Jennifer has edited many anthologies: Prayers to Protest: Poems that Center and Bless Us (1998); The Unitarian Universalist Poets: A Contemporary American Survey (1996); The Pocket Poetry Parenting Guide (2000); Fresh Water: Poems from the Rivers, Lakes, and Streams (2002); Glass Works: Art Glass, Windows, Bottles, Marbles, and Jars (2003); Urgent Care For The World--poems for the waiting room (2004); Hunger Enough: Living Spiritually in a Consumer Society (2004); Turtle Watch: Mystical Magical Turtles (2006); and the textbook anthology Elastic Ekphrastic: Poems on Art / Poets in Tour.(2003)

Jennifer has a poem in a Jim Percoco book, Divided We Stand: Teaching About Conflict in U.S. History (Heinemann Press, 2001). Percoco is author of the teacher's guide for the Ted Turner movie, Andersonville. Jennifer also has poems in two college textbooks on writing. She's featured in James Brannan Walker's Deeper Than Monday Night Football: Thoughts On High School and Beyond (Negative Capability Press, 1995), and in Tracey E. Dils' Young Author's Guide to Publishers (Raspberry Publications, Inc, 1996). Her list poems are featured in the textbook Discovering Communities: The Reading/Writing Connection (McGraw Hill). Jennifer received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry in 1995 for her Jazz Kills the Paperboy manuscript that gave birth to the demonstration chapbook by the same name. It illustrates and gives criteria for writing virtual journalism poems.

Jennifer has for 30 years led single-day, weekend, and year-long poetry workshops focusing on poetry writing, revising, reading, performance, and publishing. Her favorite venues are weekend intensives for writers' groups or liberal churches (and she uses the term "churches" loosely), giving a poetry reading on Friday night followed by open mic, poetry writing workshop on Saturday morning, poetry publishing workshop on Saturday afternoon, and providing the service/program for Sunday morning services (usually Unitarian Universalist). She has given readings with solo musicians backing her up on cello, flute, guitar, piano, drums, dance interpretation, at The Columbus Museum of Art, Poetry in the Park (Columbus Parks & Recreation), the Greater Columbus Arts Festival, various national and regional writers' conferences, and other programs. In conjunction with the National Association for Poetry Therapy, Jennifer presented (with her friend Steve Abbott) the day-long workshop "Mom, The Flag, and Rock & Roll: Writing the Sound (and not-so-sound) Tracks of Your Life" at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in conjunction with their Education Department.


now from Jennifer's
artistic run-ons and freewriting--

"Poet" is where it begins, ends, and travels through. "Poet" is my fulltime occupation with related work driven by the writing. Why is it that when we say something like this it seems lofty or pretentious? If I were a dancer and said I am a dancer, that wouldn't sound lofty or pretentious. Dancing would save my life, would change my world. So it is with poetry, through which my world can make some sense. Or I can create my own sensible surroundings right along side that which is insane and save myself, maybe. In the 70s I made a few bumperstickers that said "Poetry is LITERALLY a coming-to-terms Therapy." The word "terms" has a double implication. "Terms" meaning words; and "coming to terms" meaning coming to closure, a new acceptance, a discovery that might even be therapeutic. Through my twenties and into my thirties much of my poetry was more personal--about falling in love, divorces, separations, relationships, parenting, and my jobs. Now days I'm more likely to make a poem from a rock I find in a gutter. I don't look for "the poetic" to write poems about the ocean, a lover, flowers, a garden. I prefer to get to the "meaningful" through any old object you'd toss at me. Everything that comes my way has potential to take root and shoot out in an unexpected direction that informs me. I don't initially write for an audience and have no notions about that. I start out writing for me, to inform myself. And if I accomplish that, then maybe it occurs to me that I could send the piece out for publication. Foremost, this is the way I define my world, through poetry, whatever that is. Although an endless number of poets and others have tried to define what poetry is, I find exceptions to nearly all definitions.

Poetry is a relatively little space of word art. That's the only definition I brave. Poetry isn't rhyme, it isn't meter, it isn't about anything in particular and it isn't. . ., well, everything there is is what it isn't, not that it can't engage in those elements to get the job done. And everything someone might say it isn't, it probably is. You know a poem when you smack into it. If it's really poetry to YOU, then that's all that matters to YOU. Some of us who are snobbish about it, who are elitist (and I might be) can say more about what poetry is to US (but individually). And some of us even grant ourselves grace to risk absolutes--knowing it isn't as absolute as we assert.

Jen's absolutes:

Don't put the words giggle, kitty, bunny, good, bad,
nice day, pretty, ... in a poem you send me for publication.
I won't take it. Avoid sunsets and sunrises. I tell my workshop
participants, don't write a poem about the sunset. It's
been done as well as it can be done and far too often.
Now make me eat my words.

Don't rhyme hardly anything that's ever been rhymed before.
UNrhyme and increase your chances with Pudding House. Or
read Annie Finch's anthology A Formal Feeling Comes
and learn how a few poets achieved freshness and rhyme
in the same breath.

Make words dance together that have never danced
together before but make sure you learn something
in the process of choreographing that language.

Ask yourself hundreds of questions about the poem
in the course of it.
Run a banner across your classroom, bedroom, study--

It All Depends on the Questions that You Ask!!!


My work--Applied Poetry
Applied Poetry is a term I coined around 1980 to refer to poetry writing and reading applied to the times and elements of your life--education, healing/wellness, justice work and social action, spirituality, career, relationships. This includes being a poet in the schools, a guest lecturer or workshop facilitator for company middle-managers trying to overcome writing anxieties, or the field of Poetry Therapy which I have been involved in since 1978 when I headed up The Ohio Poetry Therapy Conference with Judson Jerome (former poetry editor of Writers Market) and Dr. Jack Leedy (father of poetry therapy and the one who dragged my young self into this) as counterpoint keynoters. Other leaders involved in that conference were Myra Clark, Margaret Honton, and David Citino.

After that, I was on the founding board of the National Association for Poetry Therapy (New York), edited their first newsletter, and ran one of the earliest Certification Training Programs through which several were certified. That coupled with my book, Topics for Getting In Touch: A Poetry Therapy Sourcebook, was the catalyst for NAPT giving me The Pioneer Award in 1996. I'm not a clinician or certified poetry therapist though I had been coerced into applying for that only to have approval depend on taking one more psychology course. I didn't have time or inclination. Since I'm not part of the licensed body of members with academic credentials in psychology/sociology/social work/etc., the Pioneer Award is quite atypical and an honor--I value it.

I see my role in the poetry therapy field as the poet-only, to model applying the tools of the poet's trade to teach care-givers, mental health professionals (psychologists/psychiatrists/etc.), and clients how to better utilize the skills that create artistic and fresh poems, using the criteria found in academic and even advanced poetry writing courses because those efforts can produce better art and happen to also clarify images and meaning, to better define the scenario, to use more authentic dialogue. Whatever leads one to THE MOST ARTISTICALLY RENDERED piece of language art (poem) has a better chance of simultaneously leading the writer to what is therapeutic, healing, or to a decision, a changed behavior, an acceptance, a re-invention of oneself, self-discovery, and even self-actualization.

Many in the poetry therapy field say "We're concerned about a process, and not a product." Bull, we've got to be concerned about it all. The process IS a product all along the way. It doesn't make any difference that it is a product-in-process. We use what we've got, who we are, at the moment. And the Product IS the Poet/Patient. Work on fixing that product, that poem, and you can't help but fix something of the poet as well. I won't get started on my Sylvia Plath soap box. Ok, I'll just say this. Jack Leedy used to say "Nobody ever died from an overdose of poetry." I think Plath did. She looked (via poetry) too raptly into that dark hole, fell in, and drowned. I have a dissertation's worth on this opinion.

The chances for maintaining good mental health, I believe, are enhanced when one is able to integrate the elements of one's life--her career, family matters, spirituality, applied education, life style, etc. We feel fractured and stressed when we believe that what we do every day in a "job" has nothing to do with who we project ourselves to be, who we WANT to be, the education we went after, the family that doesn't understand, the church we go to out of guilt, and that repeated self-evaluation that none of this has anything to do with any of the rest of it.

We can crumble from the fracturing. Poetry, writing poetry, enables us to stitch the fabric of our lives tight with the lines of the poem strong as 2016 fishing line. We gather together the patches, the ornaments or our lives--into one whole useful cloth and decorate it.

I no longer spend energy on decisions gone by. I have no regrets. Some challenges I've had have killed others who have gone through similar times. Making poems often saved me. First drafts get me breathing; subsequent drafts make me walk again; revising is reviving, and I dance. But the amazing thing is that the poem doesn't even have to be about the challenge or focused on the problem, though that certainly has happened and has improved everything--the situation and my attitude. The act of making an artful and effective poem is nurturing, re-enforcing, as good for you as a well-balanced meal or a walk in any kind of weather.

Instead of focusing on the personal, sometimes I purposefully force myself to start out 180 degrees from my current opinion or perspective. I play with language, go too far, as Margaret Honton assigned us in her book The Poet's Job: To Go Too Far, to do art for art's sake and reap the mental health rewards from the clarity that is a result. That work is often enough. And it always comes back home; it's always about YOU somehow. What you write affects you, the writer. Even the silliest stuff. "Flapdoodle fishtalk, happychatter frogyodel. . ." (a bit from my nonsense poem "Big Black Sack") lifts my spirits. Norman Cousins would appreciate what I'm saying here.

It's a wonder we communicate at all.
I go into the workplace and lead poetry writing workshops and writing anxiety workshops so that managers who have to write final reports can use free-writing, clustering, and list-making exercises to start the hand working.

We talk about the weight of words. Say the word tricycle for 100 respondents and there will be at least 70 different responses in a word association game. This is part of the proof that we all have a unique symbol system inside, a personal glossary. We are speaking out of different dictionaries even when we are in the same family, on the same block. Every word in the sentence is loaded with opportunity to go astray, to get lost from the tour. Compound that possibility by sticking these things called words in a line called a sentence or a paragraph and I don't know how we communicate at all. Why don't we try harder? Why don't we ask people what they mean more often? Why don't we say to the poet, "Now here's what I'm getting out of this..." ".Am I close?" Consider the word "work".

What does "work" mean to you? As a career consultant (especially for writers) I see too many people willing to call anything "work" and to sell their souls to buy an executive car. I hear too much disrespect for the honest jobs that clean, help get us from one place to another, feed us, teach us. We ought to pay people double for doing for us every job we're not willing to work ourselves.

Redefine terms
like "work", "career", "need", "want".

What do you "need" in order to become a fully actualized adult? Meet a fully actualized adult and you've probably met a person who is beyond-satisfied in his job and in his personal relationships. He knows he has contributed to society.

Years ago I made a commitment to help others integrate the elements of their worlds so that all the many "whos" that are inside are working together to empower the others, the body whole. This can then extend beyond the self and affect their world around them. The healthy marriage blesses the growing of a business that blesses a community that empowers those who have less and feeds the soul of every affected person connected through this interdependent web of workers and players. I called this omni-dimensional living or omni-dimensioning..

Writing poetry from the scenarios and characters that help shape my life helps me to further appreciate what is working and helps to rid my life of what is toxic. Just how that happens is subject of workshops, not the mother-of-all personal webpages.

What we "need" is actually darn little. But today's powerful persuaders convince us to think we "need" what we really only "want". A little "want" is fine; but let's call it that. After all, It's the "want" that makes us each unique. We all have the same NEEDS; we have different WANTS. As long as the wanting isn't greedy, taking too much for ourselves and leaving others out, want's okay. Brave a "want" that will take you farther in personal achievement and deeper in loving relationships. My motto is "What blesses one, blesses all." If what you want is truly beneficial to you, it will benefit the rest of the world. If it doesn't benefit the rest of the world, that's an indication that we haven't understood how it effects the Self.

The effort to choose the right word is like a board game I take seriously, like a fanatic. I apply this to a variety of writing genre. I work to create succinct but rule-breaking resumes that make the phone ring. My clients tend to be executives, engineers, and teachers, but I also write dynamite resumes for high school kids who have never worked. I write literary resumes for poets and writers, but I also have this large general clientele. Often, writers will book themselves into our Bed & Breakfast for Writers here at Pudding House and make an appointment for packages of services like resume development and/or a manuscript review including suggestions on where to send particular poems for publication. There is no leap or whiplash between working on poetry and designing careers and resumes that launch them. Both writing genre, writing poems and writing resumes, require attention to THE WORD, each and every word. And here's an amazing thing. There is no difference for me in the beginning, process, or closure between writing a resume (or any of the other writing I do) and writing poems. Nonpoets romantisize the poetry thing. They think it's such an emotinoal/philosophical/spiritual act. Well, it can be. But it's more than that. But all writing can be that as well. I feel no less drawn, spent, accomplished, proud, or relevant when I "make" a resume. There are people who have lived glorious professional careers who have a rag-of-a-resume to show for it. This is supposed to be the document that illustrates the value of the work of their lives and they're content with what Kinkos tells them to do! They have a boiler-plate name-rank-and-serial-number document that captures few achievements and soon this picture is all that's left in memory. What a thrill it is for me to do these intensive life-reviews one-on-one with people and bring so much back for them. This is work as high and artful as making poems which is nearly always solitary. And we pay attention to the Word. Prose can flow with a general effort toward coherence and a bit of fresh language meant to keep the reader awake and reading. Some college English teachers will disagree. But most prose writers splatter and publish and build appreciative audiences. John Bennett of Ellensburg, Washington, father of Vagabond Press, is case in point. An energizing writer who breaks rules--pushes the envelope as they say. I publish him in every issue of Pudding Magazine and our readers love him. Don't grade his paper though. I'd give him an "A" but I have different criteria.

As you might notice, I'm allowing myself to loop sideways in this monologue. Go off on some tangents and maybe come back again, maybe not. This freedom to express just as it comes to me is a gift to myself for being a technical writer much of my life. I wrote course materials for The Ohio State University and the Cooperative Extension Service; Administrative Rules for the Ohio Dept. of Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities; marketing materials, and numerous project reports, interim reports, and final reports for various agencies and organizations. Lots of budget narratives, policies, procedures. [Okay, now watch closely, we're about to take another little sidetrip. If this was a Pop-Up Video you'd see a Pop-Up here.] I've written proposals for nearly 10-million dollars in awarded grants but continue to consider the grants situation a dangerous diet. It is scary out there. Financially, politically, and in other ways--scary! I was the Executive Director of The Disaster Research Center in the early '80s and also Director of Friends of The Homeless (at that time the most comprehensive program for the homeless in Ohio) in Columbus. That made me look at grants--who got them, who gave them. Unfortunately, grants for the arts tend to go for whoever is an artist AND has the ability to write a proposal. The artist has to know the proposal game, have a head for red-tape, filling out forms. I respect the Ohio Arts Council for the way it has run the Individual Artists Fellowship program: a short form and show us the work. It depends on the work.

Getting $5000 from the OAC for my poetry didn't scare me because I knew I wouldn't NEED to expect it again in order to keep writing. But for a magazine, new money should necessitate improvements that create precedence.

All of my priorities--human services, advocacy for the poor and for artists, and the kissing-cousin relationship I have with the expressive arts in therapy, psychology, and mental health fields--are informed by making poems. And from reading other contemporary poets. Now right here I should write a paragraph on how important it is to read those who are writing/publishing poetry today; maybe I'll get to it. For now I'll say, it is important.

My influences:

Maryanna Miller, my mother, who died in 1985, read Shakespeare to me in the womb and engaged me in the literary; she encouraged everything I attempted.

Transcendentalist writers Emerson, Thoreau.

Other writers: Charles Dickens showed me the universal inhumanities of humankind, Kafka who modeled that it's okay to write about simple things and not go on and on about them (though I often do go on and on about them), Edith Hamilton who emphasized the need to learn the lessons of the past so we're not destined to repeat them, early Marge Piercy who wrote the difficulties but did not leave us there, my friend for too short a time Harry Chapin who taught me to open my hand wider--as we sat at Phillips Coney Island in Columbus, talking about world hunger. Harry was just getting interested in poetry therapy when he died in a car crash.

More than anyone, my husband, Jim Bosveld, who is the sincerest and most intelligent person I know especially about how to live intentionally but without self-righteousness. If I happen to do something right, I'm likely to tell you about it. Jim just works everyday for "the people" and breathes. There is no one I place higher, no one who ever lived or lives now. Which brings me to my wish for every person.

My wish for every person
I could be wrong, and I'm always ready to change my mind about this if faced with a logical argument, but I think human beings were meant to be with one significant other person. It doesn't have to be marriage. Whatever. But I think most of us function better if we have one person we are committed to who is as overjoyed by our achievements as we are. Sadly, I'm seeing too much thoughtless behavior, selfishness, one-sidedness in many couples I observe. I don't know what else I want to say about that.

Jen's religion
What? I don't want one. Don't want a label. Don't agree with any denomination completely. How did I get myself into this UU thing? I was raised in a Christian Science Sunday school, mother was a CS practitioner, and I had "class instruction." Once you've had "class" they kind of feel like they've got you forever. But I grew gradually and rapidly and beyond a belief that there is a God that takes care of us, that watches over us, that is a "god-being", much less one we reflect and therefore we are "perfect". That said, let me refine. I believe in the profound great cosmos, the Interdependent Web of Life, that offers us more good every day than we ever acknowledge or make use of. And most of that is "matter" which Christian Scientist say they don't believe in.

I celebrate matter now; it is as real as anything gets. Yet, I cozy-up most to NewPhysics, the Tao of Physics (generic or the book) and the notion that "matter has a tendency to exist." There is a spiritual dimension to the matter of our lives. Millions of people every day pray for what is already here and available if we would just rise up from the kneeling and hand-clasping to do as much as possible. If we would open our hands instead of having them clinched in prayer, we could accomplish more. To me, "praying without ceasing" is resting in action, resting in pro-action for peace, for justice, for economic justice, equiality among races, no need for feminism or masculinism to drive our hopes, we start now to act as though we live in that Utopia we might hope for and through the practice toward it we make it. Mark Twain said "Be careful what you pretend to be; you will become it." Whew, guess I'm getting preachy here. Please know I'm preachin' to myself, not a reader. You're just watching me convince myself. . . . Another thing about Christian Science. The strange thing. As much as I don't share their beliefs anymore, their definition of God is actually the one I buy. Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love--those are the 7 synonyms for God according to their founder. Well, if you're an agnostic, you probably also believe in those seven things. It is those seven elements of the Interdependent Web of Life that are my god. And the only one that an absolute atheist might have trouble with is "Spirit" and I think that's just a matter of semantics. I probably am closer to being a pantheist than anything. Ya' know what? It doesn't matter to me. What matters to me is my work and whether it's contributing.

In my early 20s I left Christian Science though I continued to love the people in the congregation and do still today. I didn't affiliate with any church for many years and thought I never would. I visited various churches with a sociologist's approach until exposed to about everything out there.

Poets with whom I became friends, over the years, expressed ideas that resonated with the core of my thinking. Every time I found myself agreeing most, I discovered that person was a Unitarian Universalist, the people I had at one time made fun of because most of them would never say the word "God." I thought "Why did they go to a church?" I had a limited and traditional sense of what a church ought to be.

Increasingly, I attended events at the First UU Church of Columbus and read the bulletin boards while I was waiting for Groupdate or the Wine & Cheese Poetry Night to start. I found myself shaking my head yes and thought about coming back to the place on Sunday mornings. But at Groupdate, where I was the disc jockey and a discussion leader, one night I met a tall, dark, substantial fellow named Jim. After I'd read a sort-of R-rated poem during a break (they don't have language hang-ups at UU churches; they've got more important battles to wage), Jim walked up and introduced himself, "Hey, I write a little poetry too." We played Scrabble that night and drank coffees and soft drinks of choice until 4am at Bob Evans. We've been playing Scrabble since then. I put off joining the UU church; Jim was a member and I didn't want him to think I was after him. It took a couple of months for me to be "after him." The guy didn't own a phone, which made him quite suspect!

A Marriage made in. . .where?
if you don't believe
in heaven?
...on things perhaps religious.
Jim moved in within about a year. He was new in town, had a clean and lean flat on the east side of Columbus, was happy there. But he gave it up toward my condo investment and a year after that we had a wedding at the condo with about 50 good friends. I'd had every other kind of wedding. My first husband, Raoul DeRhodes, and I had the big church wedding in white at a Presbyterian Church. Our son David DeRhodes is my saving grace. He loads up his heart with love and attention for numerous people; he's a great father to Katie and Nick, and he prides himself on the tasks of his two jobs. Most of all, he talks to us (it feels like) about everything. There's real communication. Second husband, Rich Groce, and I got married by a judge at Columbus City Hall. Our son Christopher Groce is a creative spirit, a young man of many muses (which makes it difficult to do the traditional job and home thing though he is talented and appreciated for his drafting skills at the engineering firm). He and Jackie gave us a grandson, Hunter, who we recently took on a trip to Iowa. He comes to stay at our place in Johnstown as much as possible. Chris is in a hard rock band, Sporadic Still, that isn't as capable as Chris is with his music if he were on his own. The band opened for L.A.Guns and Dokken in Columbus. Third husband, Rick Welch, and I had a wedding that was an arts festival at Blacklick Woods Lodge in Columbus. Rick did a lot for me. Made videos, recordings, played guitar back-up for readings. But he was too stern toward the kids. And unfaithful. Best thing that ever happened to me is that he dumped me at 10-till midnight on New Years Eve. Took me 30 days to get over that. Just 30 days.

By the way, I've published poetry under all these last names as well as my maiden name, Miller. So that's a mess for anyone who would be interested in verifying my publication credits, isn't it? There have been times that I'd wished I'd just used my maternal family name since publishing, Sharkey. I identify with the name, the Irish heritage so much.

The media monopoly,
intentional living, short-comings...
Jim and I have the marriage I would fantasize on paper in a writing workshop when the leaders ask you to write where you'd like to be 10 years from now. I'm living it today and have been for the past 13 years. It makes up for all the former. All I'd have to do is write it like it already is. This chapter in my life represents the first time I've been able to get involved with issues and concerns I care about and share that with the one I love. To go to "church" with someone (because we're aligned on these issues) and care about applying some spirituality to intentional living without dogma and without guilt for what we haven't quite evolved to. For example, we boycotted Long John Silvers restaurants in the 80s because they killed dolphins, but we aren't quite the recyclers we'd like to be. We boycotted Cracker Barrel restaurants in the '90s because they had a corporate behavior (I believe unwritten) against gays and lesbians. (I'm just one more straight person who respects the inherent worth and dignity of all people). But we've avoided Colombian coffee "when it's convenient." For over 10 years we didn't buy Shell Oil products (South Africa), but darn it we bought grapes, . . . well, I did. But my fangs come out on the media monopoly issues and for several years now we've boycotted Barnes & Noble bookstores because of the way they've played this boardroom strategized game of GO against the successful independent bookstores. We consider this religious activity.

Only in September of 1998 did I say yes to a relationship with Barnes & Noble because of some changes they say they are trying to make. They are now buying from small and independent presses, paying those accounts payable in a timely manner. But there are other issues with them and some of us are watching very closely. I know 10 people with power in 10 strategically targeted big cities who are ready to head up a national boycott of Barnes & Noble if things don't go as we think they should--matters of fair play regarding BN employees, customers, competition, and some of their practices in book selection/promotion. Barnes & Noble headquarters (New Jersey) invited me to come there to discuss my grievances but I know that was a sugar pill. I'm in an unusual wait-and-see period. I don't typically do much waiting and seeing. I act. This is strange. If this is patience, I wouldn't know it, wouldn't recognize it in myself, never had much. (A friend just called me a liar).

A couple I overheard at the Main Street Cafe down the street explained their relationship to another couple. They talked about their marriage "based on God." It sounded quite pious and to me very much beating around the bush. I find greater truths traveling through the seemingly trivial. Like Scrabble.

I suppose if we were to say what our marriage is based on we could say "on Scrabble." Before you feel sorry for me, consider what that represents: thousands of hours of fun together, fair play, learning, expanding vocabulary (tools of our trade), opening our home to other players, keeping a Scrabble scorebook because we're so damned proud of the loyalty, good times, and travel it documents because the game and scorebook go with us everywhere.

Our marriage is also based on trading weeks in our kitchen. One week I plan the meals, cook, serve, clean up, and if we eat out, I pay. The next week Jim does it. If it's Jim's week, he decides which restaurant and I have nothing to say about it. If it's Jim's week, we eat in more often. He loves to cook; does it when he's exhausted. This 50/50 meals program assures that our different tastes are satisfied more than half of the time. Totally fair.

And the marriage is based on movies. We are avid movie-goers and rate each one on a scale of 1-10, 10 being highest. We gave a 9.5 to The Apostle recently and a 6.5 to The Rounders. I used to be a movie reviewer for ZRock 103.1 FM on my radio program, The Raccoontown Review in the early '90s. Let's see, in those days I ranked high Unforgiven and Glengary Glen Ross. Also reviewed rock music, travel, books, and entertainment. Talked a lot about careers and jobs and resumes. My co-host was Matt Humphreys--a great guy I enjoyed hanging out with at the studio. I wonder what he's doing now since the radio station went to a Christian format. I left before that because they failed to follow-through on the program I proposed--an internship for high school kids. I would have left anyway with the format change.


ONE MORE BLUE GUITAR

Speaking of media--our lives together also involve TV and music and books. I used to pride myself on the fact that I didn't watch much TV. I was condescending about TV. But there is a great deal of supercreativity to be found on TV; Jim and I look for it and find it. Mostly on A&E, not very much anymore on E or MTV (they've gone way downhill), but a great deal on networks. Those sitcoms that some of you are complaining about-- I love. Especially Seinfeld which is only about "nothing" in the Taoist sense. The more nothing television is in that regard, the more it is. The television you can talk about is not the television that matters. Ok, so I've lapsed back into comedy! But seriously, if you've read the I Ching, The Watercourse Way, The Tao of Physics, you know what I'm saying.

Seinfeld, though, in actuality was always about something, usually two or three somethings each show. Everybody who watches knows it isn't really about nothing. It's just the only way we can give ourselves permission to watch such silly somethings. I had oodles of hard laughs but knew they couldn't keep this up forever. Better to go out high on the charts. We also enjoy Fraser, Third Rock from the Sun, Dharma & Greg. They make fun of how seriously we take some issues in our lives. It is comedy and comedy uses hyperbole to exaggerate our way into meaning. Some of the bedroom behavior and constant episodes involving liars represent fantasy lives rather than the way we are. These shows are one more blue guitar (Wallace Stevens). We "do not play things as they are. . ..things as they are are changed on the blue guitar."

Sitcoms force us to respond. It's like a knock on the head, "Hey, just wanted to see if you were paying attention." For me, this is the most worthwhile and true art--blue guitar art. Whether painting, poetry, music, movies, TV--the blue guitars, the attempt to show things another way or bring us to a new perception. Like Robin Williams telling us in Dead Poets Society to get up on top of the desk and change our vantage point. And this is why Norman Rockwell insisted that he wasn't an "Artist". He demanded to be called an illustrator, because he illustrated us "as we are." Splendidly as we are, but none-the-less, as we are.


PATTIED IN THE PALM

Travel--a sickness or expanding boundaries,
another definition of energy field?
Last week I overheard a person in the church where Jim gave a guest sermon say, "People who just travel travel travel have something wrong at home. There's something missing." This guy didn't know how much we travel. It wasn't directed at us. Maybe it's true for someone he knows, and so he's come to that conclusion.

It certainly isn't the case for Jim and me. I don't know anyone who loves their home any more than we do, but the list of reasons we frequently drive the blue highways across America could fill the rest of my website. We study downtowns of American villages and towns and are, in some additional and direct way, educated about why we should be afraid for their future. Their desolate storefronts are the launching point for many potential Ph.D. dissertations on the health of the American city, the direction of our commerce, how and where we're willing to buy and sell each other. Because WalMart moves in on the edge of the town with more brand names than we've ever seen we imagine we need that stuff and buy it when we we've gotten along fine at the local Ben Franklin on Main Street. But we think we NEED more, that bigger is better. We think we need to have a Big Boy, French Silk Pie at Perkins, a guaranteed-same-all-the-time biscuit from Bob Evans. Mom & Pop's diner on Main Street was doing fine until chains showed up and took the percentage of Mom & Pop's customers. Jim and I look for the greasy spoons, as the elders in my family called them and I still do. We want the donut that isn't made from industrial dough. We want the scraggly-edged burger pattied in the palm of the hand, fries hand cut from fresh Idahos, apple pie with no syrupy mass-produced sugary slime holding together hard chunks of uninteresting pieces of apple.


RUDE ABOUT FOOD

Cooking.
I don't like cooking, unless I can cook for a gang and the gang of 20 shows up in the one-person kitchen afterward to clean up--bumping into each other: "Oooh, sorry,....excuse me, can I just get those glasses...where's a clean towel, Jim, this one's sopped...just lay everything on the table, we'll put it away later..."

My specialties are the Irish traditional roasts with oven browned potatoes and carrots. I like the carrots browned to a sweetness. I put at least two big onions on a beef roast and lots of rosemary and thyme all over a pork roast. The greatest gravy you ever tasted. None of it good for you by the time I get done with it.

All of my friends seem to be gourmet cooks. I make jokes about not liking "anything interesting." They buy me $40 concert tickets and take me but they seldom invite me for dinner. I guess I'm rude about food. That's what I confess anyway, I'm rude about food. "I don't eat interesting food" I say when I pick up the menu at Champs. "Do you have anything beige?" My tray at MCL Cafeteria is loaded with beige food. Chicken and noodles and mashed potatoes and carrots and cloverleaf roles and real butter and butterscotch pie. Now this will sound like a contradiction. My problem is that I don't eat.

I'm not very interested in food because I'm more interested in work. Don't eat breakfast or lunch then I'm pretty hungry by late supper and go to sleep on that. Terrible thing to do. Terrible.

I guess some of this is stand-up comedy. When I do eat I'm actually quite particular. I rant when salads are made with worthless iceberg lettuce and supposedly made interesting with yesterdays stale bread crumbs toasted. Give it a fancy French name and people will eat it. But I don't enjoy most bland Amish cooking. We live an hour away from the world's largest Amish community. Yes, YOU can visit Holmes County Ohio and the widest range of cut-out wooden rabbits in America! Well, if you do, don't tell me about it. Cliche county, that's what they should call it now that the nonAmish have moved in to fake the look and crowd the country lanes and further put the Amish and their buggies at risk. I wish we could leave them to their ways, their Monday morning laundry, their tasteless pie crusts and peaceful fields. Cognitive dissonance. The Amish--that's a subject for which I have cognitive dissonance. They make wonderful furniture, substantial barns, tidy fields, muddy houses, messy porches, and tasteless pie crusts. My life is full of contradiction.

Contrary to Popular Opinion
That's the name of my next book. Contrary to Popular Opinion is a full length collection of my poems that represent attitudes against the mainstream. Against Amish cooking or the opposite direction, 5-alarm chili. Against Barney, Barbie Dolls, "education" that "it all boils down to", whatever political party is "in", whatever clothes are "out", trite patriotism, home shopping descriptions, and the gun show. I'm getting into being contrary. Think I'll become more and more contrary. I'm beginning to feel like this is healthy. Maybe I got it by osmosis, living with Jim who is from Iowa, you know the song from The Music Man, about Iowa stubbornness and being contrary. I'm letting myself write hate poems about telemarketers, about how they can't possibly be part of the Interdependent Web of Life (my fellow UUs are gasping), about seminar catalogues in the mail, about Howard Stern. Howard Stern is not part of the Interdependent Web of Life either. Howard Stern, Imus, Rush have so much in common. They fill the airwaves with hate and ugliness; there's nothing there that's good for anybody. So why do I think these poems I'm writing out of my disrespect for Barbie and Barney could be good for anybody? Because Barneybland "I love you; you love me" isn't specific enough to do anybody any good. It sets us up as liars.

We don't love just because we say we love. We know we love if we show the love, in deeds, in actions: by being Jimmy Carter and pounding some nails for Habitat for Humanity, by being Oprah who can afford to spend her life anyway she wants but chooses to spend it talkin' to ThePeople, by being Doris Day and preferring the company and responsibility for dogs to the dictates of directors. People throw that L word around so that it doesn't mean anything. Teach toddlers to go around the room and hug everybody good night, and they don't learn who they might really love and which characteristics and behaviors illustrate real love. Well isn't that cute, well aren't we all cozy. Surely there's somebody in that room they shouldn't be hugging, don't feel sincere about. Do these kids grow up to say "But Baby, I love you, come on." Do they grow up to say, "I'll always be here for you honey," just because it's a wedding vow and wedding vows are what you do. It doesn't matter if you really mean it, don't think about if you mean it, this is a wedding, that's a show, this is theatre, legit theatre, sanctioned by the white anglo sappiness protestant (how'd Catholics get out of this anyway?) pabulum. Barney is to children's programming what Helen Steiner Rice is to poetry. White rice, mashed potatoes, elevator music, boiled wieners, Wonder Bread, the Escort, vanilla ice cream, and a cement goose yard ornament. Gotta dress somethin' up and the goose, well, you can control it; it isn't goin' anywhere, it'll wear what you put on it, won't talk back. The kids, they run away from home, they fill up Times Square and Hollywood Boulevard. But the goose. It proves you can take care of something. Dress it in a raincoat and you're a nurturing citizen with good parental qualities. Anybody who dresses a cement goose like that oughta be all right. Bullshit. Now isn't that a bunch of bullshit. So, yeah, I have it in for cement geese too. Contrary. Contrary to Popular Opinion.


JEN'S STRANGE OBESESSIONS

Jennifer's a collector but these are her serious desires:

Wood carvings
(primarily European and Canadian)
of people—
the tinier the better,
up to 9" tall.
She also seeks
some Chinese and Japanese
of a very delicate nature.

Tumble-ups. Antique, collectible, and new art glass. Looking for the very special. If they have handles and the glass goes inside it's called a bedside set. Glass on the outside, no handle, it's a tumble-up. We collect both.

Musical instruments, from pianos to a dozen guitars, Jen has owned a store's worth of musical instruments but has downsized the collection to a number of percussion pieces, rattles, and drums. Yep, Jen and Jim play these to Mr. Tambourine Man and other retro sounds when the grandkids come over or during some of the poetry writing workshops. They also have a large collection of CDs and tapes but none as important to Jennifer as her complete U2, Hothouse Flowers, Van Morrison, Mary Black . . . yeah, you've got it, Irish Pop and Rock.

Glass trees (they're usually Christmas trees when you find them). Not the handblown fair truck type but higher art both mold and blown glass trees up to 10" high, preferably smaller. Jen is building a little glass forest it appears.