La Parola Vivace: eve eats of the fruit of the tree

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 eve eats of the fruit of the tree. Show all posts

Thursday, July 7, 2011

New Poem for Weekend 1 - Contagion

Names of the Missing - Oil on Canvas Stuart Codington Andrews

Note: the epigraph of the following poem is in italics. My poem starts after it. Links to SC Andrews' View Gallery and Kerry O'Connor's poem in full follow the poem.

Contagion

….Blank-eyed,

(mute to the sun, deaf to the

trees, blind to wind)

they come: the Children come hurtling

through the hay....

See my hands?

(Thinly-sliced, white-webbed

scars, freshly bleeding.)

And my face, the diagonal cuts crying like

hungry new mouths?...

from the poem Catcher, by Kerry O’Connor**.

What I have left of you

Like a tow-head catcher in the wheat

An oblique contagion

Inferences of affiliation

Like the whisper of the ripe field

Where the larks sway

On moist skyscraping ladders—

The tall wheat, bowed

To imminent harvest.

So are we bowed, waiting.

Caught, of and with you

In time’s unfurled

blue waterfall of epitaphs

Le bonne heure: the hour

Of hours, quel plaisir—that pleasure

So monumental I trembled

For years.

Received from you

Love’s glint in the brown eyes

Above me, like Gabriel

Descending

Or when I was looking down at you

Swaying on my stalk

Like the maternal wheat

Ripe, la madura de la madre--

Feeding you the bread of my body.

Amore. Listen now

To the bell song of the wheat

Las campanas

En los campos

And the expectant tingling

Of tines in the barn

The combine, waking

Shaking off its rust.

Can you hear me, amor

From the black lap

Of the ash

Al hondo de las cenizas

The depths of the ashes

Can you see us

The dark-haired girls

In the pumpkin patch

The rabbits

Los conejos corriendos

Running for their lives

Can you hear

The far off cry of the children

Looking for you

In the honeyed light

Of endless afternoon--

Make out the word

“Father!”

De sus bocas tan pequenas

From their tiny mouths..

O please

Orita, mira mis manos

See these hands now

Not look at them—but see.

See where I tried to cut

Love’s tendon

And the red blood of the truth

Spurted from the vein

So that I sutured you

Back into me.

See, look back, remember

Recuerda—

Make your reconnaissance

Like the hungry-eyed owl

Over the surging pastures

The virulent green morning.

I adored you. Ti adore’.

Now see the scars fade away

Hear the din of the harvest die down

The ashes whisper among themselves

Where shall we go? Which way

North, West.

Y orita para que viento?

And now, by what wind.

cc
Jenne' R. Andrews
July 8, 2011

All rights reserved

Read Kerry O'Connor's gorgeous poem "Catcher" in full here.
See other work by Stuart Codington Andrews here.

ccc

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

New Poem

Please scroll down two posts to One Stop/Magpie poem. Do read this one if you've time. Thanks! xxxj

Cheval and I Dream in the Wind

I braid and unbraid my fingers in the dark

Demanding of that cave where I rest

Why was there never

A marriage or a child.

The dark has nothing to say to me

Except to make a bouquet of shadows.

Sleep won’t be coerced

And the pillows are heavy and hard

And there is the high-voiced

Tender lance of the wind,

Slicing in from the Wyoming border.

Sometimes I want to flag down

Some jaded trucker

And be taken away

But I am on the highway of shadows

Of impossibility.

As my father once said, in the “twilight”

The crepuscule, perhaps the last decade

If that, or, burning up time as Gallager says,

“like a madwoman eating pearls”

Flour and salt call to me

From the cupboard.

I could lay my woman’s hands on these things,

The butter, the canned peaches

To make something

Where my sadness was

I have given in to the sorrows

That gleam on their strand,

Pearls around my throat. My loquacity

Is my shield but I burn

And hide

Here in the familiar dark room

I return and return to,

Waiting to be reborn.

Worse than my angst:

No one has come to release cheval d’or

From his run. He dies inside

And no one sees this

But I, the neighbor who comes and goes

In her white beaten up truck. I imagine

Taking my walker

Down the stairs and bracing myself

To drag my leg with me into the barn

Unlatching the door to the stall

So that Cheval steps out.

He would look at me with his deep velvet eyes

And nose me to learn my name

And my purpose.

I would tell him that he is to leave

Under cover of the dark

Gathering up mares along the way

As if he would not reach the freeway

Where the ghost ships of the night,

The rigs hauling goods from the edges of the world

Would mow him down.

Iii

Once I sought transfiguration

In someone’s arms.

It was afternoon, two voices

Pouring from the radio

Love scene Act I, La Boheme.

My lover’s kisses

Broke me open. He parted my legs

And wrote his name upon me

And I shuddered in delight

And then I was alone,

And my sorrow came back.

In a bed born along by a dream-wind

Out into emerald oceans

Reunited with a family healed

My mother and father’s dark hair

My brother’s laughter.

I am not lost, all is not lost

But the well of tears, the dearth

The living on empty-armed.

xx

copyright Jenne' R. Andrews
2011

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Poems with Biblical Twists-- New Challenge/One Shot

(first poem for One Shot is next post down-- take your pick! Thanks-- J)

Eve Craves the Fruit of the Tree

Tonight I lay in the dark and imagined

that you came to the doorway

incarnate, vulnerable

Bringing yourself to me

A man to a woman.

Light shone in that absence

And I made you from that light

And thinking of this, dreaming it

I imagined that my own hands

Clasped and pressing against me

Were yours

I did not want to eat the bitter fruit

Again, from this crooked

ineradicable

Yew of longing

That juts from the granite face

Of the years.

We starved it

We said, what lack,

What tree.

But there it was and is

As I am now, you a mere footfall

across the house thin and resting

Where moonlight crosses your face.

I conjure the scent of your skin

Your eyes traveling me while I read to you,

Their tears :

From those filaments of near touch

I build

And still my own cry

And give you back

To myself

Clenching harder

Around the hunger

At the core of my being

Than if I were swallowing you

Living and whole, high

In my pythoness body.

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