.
 
Ii
 
I know where the boat
Will take me

To the villa on the strait
Where the salt and sun
Might heal my wounds.

Then what stays me here?
Is it the qualifier?
Or the salt?
Or the familiar womb of night?

Iii

I work up my nerve
I go to the woman stuck
In sand

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her
Imagine you can
Find your way.

Iv
 
Is she Trinitarian
Flesh, spirit, Goddess

Can she save herself
Or one of the selves,

The one desperate
Willing to die
If necessary

To once and for all
Vacate the trap

The mirages of happiness
At her back?

V

We see the man trapped in sand
And realize it is a mirror

But, who has sent the boat
Who rocks the boat
In the rippling water?

What master of illusion sends
The rescue vessel
Into our dreams?



Draft:

Sand with Boat and Man

One morning she looked out
At the tossing sea and cloud cover
And noticed a small boat with one oar
In a foregrounding taupe sandbar

And saw not ten feet away
Someone buried in the sand
Watching, looking

Tell me he doesn’t bear my face.
Say he doesn’t wear my face.

This one up to the shoulders
In wet dark sand.

Ii

What is this new element
Where I have planted my life?

Why have I come here—
To bury myself alive

To atone for the sins
Of doubt and rage?

I know where the boat
Will take me

To the villa on the strait
Where the salt and sun
Might heal my wounds.

Then is it the qualifier
Or the salt?
Or the womb of night

The sand of indecision
Becomes?

Iii

I work up my nerve
I go to the woman stuck
In sand;

I point to the boat.

First, I tell her
Imagine you can
Find your way.

Imagine there is a purposed
Crossing to be made.

Iv

Does she have
DID?
Developmental
Identity
Disorder?

Is she Trinitarian
Flesh, spirit, Goddess

Can she save herself
Or one of the selves,

The one desperate
Willing to die
If necessary

To once and for all
Vacate the trap

The lost cause
The failed marriage
The mirages of happiness
At her back?

V

If we see the man trapped in sand
And realize it is a mirror

Something to show us
Our predicament
That we bear up
In a living death

Entombed
By our need for the familiar

By our fear of assent
To yearning

Who has sent the boat
Who rocks the boat
In the rippling water?

What master of
illusion sends
The rescue vessel
Into our dreams?



cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011

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9 comments:

Mary said...

Excellent. Crafted with complexity and unanswerable questions.

December 11, 2011 at 2:39 PM
Maureen said...

These lines stand out: "Tell me he doesn't bear my face./ Say he doesn't wear my face." and "Then is it the qualifier / Or the salt?"

I especially like those last seven lines of stanza V, and how you use them to bring us back to the first two lines I mention above. The "master of illusion"? The mirror holds the answer, if we only dare look.

December 11, 2011 at 5:09 PM
Laurie Kolp said...

I agree with Mary... and the ending is fabulous!

December 11, 2011 at 6:24 PM
Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne,

I especially like the last section, the entombment, the assent to yearning, the rescue vessel into our dreams. The beginning too=-the "tell me he doesn't wear my face." There are many many good parts here--the question and mood-- the prompt so particular, I think we've all done drafts of sort that we may wish to compress a bit. But a great deal here--K.

December 11, 2011 at 6:49 PM
Isabel Doyle said...

Fine poem Jen. I wonder if we see our faces so clearly on others? If we are that aware or buried in denial?

December 12, 2011 at 1:04 AM
Kathy Bischoping said...

I am studying your cuts and changes, esp. going from the Christian of Trinitarian to the Neptune-sound of triune, from the conditional "if we see the man" to the assertive "we see the man", from "the mirages at her back" to the fortress of "fortified mirages at her back". The "tell me he doesn't bear my face" part gave me chills. And I liked feeling the naming of "mirror" approaching in the sounds of "one oar" and "sandbar" and "mirage" and other "urr" and "or" sounds.

December 12, 2011 at 10:57 AM
Tess Kincaid said...

I like the vision of the man trapped in the sand as a mirror...thoughtful piece, Jenne...

December 12, 2011 at 3:02 PM
Ann Grenier said...

Thanks for sharing your drafts Jen. I will have to read a few more times to appreciate the nuance of your words. Intriguing and somewhat mysterious to me.

December 12, 2011 at 6:13 PM
Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne, I think you've tightened this hugely. I found the development disorder stuff very jarring as the whole scene is so dreamlike and then it became so laboratorial (if that is a word). Clinical, may be a better one. I also much prefer "triune" as the other such a latinate mouthful. It's a very interesting poem, and manages to speak without the picture (which I think is important.)

In general, one issue I have with the whole blogging thing is that everything gets too long. (I mean when I write quickly, I write too much.) You've compressed a lot which is terrific. By too long, I partly also mean that the blogging audience would seem to have a relatively short attention span because it is sifting through so much. That said, I find the dVerse people to really have immense focus--Honestly. Agh. But it's all very different from putting a book together --and as you know, with a book, it's really hard to get readers. K. (This may not be too coherent-- a lot of stuff I'm supposed to be doing at this moment.)

December 14, 2011 at 6:42 AM

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