No Tourists At The Cup Defenders, a Basil Rosa novel

This is the third novel in the Basil Rosa trilogy that takes place in Rhode Island in the late 1970s and early 80s. Thank you to Meric Bulca for the cover painting, and to Erika B Hollen for the design.

You can find the novel here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1025315

***

No Tourists At The Cup Defenders is narrated by commercial fisherman Pee Wee Coyle who tells the story to James, detailing the short life of Victor Silva, who was James' father. 

Pee Wee's narration is the fulfillment of a promise he made to Vic’s wife, Loren, that when their son James was old enough, he’d share what happened to Victor.

Raised in Fall River, the son of immigrants, his mother speaking very little English, his father, having suffered multiple strokes, unable to speak and living in an elderly care center, Victor Silva, aged 23, believes he disgraced his family after being discharged from the Navy for selling narcotics. Working on the wharves in the city of Newport, Rhodde Island is where he believes he can make amends.

Victor works seven days a week, earning $50 in cash per day. He lives in nearby Bristol and rises at 3:30 a.m. each day to drive to Newport. His Bristol apartment, a simple garret, is next door to a drinking club for immigrants and their sons who reside in Bristol. Here, in the evenings, Vic unwinds with local men who make him feel welcome. It seems to Vic that the purpose of his life is to create a sense of home.

Arriving to Bowen’s Wharf on time each day, Victor rides out on the ship Iron Jane at 5:30 a.m. with a rag-tag crew employed by Aquidneck Fish under Skipper Sonny Lombardi. They’ll empty nets kept in the Atlantic from early spring to late fall. They pull these nets up by hand, store the catch in a heap on Iron Jane’s deck, and return to Bowen’s Wharf to sort and store it.

Quitting time often comes at twilight. A young man, “a greenhorn” earns respect from seasoned vets such as Mitch McSherry, part owner of Aquidneck Fish and foreman to Sonny. Mitch sees potential in Vic, who’s learned he’s gotten girlfriend Loren pregnant. For advice, Vic turns to Pee Wee Coyle, who is an experienced lobster fisherman with a stellar reputation in the fishing community, but Pee Wee is often away at sea, so Victor decides to seek advice and friendship from his younger, energetic co-worker Pat Degnan, also a greenhorn. 

Pat doesn't have Pee Wee's life experience behind him, but he provides Victor a sympathetic ear. They’ve both made an enemy in Cliff Larch, who dislikes Vic because, as Mitch’s nephew, he’s jealous of his success. Cliff dislikes Pat because Pat’s been sleeping with Marla, Cliff’s ex-girlfriend. Cliff is also a drug-dealer. 

Victo warns Pat to stay away from Cliff and Marla. Pat doesn’t listen. Still, their friendship endures. When Pee Wee is in port, the three of them get together. Pee Wee dates Pat’s sister.

Victo, in spite of his steadfast work regimen, struggles to pay rent and bills. He takes no time off and is forever on the brink of exhaustion. Loren remains a soothing presence, her family likes him, but Vic’s worried about how they’ll make ends meet. 

Then his father dies. Everything about life and his relationship with Loren feels unfinished and this weighs on Vic’s conscience. He brings Loren to his father’s funeral and they stay with his family in Fall River. 

He must tell his mother he’s going to marry Loren, that they already have designs on a small house Loren’s father has agreed to help them purchase. They love each other and, best of all, Loren is pregnant. 

There’s one hitch. Vic fears his mother won’t approve. Loren is a pious Catholic, but she’s not Portuguese.

Vic tries to convince his mother this doesn’t matter, that he’s found true love. Though disappointed, his mother agrees to the union, but only if they’ll marry at her church in Fall River.

The long summer wears on and wears Vic down until one August evening, near the point of collapse, he sees Pat Degnan and Cliff Larch fighting on the wharf. Most crewmen have gone home.

Cliff stands for everything Vic’s trying to rebuke. He watches as Pat takes a beating from him. Vic chooses to defend his mate, and he gets in some quick punches until Cliff stabs him in the neck with a grappling hook, piercing Victor's carotid artery. 

Vic dies in the ambulance on the way to the emergency ward. Loren never marries. Pat leaves Newport altogether, though not before he and Loren create a fund to help Loren raise her child alone. 

For twenty years, Pee Wee stays in touch with them both and contributes to this fund. His final contribution is this telling of Vic’s story.

Groovemasters Night At The Met Cafe, a Basil Rosa novel

This is the second novel in the Basil Rosa trilogy set in Rhode Island in the late 1970s and early 80s. You can find it here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1025316

***

Groovemasters Night At The Met Café pays homage to Balzac’s Lost Illusions, chronicling one autumn of a May-September romance in Providence between Shura Levy and Ship C. Cusack. 

At age 20, Ship prefers his middle name, Chandler, and narrates this tale of joie de vivre. Self-absorbed, brimming with enthusiasm and unearned confidence, insecure and impatient, yet so guileless and eager to succeed that many can’t help liking him, Chandler is burning to know what love is. He must know. It’s all so urgent.

At the novel’s beginning he’s employed at Channel 36, Providence’s only public television station at the time. He’s also acting in a play directed by Shura Levy in Newport. When the play closes, Chandler suffers a bout of depression. He also loses his job due to funding cuts. He finds happiness in dating Shura, who, cigarette and glass of scotch in hand, agrees to educate him in more ways than one, but he must promise her, “We’ll always be friends no matter what I choose to do.” 

Inspired by her guidance, Chandler finds work as a line cook, lands a small part in an original play and makes visits by bus to Boston where he eat his grandmother's soup, listens to her stories, and helps his ailing grandfather by giving him a hot shave. 

Back in Providence, he enjoys lots of sex and long philosophical conversations with Shura, a RISD grad from Long Island who gave up painting for the theatre and who describes her lifestyle as one of “genteel poverty.” She reads Zola and Shakespeare and waits tables, travelling periodically by train to audition for plays in Manhattan. 

Shura finds Chandler charming and amusing, though insists he not get too attached. She treats him to exorbitant meals and they go out often to blues bars, and they sleep late after enjoying wild sex all night. Shura becomes something of a dominatrix with Chandler, as well as a star on the Providence theatre scene. As much as she likes the attention from locals, she despairs over being pigeonholed as an actress who must play mothers and aunts. Time is running out. She must move to Manhattan. Her goal all along has been to make it there in the theatre.

Life begins changing rapidly for Chandler. His roommate Gail moves to Los Angeles. His other roommate, Kevin, has been diagnosed with a strange new disease called AIDS. His Iranian friend KJ, who still hasn’t married Bree in order to get a green card, has been forced to live in a squalid room with Derek and Doughie, a pair of male strip-tease dancers. Chandler’s new roommate, Marshall, is turning out to be a cocksure bully who insists Chandler is “a homo” who likes “Frenchy” things. 

While Shura’s away in Manhattan, Chandler realizes how much she’s at the center of his life. He fears the longer she’s away, the more she’ll lose interest in him. 

Shura returns and meets with Chandler to explain why she was away so long. She had an abortion. Chandler is puzzled and feels betrayed. Maybe he’d want to have a child with her. He does love her, after all. Why hadn’t she discussed this with him? Had there been another man? He doesn’t like admitting that this is possible. Shura elaborates gently to Chandler how difficult a decision this was for her, telling him, “Having a child is not what I want right now.”

Though they resume their romance in Providence, it’s more subdued. They watch Jean Luc Godard movies at the Avon Cinema, and have what feels like one final fling seeing The Groovemasters on a Thursday night at the Met Café. It’s after this night that Shura reveals that she’s found an affordable apartment in Greenwich Village. She’s going to move, at last. She’d like Chandler to visit, though not until she’s settled. 

It’s already November and Thanksgiving. Chandler goes home to his parents, feeling lost and knowing when he returns to Providence that Shura won’t be there. A chapter has ended. His life will be different, one he’s not even certain he wants to go back to.

Perhaps Shura had been right when she’d told him, “Love is in the grasping.”

Eightball At Grady's Palace East, a Basil Rosa novel

There is a description below of this first novel of a trilogy set in Rhode Island in the late 1970s and early 80s. You can find the novel here: 

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1025313

A thank you to Erika B Hollen for help with the cover design.

***

Eightball At Grady’s Palace East blends 1970s drug mules, dealers and low-level mafia operatives with a story about friendship, love and survival among a variety of creative spirits and an immigrant who calls himself KJ. The K stands for Ken, as in the doll mated to Barbie, and the J stands for Jones, as in one of America’s most common family names. 

Born Khosrow Hor, KJ is a Baha’i immigrant from Tehran whose student and tourist visas have expired. The year is 1979. His parents left the United States just prior to the Khomeini revolution in Iran and now that The Shah has been deposed and the Mullah’s have come to power, KJ cannot return to his homeland. 

He fears his parents have been murdered. He tries repeatedly, but he cannot contact them. Anti-Iranian sentiment in the U.S. is at an all-time high. Finding gainful employment appears impossible. With Leland Sibley’s help, KJ is hired as a dishwasher, paid in cash. Scotty Greco helps too, introducing him to neighborhood friends such as the acting student Orbit, the low-level capo Little Nazo, and soldiers Vinnie Vee and Lucio DiPippo.

As a native to the city’s Federal Hill neighborhood, Scotty Greco has big ambitions to work as an actor and to rise from drug mule to capo under the tutelage of Little Nazo and Little Fig Triventi. Scotty’s proud to claim KJ as his first friend from the Middle-East. So is Leland Sibley, a transplant from a small town north of the city. Leland tries to help KJ, just as he helps his ailing, widowed mother. Nearly each cent he earns goes to her. He and KJ need Scotty and his connections. They take orders from Little Nazo, who schools Leland in how to use a .38 and gives him one along with protected status as the go-to cocaine dealer at the Grady’s Palace East bar. Though not an Italian-American, Leland can still get “made” if he proves his worth to Triventi. He works with Scotty and KJ running money and drugs throughout the city’s seedier neighborhoods. Their friendship transcends their cultural differences, but they live a dangerous existence.

KJ decides he wants out. He’s met Bree, a waitress at the restaurant where he washes dishes. She loves theatre and has encouraged him to write a play about what it’s like to live as an exile. Orbit, too, encourages him. As does Serena, another waitress and Bree’s best friend. 

Leland knows Serena. He used to date her. He cannot say no to KJ’s request that he talk to Little Nazo and arrange a way out for him. Leland talks first to Scotty, who says they’re in for life. Leland’s unaware that Scotty has been deceiving Little Nazo and giving information about drug pick-ups to Nazo’s rivals. This leads to Scotty getting murdered. Now Leland wants out. There’s only one way. He must kill Nazo’s rival that Scotty was working for. After that, he must leave Providence. 

As Leland prepares in secret for his assassination attempt, KJ, with Bree’s help, completes writing his play. He proposes marriage to Bree and she accepts. Now he can get a green card. Orbit has helped too, finding a theatre to stage KJ’s play. 

It’s the night KJ’s play opens. Leland has promised to come, but it’s also the night that he must make his first hit in order to get out from under Little Fig Triventi. Details have been worked out, but even if Leland succeeds, he won’t be able to stay in Providence. Nor will he ever never see his friends or his mother again. 

What will Leland do?

Milk Blossom Pushes Free, a Basil Rosa novel

 

Thank you to Tony Sturtevant for the cover image.

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1053013

At the age of 35, Ruby L. Hermosa would like to know how her life became so complicated and difficult. The year is 2022, having survived in her native Manhattan during the Covid-19 lockdown, Ruby is now seeing herself and the city bounce back. Broadway plays and musicals are casting again, and so are movies.

 
A third-genration actor and singer, raised by her Tony-award-winning grandmother, shunned by her drama queen of a mother, Ruby is laboring to get career back on track. She still doesn't talk to her mother, now a widow who has taken her husband's inheritcance money and exiled herself to a life poolside with cocktails in Costa Rica. 

Ruby's in mourning, as well, over the sudden death of her closest friend, Diego, a dancer in Alvin Ailey's company who was killed in a car accident. To complicate matters further, Ruby believes she's fallen in love with Montag Carlin, a loyal practicing Catholic just like her, and she dreams of starting a family with him. 

Ruby's also convinced she's Sarah Bernhardt and, though she sees various doctors regarding this obsession, her mood swings and her compulsive behavior, she remains committed to writing and rehearsing her one-woman play about the famed French diva, though her agent wants her to abandon the demanding project and choose more commercial opportunities. 
Ruby won't. She knows, believes, is absolutely convinced she's the second coming of Madame Sarah. She needs to write and perform this play. 

She's talented and she's had some success in the professional theatre, but will Ruby be able to balance, post-Covid, her desire for continued career success with a desire to marry Monte and have a child with him? 

Will she reconcile with her agent, or will she fire him? 

Will she, with the help of therapy and medication, shed her delusion about being Sarah Bernhardt?

Will she come to terms with her mother, at last, and most importantly with herself?

God Wore Denim, a Basil Rosa novel

A thank you to Erika B. Hollen for designing the cover.

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1042180

Danville, Virginia native and narrator James Robert Bradner, known as JB, is an octogenarian, widower, a recovering alcoholic and a Vietnam veteran with a passion for Western North Carolina’s history. As both love letter and elegy, he recounts daily life on a family farm and his friendship with a new arrival, a 13-year-old boy named Junior. 

Speaking to us from his room in a retirement home, JB’s focus is centered on a single harvest season on a family farm in Macon County, North Carolina. JB is married to Bonnie, also a recovering alcoholic and a dental hygienist born and raised in the town of Franklin, where they lived together for over three decades, and where the family farm that JB worked on for 25 years was once located. 

This farm was owned and run by Rod and Thorne Shepherd. Rod is married to Bev, who is one of Bonnie’s closest friends. Thorne is a bachelor. Both men are veterans of the second world war. 

There were two things that made this one harvest season special for JB. First, it was the presence of an outsider, 13-year-old Junior, who just showed up one day to sleep on a cot in the basement of Rod Shepherd’s house, sharing a room with Rod’s son, Duke Wayne. Second, it was the year of the Shepherd’s most lucrative burley tobacco crop. 

JB narrates in detail the day to day life and challenges of working in a crew as a field hand, supporting a way of life that in many ways has all but vanished in the United States. He recounts in detail the lessons that Junior learns from him, but that Junior also teaches him. He comes to understand that it is never to late to learn or to reinvent one’s self. 

He also details the personalities of Rod Shepherd’s son, Duke Wayne, Rod himself the patriarch of the farm, so to speak, and his brother Thorne. There are the hands, as well, men such as Earl Cabe, and Lee Locust. There is Bev, Rod’s wife, a churchgoer, a dedicated farm wife, taking care of these men and ultimately explaining to them why Junior has come and what his relationship is to her family. 

The Shepherd brothers raise not only tobacco but beef cattle, hay, soybeans, okra, potatoes and all sorts of garden vegetables. JB sees, day by day, that Junior really wants to learn. The boy asks many questions. Along with Thorne, a lifelong bachelor, Junior bonds with JB. In time, the men will learn Bev’s secret, that the boy came to the farm because his mother is addicted to crack cocaine and in rehab, and his step-father has been, for years, abusing him. 

As Junior bonds with the men, asking them all sorts of questions about farming, animal husbandry, the region and its history, it becomes clear that he’s a boy seeking guidance. Each of them, as adults, have by chance been forced to provide it, whether they like it or not. 

Duke Wayne is also seeking a better understanding with his father, Rod. The two have fought for years, Duke having moved out of state and only returning to the farm annually to help with the fall harvest. 

A friendship and a fraternal dynamic develops between Junior and Duke Wayne. JB relates how the different men find, in their various ways, a father figure within and without, fatefully and intimately in such an usual and quite beautiful pastoral setting.

Witness Marks, a Basil Rosa novel

Preacher Everett Micah Zachery narrates this novel of interconnected lives, of stories from the many parishioners of his church, Glad Tidings, in the fictional southeastern city of Belinda in the United States. The preacher's stories address joy as well as despair, recovery as well as failure, and delve into themes of racism, adultery and addiction. 

A thank you to Tony Sturtevant for the cover image.

Based On Joyce, a novel

 

With the death of his alcoholic mother, Marcello Andrade, raised in Reading, Pennsylvania as the son of an adulterous butcher and former boxer, has sold the house he grew up in, pulled up stakes and moved to Kansas City to reinvent himself. Marcello narrates his story of discovering love and friendship in a world beyond Reading.  

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1408887

The Blizzard Surfer, a novel

 

Where does the impulse to murder come from? I don't know. Nobody does. I explore this idea in The Blizzard Surfer, as we follow the imaginings and the heartbreaks experienced by Daniel Currie, a gentle soul, a well-intentioned, sweet and puzzled boy who cannot stop watching television as a way to cope with the reality, and the memories he has from the time when at the age of 15, he learned of his father freezing to death in his car while stuck in traffic on Cape Cod during the Blizzard of 1978.

Here is a link:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/1404665

Second Nature, Third Eye, Fifth Wheel, a book of poems

 So, in these poems I've tried more wordplay than usual and have labored to keep a lighter touch consistent throughout. I dedicated this collection to my sister, Christine, wanting to write a book for her that addresses love, fidelity, faith and amorality in an increasing secular age, the need for family ties and a sense of belonging, all of it anchored in what Seamus Heaney once described as poetry's need for a "sense of moving on, crossing something...into the dark...towards a destination and a transition."

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/1377792

Table Of Contents

 

Second Nature

 

Love Is A Ballad, A Quartet

Responsorial Speech

Insert Big Mind Here

One Breath Enough

Ashore

Analogous To Amnesia

This Life As Mural

Time Feasts On Each Lonely Believer

Metro Retro

Itchy

Terrain Tour

Risk Mined

What To Do For Children

Sybarite

Shut Up Or Own It

Seek Ye Neither Culprits Nor Blame

Every Hazard Every Step

 

Third Eye

 

Wind Hawk Theatre Dream

On A Saturday Morning In The Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Six Reflections From A New York System Diner In The Rain At 3:30 A.M.

An Asseveration

Rehab

Tree Strength

Pain Is Not A French Word For Bread

Never Too Old To Play Simon Says

When The Neighborhood Stoop Was All

This Be Surrealism

Northwestern Air

Three Reflections On Bullying

In Near Sleep

In A Highway 7-11 West Of Ashtabula

For Mags

In Support Of Just Causes

Importunate Options

Regarding Words That Never Needed To Be Spoken

What I Won’t Bury In A Time Capsule

Ritual Virginia

What I Imagine As Colors

A Palliative Dynamic

At Truman Reservoir

Etching My Initials Into A Fencepost

Optics Versus Delusions

 

 

Fifth Wheel

 

Occasionally Complete Strangers Sending Flowers

If I Could Weep Beyond Rims Of Earth Dream

Girls, Girls, Girls

Again Nightmares Of Falling

Two Left Feet Or A Determined Woman Finds Her Way

Little Sister Is Now A Mom

I Find No Faults In The One I Love

Some Never Get Too Old For Each Other

Regrets In Grueling Times Need Rain

Obit Sent By A Friend

Annihilation, Reinvention

Roddy In Speaker’s Corner, 1980

Chill Silver Of London, 2004

Two For Dad From Adolescent Years

Connect Please I’ll Wait

This is a sample from the collection.

Love Is A Ballad, A Quartet

 

 

Eternals beheld his vast forests

Age on ages he lay, clos’d, unknown.

William Blake

1.

 

Cut and paste here your fang

scars as I spin tales

about forgiveness defining

sanctimonious responsibilities.

 

You have me sawed-off, out of it

chewing soul because I can’t find magic

during each planned rendezvous

with a naked midnight.

 

Addled in the rinse of moonlight

I turn now to silver melting over grass

a town common, memories of legs

in your smile, each heroically elegiac.

 

2.

 

You coaxed me forward

into the undertow, our past.

 

Take them now these hard, coiling voices

set them free as angelic waves

so I’ll know again downward spirals

each fathom that once held us together.

 

I cannot stand myself any longer

recalling acts of violence I submitted to

and in response how I inflicted pain

to broker repentance.

 

Here on this beach remains of us wash up

shaped like a series of elasticized hooks

tied to ropes eroding in the shadows

a storm having thrashed our bones.

 

Witness me negotiating infinity’s edge

and please trust I won’t ever forget.

 

3.

 

While showing peach trees how to tremble in the rain

I follow urges to shape shawls of jackal light left neglected.

Patrolling truant impulses, I season my nights with blood petals.

 

If only I’d been more – I can’t imagine living now

without this hunger for you, for a common language.

What I accept is that beauty remains a sublime intelligence.

 

4.

 

Pawning the chipped hands of God Fortune

quoting ourselves as portrayed in a Netflix doc

about American ignorance we sing,

“If it’s not one springtime, it’s your mother.”

 

Inscrutable restorations. Perishable resolve.

Caviling degrees of incivility.

We watch tomorrow arrive

in the guise of dystopian genius.

 

Tension among ghosts, a lower-case epiphany

along avenues where garmentos fabricate

responses to our hand-blown glass threads.

A holding on? If so, how to respond?

 

Our fingers become a loom stitching

interstices into elegance.

We’re oafish in response.

The runs, the turns, the compensations.

Anglepoised With Aura, a book of poems

 

These are prose poems, and in them I wander to different places, tending to focus on light and motion and sounds as they represent various dimensions that deepen not only what is being viewed, but in the viewer. Some of these poems occur in Asia Minor, in places such as Termessos, and Aphrodisias, which is why I chose this cover image of a stairway to a theatre in the ancient city of Kibyra . 

You can find the book here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/1373856

For Dave Nader

In Loving Memory of Julie Anne Benson Flynn

  

If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance,

to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives….

Luis Buñuel

Table Of Contents

 

I

 Inshallah

Ululating Steeples

Jawbone

Oblivionraker

Never Now Been Where

Chap Mate Pal Bud Chum Bestie

Wheel Slime

Round Sound

Uptight Commuter

Symptoms

Aubade

Shed Light’s On Again

Eastern Zephyr

A Tribe Of Goats

Purple Termessos

Aphrodisias Yellow-Throated Like A Vireo

Depersonalized At The Ordinary

Stubby Crayon

Vulpine Avenues

If This What Then So Why That

Viscid Lucid

There Will Be Renewal

Class-Sick

Three Piedmont Afternoons

II

 

Behind The Breakers

Guilt Or Sew

She Charts Her Stance

Contradistinction

Drama’s Two Faces

Sewing Needles Not Dragonflies

Body Guarded

A Dandy In Cerulean

Guest Of The Harp

Wharf Rat Roger That

Heresies Of An Infatuation

Reference Maker Mate

Inked In Mighty Frescoes

Scurrilous Char

When Near

A Salty Owl Muses

Rain Rides Down To Rot The Seams

Addressing The Stakes Of Importunate Options

Wonderland Happens Today

Carle In Wormtown

Versions Of Ionia

Luck Disbelief

Burnt End Of A June Evening After Hearing Brodsky Read At Assumption College

Super Mega Ultra 80s Blitz From K-Tel

Realized And Li Po

 

III

Mudlark With Black-Eyed Susans

Gridlock

Hills Of Albion Aglow

What The Husband Usually Never Says

Sunday Quiet

Chet Over Easy

Confessing Washed-Up Wannabe

Hydrodynamic

Overcast Tea

Revered Moorings Memorial Day

Your Teacher Your Illusion

It Seems Each Visitor Soon Misses San Francisco

Yoga Morning Year’s First Snow

Connubial

Wisp And Axis

Growth Amps

Roaches At An Easel Risk The Ferns Of A Beach Dream

Lost Low Northerly

Time Signatures

Whim Oven Sickle

Fractions In E Minor

Status Andronicus

There Are Days

Song From A Little Chatte In Lockdown

 

Here is a sample poem from the book

There Will Be Renewal

 

 

When willows flag and grasses cringe, when frogs and crickets creep with sparrows, and when girls with slow faces learn how to sing, these are the times when we know an innocent has died. We mourn. Pulled toward the earth we find and make our trail back to the mystery where our glorious nothingness began. Does anyone really want to live forever? Gravity is. It never comes on or happens. Sometimes, I wish to collect and refund such gravity. Other times, the air smells like my heart, like methods, an art, daffodils that rehearse in chorus.

I don’t have to become one of the mourners. I already am – unimaginative and too eager for success. I scorn myself as one too jealous. I prefer to be a duck because I’d be allowed to swim all day and wouldn’t need to say much. I could boast a dry back too, and nobly disinterested intentions.

Jennifer Bosveld, Publisher, Editor, Poet, 1945-2014

 JENNIFER BOSVELD

With August 30, 2023 approaching, 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)

Here is a link to some of her books available from the Open Library online: https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2975890A/Jennifer_Bosveld

Here's a link to Jazz Kills The Paperboy: https://www.amazon.com/Jazz-Kills-Paperboy-Jennifer-Bosveld/dp/0944754228

Here's a link to Jennifer on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/360544.Jennifer_Bosveld