WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

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, January 17, 2012

New Poem for DVerse Open Link Night and Beyond....

Photo New Mexico View,  Tom Sheldon



The Flight-Path of the Soul

Sometimes the soul is a wild and starving thing
trapped in a storm drain,
falling in during a night flight from the family,
its predator, its perpetrator.

Cajole all you will, it wishes to remain there
however hungry and cold and tired and thirsty,
for it is safe
out of the reach of anything’s long arm.

It has no scent, it leaves no tracks for the bloodhounds
of social services or a search party of evangelicals,
even a contrite and withering mother
her dugs swinging beneath her haunted face.

ii

The soul and the wounded child are one 
and the same;
they belong to each other and time
is not on their side.

They have learned how to self-forsake,
keep low to the ground when traveling,
disguise themselves as shadows.

Oh these broken two, hoping to fuse
into one functional thing, a healthy
and radiant girl, unafraid
to return to the living.

iii

Someone called 911
and 911 came and he lay down
to look into the drain.
He saw the soul looking at him
coughing up bile, trembling, wet.

He reached in with his long and masculine
arm, his fingers,

And she gave forth the low, desperate
growl of something with its back
to the wall.

iv

I was painting when my soul
jettisoned itself from my body
like a monster bride breaking a lantern
over her own head; I could see
she had been longing to self-destruct.

I spun a sling, a cocoon, with the silver
skein of the twilight; I called to her.
I will sing you lullabies, I’ll rock you,
but she fled and melted into the winter trees
stranded in their hoar-frost salutes.

I worked on and a kyrie eleison
traveled like a zephyr through all
my tungsten silences.  What is a body
dreaming along, seated in the moment,
but a desperado soul on the lam.



cc
copyright Jenne' R. Andrews

16 comments:

erin said...

i don't know what to say other than how foolish of me not to come back sooner. !

xo
erin

Lorna Cahall said...

Amazing images - powerful. Pulling
things back together, so shamanic, and so difficult.

Mystic_Mom said...

Oh Jenne! Your words, your images they move me...I can see and feel them! Love it! Love it!

Maureen said...

The imagery of being in a storm drain, a thing dark, often nasty, a means for carrying away, underscores the controlled, pent-up and vivid emotion and pain in this, particularly in that second section. The weighting of the abstract "soul" against all those concrete details also lends to the feeling of being trapped. . . until suddenly exorcised. And what a contrast the whole is with the image you provide.

Anonymous said...

Well, this one is just terrific. Really, this time, one of my favorites. I like all of the different sections--the soul and child fusing, the man with the fingers in the drain, this last bit--the tungsten silences and the coaxing and the eventual rebirth, the hoary salutes.

It moves to a much more ethereal place as it proceeds, of course, which is a wonderful progression. K.

Anonymous said...

sometimes we do need to cajole the soul at will

Unknown said...

beautiful in a horrific way so descriptive and atmospheric really makes one feel the hurt pain and ultimately the disgust of mankind ...loved it thank you x

Brian Miller said...

this one i think you should put with some pictures...not formal maybe like a shaun tan...and turn into a book...it is fine story telling...and your opening stanza speaks volume and pain in a few lines...

Pat Hatt said...

I wonderful flight your verse took me on, the soul on the lam line was great and with the Desperado remark made me think of the movie.

Maude Lynn said...

This is a full journey. Gorgeous progression.

Zoe said...

This called forth a deep, wordless soul-cry in me, resonating with every word.
There are so many strong images here, such raw, broken, healing, tumultous, ragged emotions. Wow. You wouldn't think it, but I am almost speechless. Incredible, truly incredible. I just wish I had the faintest idea how to write like this. :)

Shashidhar Sharma said...

A lovely story in the making...
Liked it so much..

Shashi

ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya
http://shadowdancingwithmind.blogspot.com/2012/01/whispers-haiku-on-how-i-write-poetry.html
At twitter @VerseEveryDay

Beachanny said...

A molten poem poured into urban and natural spaces..filling the darkness, the silence, the empty dark long thoughts culminated in that most Western US image - a desperado on the lam. I relate to these seemingly incongruous images because they fill a modern woman's life. Another consummate poem, dear Jenne.

Semaphore said...

I have, in my drafts of unfinished work, a piece which is trying to find its voice. It is still unfinished because, no matter how I tried, I hadn't been able to get the voice authentically right. Its working title is "Out of Body" - I tell you so that if ever it comes to light, you will remember and smile knowingly.

But if I never finish it, it doesn't matter... Here is the intent of it, you've done it.

You've found the voice for that lost, tortured child, whose soul has physically fled her abused body because that is the only way it can survive.

And you've merged that idea with the well-known tale of the "precious thing that has rolled into the storm drain" - the diamond earring, the charm bracelet, the rolling nickel - that all of us, or someone we know, have experienced.

Those two concepts merge powerfully in this fable, beautifully woven "with the silver skein of the twilight", as only you can. This poem is beautiful, painful - and, ultimately, brilliant.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

I'm confident that poem will be born in you, Sam-- thank you, and Gay, many thanks... xxxj

Sheila said...

So beautiful, jenne!