JENNIFER BOSVELD
Publisher, Editor, Poet, 1945-2014
When August 30, 2023 approached, I decided to put together a brief memorial to a poet, editor and publisher who did so much for me, and for so many other poets, for so long.
She died on August 30th, 2014. She was 69, which seems to me now, at 63, a young age.
Jennifer published three of my chapbooks, and we were working together on a fourth, even though she was ill at the time, online from a long distance because I was employed in the Far East of Russia.
A native of Bexley, Ohio, and before she began her career as poetry publisher, Jennifer was a teacher in Franklin County, Ohio. Throughout her life she was an activist, a proponent of social justice, opposed to the death penalty and in support of programs and causes that assisted the needy and homeless.
In 1975, she helped a man named Jack Carmen who'd been convinced he should plead guilty to a murder he didn't commit. She formed the Justice For Jack Committee. Mr. Carmen was eventually tried and acquitted.
Jennifer worked for Ohio State in that university's Agricultural Extension Service, and its Disaster Research Center. In Ohio, she became the director of Friends Of The Homeless, and she ran Pudding House Bed And Breakfast in Johnstown, Ohio, where she conducted writer's retreats and residencies.
She's known for first using the term "Applied Poetry" which, as I understand it, defines an approach to a poetry as an art form that seeks to encapsulate and reflect the times we are living in. The here and now, so to speak. Poetry as populist art, reflecting social issues, though linguistically willing to challenge and go beyond the lyrics of popular music in any genre.
I believe Jennifer, who saw the death of her son, Chris Groce, and her husband, Reverend James Bosveld, lived and worked as a champion of the underdog, of working class people, of those born with disabilities and in need of support and asistance.
I believe she viewed poetry as an important component of our lives, a way to help us understand where we've been, who we are, and how we can heal. It should come as no surprise she was a fan of working class hero rock star The Boss, and even titled one of her books Love Poems And Other Messages For Bruce Springsteen.
She was open to startling and yet grounded langauage and metaphor. If she liked any of my poems, in my opinion, it was because they were about someone or some thing or event. She stayed away from poets who tended toward the vague and a certain amount of navel-gazing. She liked humor and a touch of the surreal in poetry, as seen in the title of one of her chapbooks, published in 1986, Free With Purchase Of A Spaghetti Fork.
She earned in 1996 an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship, which allowed her to expand and continue to develop Pudding House, the small press poetry publisher that she founded in 1982. She also earned the Pioneer Award from the National Association For Poetry Therapy, and a Governor's Award for her contributions to Ohio arts.
What I enjoyed when working with Jennifer on chapbooks was her distinct lack of pretense. And her patience with me. She wasn't a poet taster or a dilletante. She ran her press with confidence; she wrote her poems, she published the poets she liked, and she mentored some of them.
Her press, Pudding House, operated for 30 years, making it the largest independent poetry publisher of its time, bringing 2,000 titles into print. She also founded Redkitchen, a poetry troupe, the Salon workshop for poets, and the Rattlebox poetry series.
Is there anyone today doing as much for poetry and poets as Jennifer did?
She founded Pudding Magazine in 1980, and served as its editor. She founded the Greatest Hits archive for poets in 2000, in which poets from all over the country and from different walks of life were invted to choose twelve of their poems to be included in a chap along with an introduction.
Her steady no-nonsense approach, her consistency and work ethic contributed, I think, to an important archive of voices from mid-century under-appreciated poets outside of mainstream and elite university circles. She ran workshops in venues all over the country, from the Rhino Workshop in Normal, Illinois, to the Indianapolis Writers Center, to the Sunset Poets in California.
In her own words, applied poetry is "poetry applied to the times of our lives." This perspective inspired her to create workshops, residencies, readings series, and training programs, all of which emphasized poetry as a functional component of our daily lives. This was the opposite of anything I learned about poetry as a graduate student, or saw from poets on stage competing for the spotlight in slams, or heard from touted overly academic poets with degrees from Yale, Iowa or Harvard.
I remember thinking when Jennifer accepted my chapbook, A Dozen Lemons In Autotroplis, "She gets me. She sees what I'm trying to do."
I imagine many poets felt that way when they recieved a letter of acceptance from her in the mail. It was a different time.
To show how tireless an editor of anthologies that Jennifer was, I have listed some examples:
Crude: Poems At The End of the Age Of Oil (2010)
Cap City Poets: Columbus & Central Ohio's Best Known, Read, and Requested Poets (2008)
Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society (2004)
Glass Works: Art Glass, Windows, Bottles, Marbles and Jars (2002)
Pocket Poetry Parenting Guide (2000)
Prayers to Protest: Poems That Center & Bless (1998)
Coffeehouse Poetry (1996)
The Pudding House Gang (2009)
Jazz Kills The Paperboy: Virtual Journalism Poems (2006)
Elastic Ekphrastic: Poetry on Art/ Poets On Tour in Galleries (2005)
From A Phone Booth In Paradise (2005)
The Magic Fish: Poems on an Edward Boccia Sketchbook (2003)
Fresh Water: Poems From Rivers, Lakes and Streams (2001)
The Unitarian Universalist Poets: A Contemporary American Survey (1996)
