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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.

Friday, October 5, 2012

A Prose-Poem: Five Fathoms, for DVerse and Beyond...



Five Fathoms

Frieda’s calf slips from her in a surge of rose-colored blood.  He hits the earth and lies still as a boot.  She strokes him with her python trunk; his lungs stay folded like a split concertina.

She trumpets elephant alarm to the harem of cows, sentinel ghost ships in captivity's black.  No one comes, no one runs in.  Ponderous in her love, she pulls back one redwood of a leg, kicks the calf like someone putting a cue ball in the pocket; he lands against a cement block.  She sends her ear-splitting cry like the wolves in their hunger folly out into the night; her mouth is a terrified wound. 

She lifts his trunk with her own; at last he gasps and lies stretched out,  panting.  The cows bow to her from the stage apron; she has brought him to life, his humped rubbery body in the wet.

She curls her trunk in triumph and then nudges him up, up;  he clambers to his stubby legs and splay-walks then, one tentative picket-toed foot after the next.  They go into the good dark of the herd. 

ii

I lie in the warm water singing the hymn of the new mother, my calf lodged at the gate of my body, her wet round head crowning.  I pull her down and up, and into my arms; she is water-blue and then pink.  Her tiny mouth works and her face becomes the o of a cry.  Birth angels gather in the dark. 

What else does the maternal dark hide?  The farrowing foxes, vixen biting the cords down to the stub.  The small kits at her belly, tugging out the milk, the wild cries in the night, the heart seared, the milk surging in the breast, the birth cry behind the front lines, ascendant and holy.

iii

Candlelight makes a noose around my neck pulling me toward you. We wind down together like two pocket watches in our chairs, the lopsided candle flickering.  We are tallow.  O hour of paraffin, the veering light with its tiny lyric of smoke.  I try to pry open the walnut of your silences,

for I know that within you have sailed around the world.  I want to see what you saw; whales, off the coast of Newfoundland.  Christ descended, in the grotto.  Sweet the night's kiss of shadow.  We need a blue bowl of apples here, to flare up.  What a bad idea it was to exhume anyone sleeping there.  They rise up, crows in excoriation, flying up between us, against the throbbing globe of the sun.

iv

The orphaned elephant and her keeper slumber in straw; sun kisses the savannah; the lioness ranges, drops the gazelle fawn before her young.  Out on the campfires of time we  taste blood.  When you forgive me I bite my lip, for the rich ripe taste of salt.

Five fathoms down I rise, gyrate in place to soft music, retire to my room and lift each leg ten times.  I will never be whole again.  Wind stirs the Styrofoam panels over the windows but there is no keeping out the blades of day.  I see the mother elephant delivering herself of her calf.  More, that the slung mare out on the field that pulled into herself refusing food and water has dropped her foal.  Here in the room’s blue absence, all the dried and dusky flowers, petals crumbling to ash.



copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2012

5 comments:

Daydreamertoo said...

I've seen them give birth on TV but it is never the same as watching it in real life. You gave such detailed insight it was almost like seeing it, feeling it, knowing it. I'm glad the first one survived. Animals seem to know instinctively what they need to do, too.
Gripping read!

Brian Miller said...

wow...what an intriguing blend of moments...the sex, the birth...great intentional use of language through out to set the tone as well jenne...his humped rubbery body in the wet...the gate of my body...the kicking of the body...so much emotion in there....oy...this is really good jenne..

Anonymous said...

Wow! This is a very beautiful and moreover original piece, from the elephant booting the calf to the noose to the bath to the noose of candlelight to the elephant again -and the bitten lip. Well, the elephant always in the room as it were.

As always you have so many beautiful phrases - the dark of the herd, the dark of the mother, the noose of the candlelight, the o of the baby's face, the blades of day, the blue bowl of apples, all that business re the travels - the body. Very well done. k.

Beachanny said...

Dense, primal and artistic. Each section a prism that radiates life in another plane from a different angle. Nature, natural, beautiful, voracious, cruel, cyclical, fragile all encompassed in an ever moving sphere of images, a verisimilitude of life!

Unknown said...

The poem is full of veracity and lyric beauty. The haunting clarion of your gorgeous poetic voice shines through the prose, a real challenge. Your imagery sparkles and the psychological heartbeat thundered in my ears. Masterfully and artfully drawn.