La Parola Vivace: poetry challenge

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 poetry challenge. Show all posts

Friday, April 15, 2011

Poem for Weekend... Forty Lashes

Forty Lashes

On the night I fled the church before the performance

I threw my music down in the parking lot and drove off

in the truck, to the quiet dark along the river.Someone
had pulled a switch blade from beneath her vestments

And tried to cut out my tongue. But she bruised her own hands
on the keys of the vast organ towering at the back of the nave
and the choir roiled in like striped smoke, taking its place.
It was Lent. The Cross was on its side draped in black netting.

It was the time of weeping. Punctured, repudiated, I shattered away
like a breaking plate to the bridge over the river and wondered
if my friend who lives there year on year at a small campsite had died.
No flames in the rippling dark. But I am a veteran of flight—unlicensed.

I lift off at the sign of trouble, and came back on fire to avenge
the misdeeds of the babbling peri-menopausal choir, the red-faced
priest with the gum of rectitude in his mouth who holds the Gospel
according to Himself over his head. Gestures signifying drama

Sans lux perpetua. The agnus dei dripping with blood, stigmata
on the wrists of the fresco angels. Before, I bowed my head
in the serene light from the stained glass and the priest said

I was forgiven. But he said before the day is out you’ll sin again.

Thank you. I am sin incarnate, I often think, when I see that
I am being observed from the safety of trees near the border.
I was thrown down a flight of stairs. I was kicked into a corner,
my hip shattered. I was fed to the roiling dogs in the backyard

That were eating each other. You don’t know what it was.
You can’t think of it. But then if you are singing in a choir
hoping to become a pain-free angel and then excoriated,
cast out, falling down through the air of your own soul blamed,

Then as Lucifer was, blamed for the Fall of Man—if the church
is named for the Healer and you went down into the water
cupping your hands to take the Host like everyone not knowing
you were hated and feared, if another priest said you don’t believe

You’re loved because you aren’t and if it was proven that night
of the Rheinberger Requiem you had rehearsed, wood-shedded,
reaching out to the about to be widowed other soprano next to you,
the Chippewa who had the heart attack and couldn’t sing above

A whisper and then were cast out, blamed and scapegoated
would you do as I, rising up and blowing fire over
the sanctimonious there, flaying the hypocrites with your lash?

April 15, 2011

Thursday, March 10, 2011

A Poem for Thursday, Magpie and Carry On Tuesday Challenges....

Calabrian Garlic

In her window, a basket of garlic reaching

For the sun. She broke off one of its fat cloves

And took the knife to it, using

The flat of the blade to mash the clove open;

Then she peeled off the papery rind

And there it was, sending its quartered objections

Up into the air of the kitchen, disempowered

And redolent.

I sat back in the shadows with my love,

Her son Pepe; we sipped latte di mandorla

And watched Mama in her cooking dance

How she carefully took a beef knuckle

Out of butcher paper,

Put it in a boiling pot for stock, crushing

Fresh tomatoes for the sauce. We kissed

And longing surged in us

And my love's tongue was as tensile
and searching

As the garlic’s green

Inquiring foot

And I dared not touch the tendrils

Of his desire then.

But later, spent and laughing after dinner

I kissed his garlicky mouth

And much later, we wept briny tears of rapture,

Rising to walk the edge of paradise,

The lolling Calabrian phosphor

On the Strait of Messina.

I saw something arc in the air

And he said it was the pesce spada, the swordfish

In rising-moon ardor. I said

Within myself, with my poet’s heart,

Thinking of Homer’s stunned walk

In this very place, that is the mermaid-gorgon

Scylla herself, exulting

In the tide that forces garlic-stricken lovers

Into each other’s arms at all hours.

Soon I boarded a train away

From Momma, Papa

And the babies lolling in everyone’s arms

At dusk in the kitchen.

Many years later, there is no trace of them,

Not even anything legible in a book of names,

As if I had conjured all of it
From thin air, my indoctrination

Into a hard, polished love tinted

By flash in the pan anger,

Like the pink water-laved stones

One finds in the surf--– la famiglia’s

Work-weary and serene

Faces as we walked the garden.

This is what I remember

Now, all of them cloistered

In simplicity and resolve

Like the purposeful garlic bulb

In the window basket--sublimely
Permanent,

Sheathed in undaunted light.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

New Poem: Homage to Sylvia Plath

The Wrack of Shells

To the memory of Sylvia Plath

“A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack
Of kaleidoscope shells
Probing fractured Venus with a stick
Under a tent of taunting gulls.

No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone
That chucks in backtrack of the wave;
Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,
A grain of sand is all we have.”

From Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea, Sylvia Plath

How then, our fractured girl

Did Venus too break apart at low tide

In scattered porcelain shards

Beneath our bare feet

Perhaps two disrobed

On the white sand

Before the indignant witness

Of rumpled waves

And stood revealed

As dual wounds

Red mouths made to leach

Brine, and lacerate--

Speaking words that abrade

The withdrawing sea leaves

Silted wrack

To seal small graves

Oysters drop pearls there
Bright confessions

Let slip from yearning tongues

And phantom sea stars

Bivouac in the ruins

Of the houses of the sand

Where love birthed herself

Rising sun-tinted

To stun and stripped

Tease the wayward young

This makes a lonely

Beachcomber brave:

I came unto you

Wet and singing,

But no sea-change checks

The sighing storm

That unnerves a hungry wave

You surged, stunning me
with your white crest
And then pulled back
to the monasteries of the sea

As if to know me then and there

Had turned your blood to water:

Now I am a grain of sand

Burning on in the bone-house

Of a shell.

Jenne' R. Andrews

February 5, 2011

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