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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, March 10, 2012

What /Who I Was Doing in 1999.... for DVerse Poetics

Boy howdy, this is an entertaining prompt for today's DVerse Poetics.  I wouldn't say I was exactly in love in '99, more like having a few last flings...

Bad-Ass

One day in the cafe
the tall drink of water from Savannah
with all the chrome
said the run from Ogden to Denver
hauling the U.S. mail
got to him;

He ran blue eyes over me
where I sat reading the paper--
he had silver hair and long fingers
and still used Old Spice.

In the parking lot a kiss; later a call
and then I went to get him;
call me millennium man, he said
your sugar daddy of the new year.

And he wore a tooled silver six-gun with chamois smooth skin
loaded with an ever-ready cache of warm silverfish ammo
I loved in my holster
where I would yearn and smolder.

Why would you drink me down
Like a milkshake that way
he asked
in the wake of a hot first go
half out of our clothes in the kitchen
nice girls don't do that

Nice boys don't let them --
if they want to come back
my riposte.

How'd I get under your skin, he'd tease
when I played that song
while he suckled me hard
like a neonate Hampshire boar.
  
He'd go no holds barred
until I was on the edge,
get up and drift off
to smoke;
I'd finish myself off in the dark
with one sympathetic hand
in one smooth glissade, biting my lips,
holding something back
not my heart.

He never thawed or flinched;
I'm your millennium man he'd say,
taking out his comb.
He would dress and smoke
and pace and drive away
and here it is again,
the new year, 3 a.m.,

The horseplay and innuendo
and unfinished business
of our bruised mouths,
small whirlpools now
in the tide of my blood.


copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

8 comments:

Claudia said...

ha...you should never trust one who still uses old spice....goodness...what an encounter..tight write like we're used from you..

Brian Miller said...

wow so 1999 was a hot year for you...smiles....nice descriptors as well...i like the kinda outlaw, wild west feel you overlay jenne

Mystic_Mom said...

Jenne - oh wow...this is just wow!

Anonymous said...

Oh my gosh, now THAT is heat sister!!! Wow, surely I'm blushing. :)

I have always loved your creative use of language, the visuals you draw forth with your words. I was grinning at the Old Spice bit; I think I bought that for my dad on just about every birthday and every Christmas.

This leaves me wondering who is the greater badass, you or the millenium man?

These are my favorite parts:

"the tall drink of water from Savannah
with all the chrome"

"He ran blue eyes over me"

"In the parking lot a kiss; later a call"

I really loved the back and forth conversation in italics. Very effective. I can picture the facial expressions and other nonverbals.

"nice girls don't do that
Nice boys don't let them --
if they want to come back
my riposte"

"I'd finish myself off in the dark
with one sympathetic hand
in one smooth glissade, biting my lips"

"small whirlpools now
in the tide of my blood"

I'm so glad you liked the prompt; you did a fantastic job!

~Shawna
rosemarymint.wordpress.com

Maude Lynn said...

Oh, outstanding!

Beachanny said...

This gave me a catch in the throat. How even something so double edged can be written with such clarity and lyricism. This, as much as any piece of yours, rings with beauty and authenticity, and might I say a personal bravery. Excellent.

Timoteo said...

Nice girls don't do that...but who likes nice girls?
This poem is what I've come to fancy, and adore, and to just sit here in slack-jawed amazement about you.

Scarlet said...

Whew...a searing and beautiful write from you...how you described him so well (so cold and unflinching) and as well as your night...enjoyed this ~