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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.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Revision, Exile, posting for DVerse Poetics


 Tera Zajack, Coming Home
A few quick notes:  I was astounded by this image, because it looks so much like the seacliff village Scylla where I would give my  good leg to live the expat life where Homer himself was so taken with the beauty of the Strait of Messina that it inspired the Odyssey!

In 1973 I was staked to a trip to Europe, met a southern Italian man in Verona and took a train down the coast of Italy alone to rendezvous with him..We took a day trip to Scylla and I lost my heart to the villas built into the cliffs.  Clearly no poet could have asked for more inspiration than that experience. Moreover, vis a vis the image I selected today, the night before my train left my artist friend Julia Marshall painted me in a moon-balloon in a basket floating down the coast, being greeted by a little family.  It was all very much like that, and this amazing piece resonates with me in all of these ways.  One of my poems follows.  My memoir of this experience is posted in its entirety: Nightfall in Verona


Exile

Now I am in Rapallo, the boats tied
at the dock.  My hair is dark again and I

climb from the skiff  and stride along past
the mustard-colored villas.  I sit at a table

back in the redolent shade where roses
embellish the blurred frescoes of war.

An old woman comes by, dragging sacks
of baguettes behind her in a cart. I buy a loaf

and lean it on the other chair, il dolce pane
and I together in the shade, the glittering

red geraniums in the window box.  It is afternoon
but I write a chanson du matin, a morning psalm,

on a stained piece of paper, tucking it into
my pocket.  Somewhere out there coming from

a long distance, the mariner. Within, the swan,
capable, strong, wide-winged and armed

for the distance.This is what I am,
not someone on the lam with

a bad leg and a crook in her back, few
years left with which to write more entreaties

to the moon, the sun, the stars.
Now the swan spreads her shining twin

rivers and rises, gliding off on the oceanic
currents, tears from the burning air streaming

back from her black mask. She flaps and glides,
settling herself then at the calling buoy, waiting

for all who come for the bread of love
rowing in from the lavender dark.


cc

from my collection of Italy/opera inspired poems, The Listener's Delirium.
To participate in DVerse Poet's Pub myriad of weekly activities, click here.

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011 


16 comments:

Claudia said...

awesome imagery as always jenne..loved esp. the morning psalm on a stained piece of paper

Brian Miller said...

nice...love that you are the swan spreading those wings jenne...and like the pace you set, setting the scene very nice before you get there...i often capture poems on scraps so i am with you there as well...smiles.

Maureen said...

Having read your "Nightfall in Verona", I can imagine the feelings that must have arisen when you saw the image you include here.

The poem is a mini "Nightfall", with a controlled cadence and, as always, images that tell your story cinematically. I especially like your vision of the swan in the concluding lines. Would that we could all be exiled to Rapallo, sustaining ourselves on the bread of love.

Maxwell Mead Williams Robinson Barry said...

incredible journey in your words.
wow.

Maude Lynn said...

Absolutely lovely!

Anonymous said...

I love "rowing in from the lavender dark."

~Shawna
(rosemarymint.wordpress.com)

Anonymous said...

A very pretty poem. I especially like the bread of love and the lavender dark. K.

Maxwell Mead Williams Robinson Barry said...

beautiful blend of thoughts and imaginations.
wow.
way to go.

Sheila said...

What a glorious swan! I could see the whole scene. You write beautifully.

Dave King said...

I was really taken by this. Some superb images and a fresh take on the pic.

Kerry O'Connor said...

Just so spectacularly beautiful. Your eye for detail makes the work so redolent of the time and place.. and who could fail to see the poetic truth in a flying swan? Gorgeous.

Steve King said...

I love the tone, the voice, the pace. The writing is a window into another level of understanding, which is what this is all about, I guess. Very refined, understated. Classic. I truly enjoyed this.

Steve King said...

Jen,
This is my second try, so if the first shows up sometime, my apologies. I love the pace, the voice here. Your words elevate the understanding to another level, and I guess that's what it's all about. So understated and elegant. I really enjoyed reading this.

Friko said...

How wonderful, both the memory and the poem.

I see you sitting there, at a little table in the shade, scribbling your poem on to a scrap of paper, being there, fully in the moment.

This is a very lovely image, like a painting in my mind.

ayala said...

Great imagery, and thank you for sharing your story, it's lovely!

Victoria said...

Your memories came alive for me, thanks to the precise sensory details you gave us. I would not have gotten as much out of this painting without your poem Jenne.