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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, September 30, 2012

New Poem: A Tarnished Dream of Silver, for The Mag, Dverse, and Beyond....



Many thanks to Tess Kincaid for the Sunday photo up at The Mag...  



It Must Be Time for Lunch Now, Francesca Woodman, 1979
 

A  Tarnished Dream of Silver

After the great crash of ‘79, after they both
had died,  I took all thirteen pieces of the family sterling
to the pawn shop. 

A Judas daughter doesn’t need monogrammed
silverware lying around
while she settles matters for parents gone to dust.

Once that glint was gone, all the Victorian utensils
handed down from Great-grandmother Coddington,
the fluted serving spoons, the sterling shell-shaped
jelly dishes, the house sighed, and closed its eyes.

Then I found in her old portfolio a painting of her beloved
place settings, an unstretched canvas of spoons touching
forks, and I remembered her swearing in the corner

of the dining room in Albuquerque over her easel,
knocking back one scotch on the rocks then another,

while her toddler daughter stumbled in circles
in the immense and dark living room,
a lump hard as ore in her throat.

I didn’t want a mother who was a spoon in its cups.
I saw silver singing to me from the dish water
and then her face appeared,
and I pulled the plug.

ii

I remember George building a blast furnace
a small one, on his canyon land
and raiding industrial dumpsters for anything
he could glean the silver from
and take to the pawn shop.

I remember when they hacked up our peace
of mind,  like a murder of ravens
clacking epithets:
it always got their attention
to be on the wrong side of a sterling-handled
carving knife.

And how could I forget throwing
the silver-plated tea set down the stairs
when she punched him in the face,
until he was a concave clock
with broken hands?

iii

The silver halo of the angels I dream of
is their astounding millinery.  And the night gaudy
with the platinum puncture points of the stars.

I prefer the silver linings I see in the piled cumuli
over the Never Summer Range, I prefer that name
for mountains.

I prefer the silver side of a dream even when
that dream has gone to ruin like apples
tawdry with rot in the heavy-hearted grass. 

If you put me on trial and I took the stand,
I would still say it was necessary
to take away her silver spoons,
cash her in like Hopi pawn, keeping
the turquoise, smelting her down.



Jenne' R. Andrews, copyright 2012/

16 comments:

Scarlet said...

Exquisite writing Jenne ~

I am in awe of the silverware and dreams weaving in your words ~

Unknown said...

So many memories in silverware, some needing to be forgotten and others needing to be heard. I love the expressions, the hopes and regrets in your family remembrances, here Jenne. This is so creative and expressive. Thanks so much for sharing.♥

Daydreamertoo said...

Pheeew...this is written by and through the eyes of having lived it. Very deep, painful and we could read it as full of sadness yet, it isn't because it ended on a high of hope and putting the past where it belongs.
We cannot get to where we are without first coming from the places we've been, can we?
Heartfelt to me.

Maureen said...

Wonderfully told story, Jenne. That last stanza in the first section is a stand-out.

Laurie Kolp said...

Powerful... I especially like the second to last stanza.

Anonymous said...

That is such an evocative piece Jenne, really powerful and some outstanding imagery.

Brian Miller said...

fascinating jenne....the image in the dishwaater was rather haunting...so full of emotion....particularly the first stanza...

Other Mary said...

The silver threads through these lines like a sparkling stream through dark woods. This is layered and complex and skillfully written.

Unknown said...

This felt like familiar and familial territory and I resonated much with the emotional and physical landscape (I spent some early years in Taos and a teen year in Albuquerque, where my brother still lives). That last stanza was a potent full stop on your achingly beautiful journey. I think only art gives us these tools to smelt something worthwhile from these experiences. You use the conceit to great effect, magnificent.

Claudia said...

the scene that touched me most was the one with the dishwater when her face appeared and you pulled the plug...tight emotional write jenne

Tess Kincaid said...

The pain...the emotion...all here...I know the feeling...you go Judas daughter!

Anonymous said...

Wonderful intense poem - so much silver in so many permutations - a kind of quicksilver in all of this too as you transmute it into wonderful poetry. k.

ayala said...

Tight emotional poem. Powerful...you pulled me in and I could not stop feeling the pain so raw. A great write, thank you.

Unknown said...

Powerful, Jenne! Form and flow augment your precise word choices. This piece, without contrivance or manipulation, fills the reader with emotion and wonder. Images emerge that are ripe and true. You did yourself well, here.

Carrie Van Horn said...

Wow....an intense write....beautifully told!

Sheila said...

whew! strong imagery and intense memories. My kind of reading.