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.
13 comments:
Wow, Jenne... I'm speechless.
dang...nice...and apropo too for the times we are in...we do need to get busy and work out this world...i dont think we can wait around on divine intervention...and i don't know if waiting for the mythical quick exit right before the crap hits the fan either...smiles.
sometimes the suffering in the world can just overwhelm us and i agree with bri..we need to get busy to do our small part to change things...even if we can't change as much as we would love to
In my recent workshops with high school students, we've been talking a lot about the idiosyncrasies of line. I'm curious about your variable approach to enjambment. What's your thought process about lineation?
Brave poem. Such a wonderful metaphor at the end. So interesting to see the thorned garden convert to barbed wire. "Shroud" of barbed wire especially poignant. K.
Myth, of course, holds deep truth, which this poem aims to reveal and free. Your imagery is so strong, beginning with "the priest's pallid hands" and ending with "every shroud of barbed wire". The sense of the hidden in your opening lines opens into conflagration that finally allows us to imagine what will rise from the ashes.
Yes.. this is in the top drawer of poetry. Just brilliant in conception and flawlessly written. You pack a big punch.
Thanks to each person/poet who took the time to read and respond to this problematic poem. And so nice to hear from you, Dawn-- have missed you. Regarding lineation I know that I vary traditional breaks with enjambed lines and it seems always to come to down to wishing to convey either that I hear a brief pause, or a stop, or that I want at least for the following of the image to continue-- I think my approach is in transition, honestly and perhaps it's fair to say that in this draft, I'm focused more on unburdening myself of my meaning as Woolf puts it, to which the lines are somewhat incidental to but still of course part of the whole. I'll give it more thought as it's a very important question-- thanks! xxxj
...I was afraid to write this and so I think perhaps the lining reflects a fluctuation between feeling brave and holding back, perhaps my unconscious attempt to convey the tide between and among doubt, grief, faith...xj
This is very bravely told, serenely and confidently in its refelection on reality versus promise. I think the mythic features of the Christos have outweighed what I call the existential, thereby letting in such aberrations. Though that too, ultimately, hearkens to an aboriginal sinfulness, an idea quite out of fashion now.
The appeal to a triumphalist Christ versus the Jesus who walked on sand and mountain makes for too much for fantasy, drawing away from reality. Your poem is expertly crafted, I thought, though I would want to trust your instincts since you're closer to it than I.
Amazing work, Jen.
Parts of this, Jen, broke my heart a little.
I'm not sure what to believe these days, either. Buddism seems to make a lot of sense, peace and inner calm the goal, we are made of love and have nothing to fear. Then Christianity as "The Way."
You have only deepened the mystery for me in this.
Jenne - brava! Wow...
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