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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.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

New Poem: A Beautiful Sadness-- for Dverse Poets Poetics and Beyond...

 
 
Notes on a Beautiful Sadness

The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
     down in the flood of remembrance,
 I weep like a child for the past.

D.H. Lawrence, Piano

Oh but if there had been glamor
in that beautiful place. Or if the sadness

itself had a tint like the sunrise:
the adobe that held the small family

like a darkly veined hand in the alfalfa
incense of summer, the cicadas’

relentless ave verum. If the dark-eyed
infant in the christening gown had not

been as mortal, her skin listening, hearing
the rise and fall of remonstrating voices.

If the flower-lovely green-eyed mother
ever sang, or laughing, buoyed us,

if the father’s amorous play were ever
returned before us so that we could know

what happiness was. If down the hallway
of the years there had been a doorway

into light, an invitation to come into day
whole and brave and hungry, or the world

itself dance toward us in a red dress
of possibility. As it happens now, the house

is there shuttered, hollyhocks in flagging
ruin; the girl I was in the desert years

on-living, proffering me midnight roses,
her dark hair a wound.


 cc
 
Many thanks for this prompt, Stuart.  Just take a peek at my Italy poems in particular on this blog and you’ll see we’re kindred spirits.

A wonderful prompt to write of the “beautiful sadness” of melancholy grounded in locale ala D.H. Lawrence up today at DVerse Poets’ Pub



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012 






9 comments:

Maureen said...

All of the senses manifest in this lovely poem. So many beautiful images.

Anonymous said...

Hi Jenne, Yes, a beautifully sad poem--wasted chances. It is hard to transcend absences, especially as a child when one knows few differences. k.

Anonymous said...

This is tight, written with precision and some real excellent word usage. I interpreted this as focused on the family, the yearning for love which so often doesn't materialise within what should be the most loving environment of all. And in that very fact- that families are so often besieged with difficulties, turmoils, there lies a beautiful sadness- and you captured it so poetically, with such melancholy- well- it was excellent - very much enjoyed it- one of my favourite lines being the close- her hair a wound- loved this. Thank you for stopping by and thank you for sharing! P.s hope I interpreted it right! I often miss the mark and tend to go off on wild tangents! :)

Anonymous said...

Such melancholic tones... I loved the abode held the family like a darkly veined hand in the alfalfa incense of summer. Beauty all about and a sadness within

Brian Miller said...

wow. you really bring this to life jenne with your deft pen...smiles...the lines of the hallway leading to the light...i feel you in there esp in light of all that comes before it...nicely done...

Scarlet said...

The rise and fall of remonstrating voices of the mother and father is telling ~ I do like the invitation, but how her desert heart wounds ~ Lovely writing ~

Maude Lynn said...

Incredible imagery! "in the alfalfa
incense of summer" just took my breath away.

sheila said...

...and you continue to preach to the choir with me, Jenne. Childhood longing is indeed beautifully sad. So, nice to see your comment on my blog. Hope you are well.

Claudia said...

a beautiful sadness indeed...
loved esp. the world itself dancing toward us in a red dress of possibility...