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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 8, 2011

New Poem in Draft: I Am Speaking of This

Please also scroll down to read the preceding poem which in a sense, companions this one.  xj 

I Am Speaking of This

Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything.

Jorie Graham, Nothing.

Here, heart full of night, letting it billow long
And long.
Missa Brevis, low, burnishing all the rooms
Until they are a landscape of brocade.
Mouth full of warm cider, drinking
The soft light
From a veiled lamp.  The gilded
Dog sleeps; her breath catches when
She dreams of racing the ice flats.

Now I want to go to the mares
Rigid in the cold, out on the stiff grasses
To house them in warmth.

I am speaking of this,
A deep late dark, its silences, that the male choir
Sings in the duomo nave so that the sound is long
And full and you can’t hear anyone breathing
How is it, then, that love
Goes even through the dark out to something
That endures the onslaught shards of cold.

Ii

Someone is singing a laudate dominum. I know
His voice, someone I once knew, loved
For the purity of that sound he could make
That pierced the soul, so that the soul then knew
How God feels, how it feels to touch
Mystery’s face.

One is awake while the beloveds slumber
Like a sentinel waiting for the death of night
The young men singing, a sound so light
It is smoke
Can you hear their mortal tenderness
Unearthly, heralding

Even as we board the trains
Of night to pierce it, our own fleshly absence
The weeping soul, the gathering
Plumes of ardor, the awe that such a thing
Exists, that we tremble:
To think of being loved by something

Coming unto us, magnum mysterium
Like the rain, the clarity
Of first light, waking for a split second
Innocent of Self, of distinguishing
Oneself from everything:

As if we the broken, the lost,
The profaned, having nothing
Left to say, have arrived
At night’s station to disembark
With nothing left, but to stay
Our hands against one another
In something like belief.


Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011
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6 comments:

Maureen said...

Beautiful, lyrical, imagistic, you at your trademark best. Especially strong and standing out are those last three stanzas. That image of boarding "the trains / Of night" of "thinking of being loved by something // Coming unto us", and then the final "hands against one another / In something like belief": gorgeous.

December 8, 2011 at 6:51 AM
Maude Lynn said...

What an exquisite piece!

December 8, 2011 at 12:36 PM
Brian Miller said...

nice...really like the second part to this ...there is a nice depth of feeling to it from the recognizable voice on...felt that part...beautifully rendered jenne...

December 8, 2011 at 8:38 PM
Anonymous said...

Really lovely. At first the parts seem disparate but, of course, they all fit together. I think I especially liked this stanza:

One is awake while the beloveds slumber
Like a sentinel waiting for the death of night
Like the young men singing, a sound so light
It is smoke
Can you hear their mortal tenderness
Unearthly, heralding

So interesting to think of the death of night, when night itself is usually the death, and, the sound so light it is smoke-- I think of the smoke of incense here. K.

December 8, 2011 at 8:43 PM
Victoria said...

This is rich in so many ways. I savor the stanzas about the young men singing and the compelling care for the mares out in the cold. I can see how our Catholic backgrounds have added texture and understanding to our way of seeing things...not to mention fodder for an array of emotions. :0>

December 9, 2011 at 10:08 AM
John (@bookdreamer) said...

Rich story with strong images

December 10, 2011 at 3:39 AM

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