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.
18 comments:
really fascinating imagery....really love the diving down..mermaid, birthing of the calf...the singing to her at the end though not knowing what she hears....there is a magic to this jenne...
This definitely is a poem about a particular time of life...the keeping the vigil, the waiting for the black butterflies of last breath...singing but not knowing what she heard. Not an easy poem to read, but a heart-felt one! Whew.
Beautiful poem. The black butterflies of last breath - the swallow with the morphine (that is just fabulous - and the double meaning too), the birthing of calf, the parchment legs, the very mundane John Denver CD, all just terrific, very sad, but spot on for this and terrific. k.
Man! That's some heavy stuff, Jen! Stopped me in my tracks a couple of times; made me study the lines some. Great write!
This is an absolutely spectacular piece of writing. You drew me right into the scene, and I have been there, more than a few times, as someone made that final voyage. Fabulously written, and deep, and moving. And so real. Wow.
Jen, I'm stunned at the finesse with which you've described this scene, so familiar to me as a nurse working primarily with the elderly and death and dying. Your sensory details are so on target. I'm at a loss for the right adjective to choose for my response.
Beautifully written...I like 'her hands mimed swan flight'...;)
....singing to her and we don't know what they hear...touching and just lovely... especially the river
From the first stanza, you create a scene vivid and all-too-real. The opening line in the concluding stanza "I sang to her" gives this a deeply human touch, especially when we come to the breath-catching poignancy of "between our rooms". Marvelous imagery as always and lyricism at a level few others achieve.
With images of the exotic you illustrate the mundane, the thing each of us is destined to do. And then you make us realize how precious it all is. So effective. More important, though, so beautiful.
Hmm, I can't really tell what this is speaking of, and reading the comments to-date does not help. But like others, I love the imagery.
As a health-care provider, I recognize much of this but I am not sure this is a good by or long term care or both. I would have enjoyed being a bit more clear, but what I did enjoy was fantastic.
@sabio-- perhaps reading more attentively would assist you in comprehending a poem that turns on the image-- a number of them.
Thanks to all for your wonderful and encouraging comments! xxxj
splendid use of objects and imagery, lush in their impact and illustration, some really creatively penned lines as well, the entire fourth stanza brought a smile on my face where none was there all day. Love this piece. Great write. Thanks
@ Jen
Yeah, maybe if I had a better mind and was more careful I would get much more abstract, modern poetry. It is hard for me.
On my site you said I should consider reading a "reputable" book on modern poetry. Any suggestions? It can't just be an anthology of modern poems, but one which guides me through some.
Sabio-- as most people find my work accessible, not abstract but not dealing in hidden meanings I wonder if your issue is with imagery. To me the best poetry is rich with it-- this poem is about an old woman dying, the process, the intensity of the experience. here's a simple example of an image; the veins of dusk-- meant to show dusk in a new way, the veins standing in for the outline of the trees. The mission of any writer is to make something new, give the reader a new way of looking at something that brings the experience into relief and intensifies it. Perhaps you are trying too hard to read in to modern/contemporary poetry, as you seem quite intelligent and scholarly on your blog. xj
I am reading this one more time for dVerse, and I appreciate this poem even moreso. It packs an emotional impact, and as it unfolds the sadness is palpable. I feel as if I am rght there in the experience with you. You gave dying a face....gave us a glimpse of something we may not want to look at closely, but are compelled to.
Thanks, Brian! xj
Well, Jenne, This is some of the most intense imagery I have read in some time, truly beautiful writing. I am for one a great lover of good imagery and you never disappoint.
Pamela
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