WELCOME! BENVENUTI!

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, September 26, 2014

Second Guest Poem - Rosalba Di Vona - Magia della solitudine dell' anima - The Magical Solitude of the Soul

Welcome to the second week of publication of a contemporary Italian poet’s work on my blog.  The poet Rosalba Di Vona has graciously permitted me to translate her poem Magia della solitudine dell’anima/ The Magical Solitude of the Soul.

This is a brilliant poem about existential torment, of the body attempting to speak with the soul or more properly, attempting to listen to what the soul says in and with silence.  Please know that this may well be an imperfect translation.  I ask that you feel free to comment—this is a blog, after all—even contributing a better working of the poem in English or parts of it—to do it even more justice.The poem appears first in rich and beautiful Italian.  Then, the translation. My heartfelt thanks to this wonderful poet!

Benvenuti alla seconda settimana di pubblicazione dell'opera di un poeta italiano contemporaneo sul mio blog.  Il poeta/la poetessa formidabile Rosalba Di Vona gentilmente ha permesso a me di tradurre la poesia Magia della solitudine dell’anima.

Questa è una poesia brillante sul tormento esistenziale, del corpo tentando di parlare con l'anima, o più correttamente, tentando di ascoltare ciò che dice l'anima e nel silenzio.  Si prega di sapere che questo potrebbe essere una traduzione imperfetta.  Chiedo che sentono liberi di commentare — questo è un blog, dopo tutto — anche contribuendo a un migliore lavoro della poesia in inglese o parti di esso — fare esso anche più giustizia. Grazie di cuore, Rosalba!


Painting by Lorenzo Luciani



Magia della solitudine dell’anima

Resto ad ascoltare il lento passo
che spesso appare scomodo
ma intimo confessa
l’intervista all’anima inquieta

aggrovigliata nella sedia preferita
stringo al petto le ginocchia e fisso
piedi scalzi laccati di rosso e
mani  lente a massaggiare caviglie

sguardo dolce che implora energie
nell’intimità del grande silenzio che
racconta anche ciò che non sopporta
a  chi non l’ascolta senza inorridire

magia della solitudine dell’anima
che non ha bisogno di lenti per vedere e
credere nelle azioni che verranno ricompensate o
per trovare approdo dove il razionale è latitante

cerco solo l’intuizione giusta quella dei verbi che bramano
gesti da fare per incontrare  la speranza di futuri migliori
non si sopravvive oggi se non si pensa al domani
Il dolore della vita è maestro e in lui cerco la speranza

copyright Rosalba Di Vona  2014.


The Magical Solitude of the Soul

della poetessa Rosalba Di Vona.

I rest, to listen to the slow pace
that often seems inconvenient
but intimately confesses
an interview with the unquiet soul.

Tangled in a favorite chair
pressing my knees to my chest,
my feet fixed and lacquered red,
my slow hands massaging my ankles,

with a sweet look that summons energy
into the intimacy of the great silence
that recounts, even though
it is insoportable
to one who cannot listen
without being horrified.

The magic of the soul's solitude,
that doesn't need glasses to see
and believe in actions                                                                                                                
that will be rewarded
or to find approbation
where the rational is fugitive.

I am looking for that certain intuitiveness
of verbs that crave gestures of action,
to encounter hope for a better future.
You do not survive today
if you do not think about tomorrow.
The pain of life is a teacher
and it is there that I search for hope.

A poem by Rosalba Di Vona
Translation:  Jenne' R. Andrews

3 comments:

Nadia Angelini said...

Carissima Jenne! Trovo la tua traduzione coerente e ben sintetizzante i palpiti di cuore che la poetessa, Rosalba Di Vona
intendeva esprimere nei suoi versi.
Complimenti!!!!

Maureen said...

Lovely and profound.

Anonymous said...

Solitudine,la grande solitudine interiore è cosa buona dice Rilke"la solitudine è la dieta dell'anima,ma io so che crea anche mostri.Le grandi religioni,sono state create in deserti e montagne,e vedi il tremendo risultato.E tu ne hai paura,ti raccogli aggrovigliata sulla sedia,nella posizione fetale,tipica della difesa,cara Rosalba.Peraltro sono versi di esperta mano questi tuoi,di grande arte,di raro riscontro.Se poi la solitudine è anche esteriore,il pericolo è doppio.Precisi studi scientifici,dimostrano che la privazione sensoriale,specie quella sonora, genera allucinazioni(gli anacoreti vedono diavoli e Dio...).. Qujesto tuo blog è un po' troppo stipato,e ci si perde un po' specie nella parte discorsiva,lo scuro compatta un po' tutto.Vedi di spaziare.I versi che sono distanziati, si apprezzano meglio.Si respira meglio.Buona l'idea di affiancare la traduzione quando necessaria.Ti abbraccio e ti auguro una serena fine settimana.- Gilberto