La Parola Vivace: about depression

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.

Showing posts with label about depression. Show all posts

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Poem for Saturday

Saturday’s Child

What can be understood of that one

Who lives by enduring

The intolerable

Someone tending an alcoholic wife.

Someone on eternal duty to the broken

Someone bringing home stray lambs

Because no one else will

She imagines, or because

She has damned herself

To hard labor, like pitching out
A rank shed of compressed alfalfa

Where something bereft

Had been shut in for years

What makes a man trudge through

His own house

Like a burro plowing poppy fields

In a track of obligation, bearing up

When he is running out of air and time

Hooked up to oxygen, too married

To someone too dissipated

To care for herself

When the door is open

And he could at least take flight

For a short while, dump them all

So that they are forced

to save themselves.

What addicts someone

To a bankrupt past

So that even as the years fall

Like corn stalks, scythed down

By first frost

He lives in the ash-fields

Of his traumas and follies.

Someone I know lies in the dark

All afternoon, her face to the wall.

She is tired of swimming upstream

Of willing herself on.

What will rescue her?

How will she come

To love herself

Enough to say

I matter

To the world.

Clearly she must locate her will

On the map of her own soul,

Pitch herself at the blue horizon

Heart-first, disobeying
the tyrant mind, return

To the fishing village on the sea

To listen to the tide

pensione shutters flung wide

Permit herself a cup

Of happiness/alegre/alegria

Before the curtain falls

On the one-act existential play

You might subtitle

Waiting for God--

I ask a final time

we see that some

convict themselves

of imaginary sins.

How then

Shall we love such a person.

What liberates her. What cure

As in a day in the country.

What food, as in

A taste of forbidden foie gras.

What marshaled, searing inner light.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

A Poem for One Shot Wednesday....

Posted for One Shot Wednesday hosted by the wonderful One Stop Poetry.

I do think it's appropriate to call this a ballad, however unorthodox the theme and of course it has its personal elements, hopefully eased by use of the second person. And, it doesn't rhyme-- but to me, a ballad nevertheless...xxj

The Ballad of Highway 14

You were shattered enough

Clawing at your arms in withdrawal

To lie for a scrip of Valium

Buy a gallon of wine

And head down Highway 14

It was raining hard enough in you

For you to stumble to the clerk’s desk

At the Motel 6

Grab a key and check in.

Then you sank into the naugahyde chair

The ghastly stillness

Against the muffled thrum of semis

Cruising at warp speed along the highway

You’d forgotten how it felt

To feed a cat or boil an egg,

Poured your booze down an ant hill

Detoxed from benzos

Only to have the Fourth of July

Explode in your mind

All those synapses firing

For the first time in years

With it the rolling panic attacks

That drove you out of bed

To doze on the edge of town in your car

AA gave you the snowball’s chance in hell award

And you fled the Serenity Club

With its crowing dilettante women

And their cagey pronouncements

The dark men in ball caps sucking

On cigarettes with their surly tongues

A husband who bore down on you

Like an angry pecking owl

Get well, get well, get well.

How you wanted to believe

You could.

Days passed like a waterfall

Of waking dreams

You came and went from the admonitions

Of one time friends

Bolstering yourself with the Big Book

The Bible, anything

Hugging the dogs

By then half-afraid of you

How you would scream alone in the house

And throw the furniture out into the yard

At midnight

So you thought

It was past time

For a mercy killing

A self-euthanasia, and took

The cheap room on the truck route

And sat in the quiet

Looking out at the blue blue mountains

At the grade wine with its

Taunting gilded label

And the valium valorum, both together

The means to get some sleep

For eternity.

But something in you

You thought had died stirred

With lifting wings

Something that tasted

Like hope, some grateful salt

In your mouth: the mountains called

Over and over to the eye

And the nights of lovemaking in the fields

And the geese keeping on

Heading into the cold

Like your nomadic heart

Or the all-enduring will

of a polar explorer.

You rose and gathered up your things

And left that place to its peeling paint

And its stench of smoke

And lonely masturbating traveling salesmen

Homing, heading west,

Into the welcoming dusk

Your surer self waiting open-armed

For you, at the end

Of Highway 14.

All Rights Deserved....

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Through a Glass Darkly This Morning

Here goes-- more venting-- ... You don't have to listen or reassure me if you're tired of my dips and plateaus followed by my literary fiats. Eject now-- or not. I am writing this online because I don't want to be alone in my pain....

My old nemesis Insomnia has returned. I can't sleep. I've been up for days, getting fewer and fewer hours, crashing and getting six or seven hours, then up again and getting fewer hours, to crash again. I hate this.
Nothing makes me want to jump off a cliff more than not sleeping. How ironic that I've named the new blog The Spirited Word... I am in so much trouble.

Something about lying down in my so peaceful, pretty room in my apartment makes me feel vulnerable and vigilant. I think it's that I am caught between lives-- the old one in which I was afraid, stuck, helpless, and the new one in which I'm busy, happy and I feel like I'm about to turn 62 with some good years ahead.

Yesterday when I got tied up in my underwear about not resting I went out to "the place"--- actually D's house now, where we are horseless but still up to the ears in yellow cats and kittens. I went into my old room where I often rest for a few hours in between our great talks about writing....

I lay down in the musty, torn-lace dark and lay there from 4 in the afternoon until 9. I did get a nap and then I didn't want to kill all the cats: I was glad to see the little beggars..

But then I came home and it all started again; I've been torturing myself with the following, running the laments I've run before and that you've been so patient with::

I got angry at the surgeon who didn't tell me my leg was deforming and fled to the country where it deformed some more. Now, I'm stuck with a crooked leg three inches shorter than the other and the rest of my life in a walker and brace unless I face it all.

I think of the surgeon's saw near my leg again, which has taken three years to become strong enough for me to use it to walk with a cane-- and I wince, just thinking about it. How do you get past that? (yes, I have a new therapist, but she's so young I don't have a whole lot of confidence in her yet.)

And how do you get your trust back? How do you reclaim an innocence about all of the things and people you lose faith in and shut down toward-- the Church, doctors, people I was once close to.

So, the writer with a novel, a memoir, a collection of poetry, two blogs, who looked forward to a work day, is tied to the stake of exhaustion again.

I am tired. I want somebody else to do it, be the grown up and take care of me. I am so jealous of people who have husbands and wives. They've committed to support each other in adversity.

Years ago I had a child in my Poets in the Schools program write: "When you're alone, it makes you Capone." No shit!

These are the things that work on me when I can't sleep. This is the lonely corner I occupy at my lowest. I have been running, trying to feel safe in my own home and in my own skin for a very long time and have had to chip away at this immense chunk of self-doubt.

Chip, chip, chip, chip....tink tink tink tink.....

Pages