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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.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

New Poem: Misericordia, for DVerse OLN and Beyond....


Misericordia

Lent has stilled the bell tongues of the town
Save for the burnished carillon of the Catholics
Tolling the hour to the courthouse.

But think not of the dark-robed there
Meting out a facsimile of justice.
Think of the choirs of impious geese

Driven by the unseen to open water
After hours on the flight-path
Over the Continental Divide.

The earth wakes and cares not
Whether the Penitentes
Erect timber crosses in the Jemez. 

The waters will swell and course
And the body will surge and sing, burn
And desire.  The soul dies

If we are silenced, made to feel
We cannot speak, should not name
What is seen with our very own eyes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of
The Big Dipper every night, pouring
Milk over the fields, that Canis Major

Burns on, glazing  the mares’ backs
With frozen light.  Someone is turning
Over the earth with a great fork

So that air, sun and water come to it
To soften, split and raise the seed. 
Mozart tried to finish his requiem

In whispers that could not be
Deciphered.  He shut himself away
To hear the callings he wrote down

In a rain of black notes on parchment. 
He couldn’t stop or silence himself. 
Whitman the same, writing A woman

Waits for me, of waiting and surging,
Manly love and we, we women
Are the takers and keepers

Of the seminal milk--
But we seek diligent assuagement
patience, rapture,
from the lover’s hands, mouth. 

ii

I need you. I hunger for you. 
As it is Lent, I confess
that I have often terrified myself away

From being filled, released
To my own torrent.
Here then is a sundered dream:

The priest proffers
The Host to me and I open his robe
And take the bread of love into my mouth. 
He goes down on his knees, spilling forth
The incarnate. 
Later he finds me and spares me nothing,

With his circling tongue
And probing fingers. 
I am the bread of life, he says; 

She who comes to me will not hunger.
But broken promises—that we will no longer
Make war, that we will be changed, rage on

Like the taffeta robes of the sunset
Even when the sagacious geese that ascend
And call to each other mate in mid-air

In a wanton refueling,
And all the unseen things writhe together
In the dark privacy of the waking brown grass,

And the slugs make their luminous orchid
From the intertwining and strange
elongated glands

That then burst,
So that each falls to the grass, spent.  

c
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copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012



10 comments:

Maureen said...

Striking imagery (especially those last five lines) in a multi-leveled, deeply thought-provoking poem that bears more than a single reading.

Brian Miller said...

The earth wakes and cares not
Whether the Penitentes
Erect timber crosses in the Jemez

nice. i like that acknowledgement...i also like the great turning of the fork as well in that first part jenne...

that is some dream there in that second part...some interesting intimacy there...

Timoteo said...

Forgive me, but when you opened that robe, this came to me:

You don't give
an inch
but you take
a lot of them

Timoteo said...

May I also add that that moment was sac religious.

ayala said...

Lovely imagery...beautifully penned.

Anonymous said...

Whoa! A very torrid poem! I can feel surrealism and naturalism - Dali and Courbet and Caravaggio and I don't know--how about a little Audubon or Eakins? But all turned into women, of course.

I am joking - it is a very cool poem. I am a bit tired to comment coherently, but was impressed and moved! K.

Mystic_Mom said...

Jenne, whether I like it or not, your images and words always draw me in at the start and pull me through to the end. Wow.

Semaphore said...

You are at full powers here, exploring alliterative technique with the bells, flowing into the cadence of an ode, mixing the sacred and the profane into a feast for the tongue that tests the line between blasphemy and transcendence.

Jenne' R. Andrews said...

Thank you for all of these perspicacious and salient comments, dear writing friends/fellow poets. I have no idea where I thought I was headed with this but I was first turned on to-- and then by-- those mating slugs by William Pitt Root, editor par excellence of Cutthroat..I am ever running behind these days but will find you...xxxj .

Unknown said...

Simply and irrevocably beautifully crafted and spun into bones that found the courage to pen the words. Your words rise from the screen and soak the night like a soft torrent of rain that will nurture wild flowers in the morning sun.