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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, July 10, 2012

New Poem: Dos Amantes, for DVerse Poets Pub Open Link Night and Beyond...


 
James Dean...

 
Dos Amantes

Dos cuerpos frente a frente
son a veces raíces
en la noche enlazadas

Octavio Paz

We were twelve, the cottonwoods in full leaf,
everywhere the cicadas and their leg-rubbing
evensong; a cooling breeze from the Rio Grande.

She liked the photo of me in the rope swing
in the patio after I was freed from the body cast,
nude there, my legs bowed, in a garden

of volunteer hollyhocks.  Alone together
in the guest apartment over the adobe garage,
we would slip our nightgowns and lie down

under the quilt; lights from the traffic gilding
the dark vegas, we would trade off, she my hidalgo
troubadour from the bootleg album of my father’s

from Mexico, I her James Dean—she was too
fervent too young, sliding down to kiss me open.
I wasn’t ready for this, her tongue like a dove’s

feather. But I kissed her back and deep by instinct,
and ran my hands over her butterfly hips
and she said I had eyes the color of the river.

One night the chulos roaming the boulevard
teased us, looking up at us on the balcony;
we went back in laughing, slipping from  

our fiesta skirts into one piece bathing suits;
she said the body I was already ashamed of
was beautiful and we explored each other

standing in the shadows, our breasts round,
swelling when we lay down to undress
one another, entwined and nude

in the moonlight under the ice-blue sheet. 
Like this, dos cuerpos frente a frente,
two girls body to body, our mouths aching

and ripe, pliant and tender nubs at the cleft
taut and glistening, dark early cherries
swelling on the bough.




 x

Trans. epigraph: 

"Two bodies face to face
are roots entwined in the night."

OP 

10 comments:

Claudia said...

you capture the fragility and wonder of that age well - ha - brought back some memories of playing doctor...with boys though..

Brian Miller said...

well now...that was a bit of a magic moment...really well crafted as you go into who you became for each other...kiss you open, whew some nice heat...and i love her thoughts on how you view your body as well...i think we all need those that reassure us in that area...

Unknown said...

This is beautifully realized. My mother, who is a lesbian, did not have these coming of age encounters, and I think they would have grounded her, helped her come to terms with her identity earlier and given her some confidence.

Anonymous said...

Stunning poem - so many wonderful wonderful lines and images. An age of innocence and desire - so beautifully captured - I can't list them all - dove's feather - butterfly hips. k.

ayala said...

A great capture of youth and sensuality...lovely!

Unknown said...

Amazingly tender and filled with the wonder of innocent sensuality. Your description of the sexual play is very loving, erotic and vivid, allowing us to share in the experience without prurience. I love the description of NM, kniwn quite well to me, though not from this perspective:) So true and real. PS you might wish to foitnote vegas and chulos, since many outside NM will not know their meaning. :) This is a lovely poem, crafted superbly.

Beachanny said...

How elegant your images, how sensual the feel throughout. This defining rite of passage so deftly managed, all safeness, all beauty, the realization of womanhood. Your skill with words makes every subject you write about unfold naturally, easily, elegantly. I was caught up in this entirely. Truly beautiful.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jeanne - I don't like to do this, but I wrote a poem about a horse that I meant to do for OLN but didn't have time to. I am only telling you because I always think of you with horses. I don't really know anything at all about horses. The poem is not from my experience. But at any rate, thought of you. k. http://manicddaily.wordpress.com/2012/07/11/colonel-kernel/

Britton Minor said...

Tears I choose not to explain; blindingly beautiful my friend--the unapologetic memory of a an experience so natural and bright that I wish every woman could have it.

Anonymous said...

oooo...lemmetellyaIamdrenched! Sultry - licking mango juice off all sorts of things! Delicious writing.