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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, March 15, 2012

New Poem: Desire Explicated for DVerse Poets

Many thanks to Charles Miller for a tantalizing and irresistible prompt..... at Dverse Poets Pub.
 
Desire Reexplained

All my thoughts always speak to me of Love,
Yet have between themselves such difference
That while one bids me bow with mind and sense,
A second says, “Go to: look you above;”
The third one, hoping, yields me joy enough;
And with the last come tears, I scarce know whence:
All of them craving pity in sore suspense,
Trembling with fears that the heart knows of.

--from a sonnet in La Vita Nuova -  Dante

All day thoughts of you sprig like crocus,
The photo of your sleek golden body 
rising from the Scilla harbor

Like Odysseus redeemed.

You, Calabrese to the core,
Your smile and bearing
Constricting my heart,
Saw me as well in a photograph, my hair gray,
My dog gathered on my lap.

How else did you find and appear
to know me—did you plot the cartography
of my solitude?

Did you read that years ago I free-fell
into the arms of someone in that very place
who taught me the Song of the Resistance
and wept when the train bore him away
from my arms? 

You call me from Napoli;
You want to see me, to talk.
I make excuses; and where is your wife
I ask you, bronze man rising in ardor
On the horizons of time?

You say in your tongue
Lei non c'e 'or..  She is not here.
But other photos give me details
To remind me of what happens
When I set sail without compass
Or my diving gear

Into the very moon-shot waters
Where desire and myth collide:

No matter the blue joy of the dive,
I would escape with nothing but my life.

In Italian..

Che Ti Voglio Esplicitata

Tutti i miei pensieri sempre mi parli di amore,
Tuttavia hanno tra loro tale differenza
Che, mentre si piegano le offerte me con la mente e il senso,
Un secondo dice: "Vai a: cerca sopra di voi";
Il terzo, sperando, mi dà gioia a sufficienza;
E con le ultime lacrime venire, scarsa so dove:
Tutti pietà desiderio in sospeso dolente,
Tremante di paura che il cuore conosce.
- da un sonetto a La Vita Nuova - Dante

Tutti i pensieri del giorno, come si rametto di crocus
Il tuo corpo elegante oro sale dall'acqua

Come Ulisse redento.

Tu, Calabrese fino al fin, con il quale
Sono affascinato e che mi costringe a
il rilevamento e il tuo sorriso.

Mi hai visto in una fotografia, il mio capelli grigi,
Il mio cane riuniti sulle mie ginocchia
In quale altro modo hai trovato e apparire
di conoscere me;  hai trovato un modo
per mappare la mia solitudine?

Avete letto che anni fa mi caduta
tra le braccia di qualcuno in quel luogo molto
un calabrese con gli occhi tristi
che mi ha insegnato la canzone della Resistenza
e pianse quando il treno lo portò via
dalle mie braccia?

Tu mi chiami da Napoli;
Vuoi vedere me, a parlare.
Mi scuso, e dove è tua moglie
Vi chiedo, l'uomo di bronzo in aumento in ardore
Sugli orizzonti del tempo.

Tu dici nella tua lingua
Lei non c'e 'or .. Lei non è qui.
Ma le altre foto mi danno i dettagli
Per ricordarmi di ciò che accade
Quando salpò senza bussola
O la mia attrezzatura subacquea

Nelle acque cerulee d'amore
Nei casi in cui il desiderio e il mito si scontrano.
.
Non importa la gioia azzurra dell'immersione,
fuggirebbe con nulla ma la mia vita.


xx
This poem explained:

Guarda--a certi tempi la fantasia d'amore 'e migliore che la realita… 'e certo.  Io so questo.  E quanto dovera basta avere una finestra alla amore che amore en braccio.  Perche si due facciamo amore a fuori di familia y sangue,  si accedere un terremoto di lagrime per tutti.  Non voglio essere la una qui 'e la forza di quel destino.  Un terremoto io non so e mai sarebbe ancor....  Legge mi poesia en cual ho detto lo che viva ancor nel mio cuore.  Niente mi piacerebbe che cominciare il furore di amore con ___ en una notte splendida ma… per noi questo ha il potenza di iniziare un gran sfortuna. 

Beware-- at certain times, fantasy is better than reality-- that is certain.  I know this.  And how much it should suffice to have a window on love than in one's arms.  For if two make love outside the ties of family and blood, an earthquake takes place with tears for all.  I don't want to the one to be the force of such a destiny.  I am not an earthquake... Nothing would please me more than to have a night of truly mad love with ___ , but for us this has the power to initiate great misfortune... 






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copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012
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4 comments:

Brian Miller said...

it is a dangerous dance for which few rise unscathed...but it is nice to know you still peak interest you know...smiles.

March 15, 2012 at 9:15 PM
Anonymous said...

No matter the blue joy of the dive! Such a great line--of course, during the dive it's pretty good--suffering afterwards! Which you well express. K.

March 15, 2012 at 11:01 PM
Claudia said...

nice..loved the italian..i think italian is the most erotic language on the planet..i can imagine that it was so hard to resist the temptation.. but think it was a wise decision for sure...smiles

March 16, 2012 at 2:30 PM
Unknown said...

Sorry to have taken so long to get to your beautiful poem Jenne. This is really powerful in numerous ways, calling us to be aware of that divide between reality, dream and imagination. This has such powerful resonance in my own life, where that desire for adventure, bronze bodies or simple oblivion from the humdrum took me into paths best left unexplored. Your prose addition clarifies exactly that fit between life and poetry where they become integrated. This is the point of the prompt, to become aware how poetry instantiates time in a seemingly eternal moment, though life moves on and must be lived instant to instant where each differs. Pulling those pieces into the work of art that is our life holds together with the integrity of other passions and desires just as important.

March 16, 2012 at 9:18 PM

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