Josephine Jacobsen

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Joy & Terror: The Poems of Josephine Jacobsen

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SOURCE: Spires, Elizabeth. “Joy & Terror: The Poems of Josephine Jacobsen.” New Criterion 14, no. 3 (November 1995): 28-33.

[In the following essay, Spires summarizes Jacobsen's poetic career, characterizing In the Crevice of Time as honest and direct.]

Art is long and life is short. Or is it the other way around? On the evidence of In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems, a 258-page volume that spans sixty years of poetic productivity, both art and life have been long and rewarding for Josephine Jacobsen.

The collected poems of a greatly gifted poet may not offer the suspense of a well-plotted novel, but there is still a certain drama in seeing the arc of a life's work fitted between the covers of one book. To read In the Crevice of Time is akin to watching some frightening or wondrous natural process, say a tree or flower blooming, captured in time-lapse photography—from the first stirrings of a germinal impulse to the rapid movement into individuality, maturity, and inevitable denouement. It's a disturbingly compressed tale of birth, change, growth, and oblivion. So it is with Josephine Jacobsen, who, at eighty-seven, has probably been writing longer than any other American poet living today, and who continues to write poems of extraordinary force and passion. Like the aging, prescient figure in “Hourglass,” a recent poem, “She perfectly understands the calendar / and the sun's passage. But she grips the leash / and leans on the air that is hers and here.”

Unlike many of her poetic contemporaries, Jacobsen has not pursued a particularly “literary” life. She was born in 1908, part of a generation that included Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, and Roethke. Her formal education ended with her graduation from high school; it had been decided early on by her mother (Jacobsen's father had died when she was five) that she would not go to college. In the spirit of the time, she married early and had a child. Her first four books, Let Each Man Remember (1940), For the Unlost (1946), The Human Climate (1953), and The Animal Inside (1966), published by smaller presses outside the circle of New York, did not establish her as a major poet of her generation, although by all rights they should have. She did not teach, nor was she deeply involved with the literary world until she was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971, when she was sixty-three. For the most part, her writing was done “on the side,” in brief intense spurts during isolated months at Yaddo and MacDowell, and during winter stays in the Caribbean, a locale to which she has always felt attracted because of its “wonderful sense of strangeness … which was totally other.” With the publication of The Shade-Seller, in 1974, and The Chinese Insomniacs, in 1981, Jacobsen became better known, although even today she is still a “poet's poet.” Despite receiving various awards and honors in the past decade, she has often been overlooked, especially when major anthologies have been compiled.

Having said all that, and now having In the Crevice of Time in hand, does it matter? Of the 169 poems included here, several dozen are perfect and irreplaceable, far more than the precious half a dozen Randall Jarrell spoke of in his famous remark about poets spending their lives standing out in fields waiting for lightning to strike. A necessarily incomplete list of some of her best work would include, I think, “The Three Children,” “My Uncle a Child,” “Instances of Communication,” “Poems for My Cousin,” “The Starfish,” “The Enemy of the Herds, the Lion,” “The Birds,” “Colloquy,” “Daughter to Archeologist,” “In the Crevice of Time,” “The Mexican Peacock,” “Treaty,” “The Chanterelles,” “The Shade-Seller,” “Pondicherry Blues,” “Notes toward Time,” “The Sisters,” “The Chosen,” “Winter's Tale,” “The Woods,” “The Limbo Dancer,” “Tears,” “First Woman,” “Reading on the Beach,” and “Hourglass.” In the Crevice of Time is a selection of only about two thirds of the approximately 250 poems included in her eight books, and any reader familiar with all of Jacobsen's work might easily add another dozen to the two dozen or so just mentioned.

Throughout her career, she has persistently chosen to write poems of an unnervingly pure lyric intensity. (About her early years she has written, “I had an unidentified craving for the lyrical.”) She is a formal poet with the ability, when she wants to and the poem demands it, to be “free.” She has, unfashionably, always been clear in her refusal to use personal, intimate experience in a direct or explicit way in her poems. What one observes in Jacobsen's poetry is experience worked into the very fabric of the poem, in its tone and stance, rather than experience overtly disclosed. In a memoir she explained, “If there is little trace in this account of … things which are darker, of pain and loss, it is never because these things were nonexistent, but because they are in the very texture of writing where they belong” (italics mine).

A Josephine Jacobsen poem will not come alive for the reader until this subtle texture is both intellectually processed and viscerally felt, the way meaning in spoken conversation is understood as much through a subtle tone of voice, a shift in inflection, as by simple denotation. Readers desirous of an explicit topical poem (which many readers seem to be these days) will go away from Jacobsen dissatisfied because her concerns are not so easily categorized. She is part traveler (“Born travelers must and will have terra incognita”), part archeologist (“We breathe through our future. / Remember me is the message”), and part seer (“I know all about what is / happening in this city at just / this moment; every last grain of dark I conceive”).

In the Crevice of Time is arranged chronologically, beginning in 1935 and continuing up to 1994. Initially, Jacobsen moves through a period of literary influence, trying out various modes and styles, both romantic and modern. About her early models and influences, she said once, “If I have cause for gratitude, let it be to Robert Service, Rudyard Kipling; to Dante Gabriel Rossetti; to Keats, Yeats, and Donne.” Here is Yeats in “Fergus and the Druid”:

I see my life go drifting like a river
From change to change; I have been
          many things—
A green drop in the surge, a gleam of light
Upon a sword, a fir tree on a hill,
An old slave grinding at a heavy quern,
A king sitting upon a chair of gold. …

And here is the young Jacobsen in “Winter Castle”:

I am many-minded, diverse-shaped:
I am the horses, hay-warmed in the stalls,
The snow-snagged spruces, and the starving
          hare
Coursing the slopes of snow.

Other early poems, such as “For Any Member of the Security Police” or “‘It's a Cold Night,’ Said Coney to Coney,” show Jacobsen assimilating the influence of Auden. Much of her early work is characterized by a tight reining in of the subject matter, by an ironic or distanced treatment, and by the imposition of formal constraints, where lines are carefully counted out and fitted into set forms.

At around the age of forty, when many poets privately wonder, “What now?,” Jacobsen stepped out from the shadow of influence and the confinement of closed forms to begin writing the poems that are most hers. Working outside of any poetic circle, she said of the process, “I was forced … to develop a sense of my own intention.” And her intention, from almost the beginning, seemed to be to write a poetry in which “the experience, wherever found, is the experience of being taken out of oneself, simultaneous with an inner penetration to unity. In that respect, the aesthetic experience is similar to the religious experience, and vice versa.”

The overriding thematic preoccupation of her poetry, from first to last, is impermanence and loss. Chief among the many questions that her poems seek to answer are these three: What is the difference between the animal and the human? How do humans know and communicate with one another? And, how shall we be reconciled to the fact of death? In “Notes toward Time,” Jacobsen reflects that “the schizoid heart tells / what is alive, by its dying.” An early poem, “Spring, Says the Child,” connects the child's (and poet's?) acquisition of language to the onset of consciousness, with its fateful recognition that all things die:

There are words too ancient to be said by the
          lips of a child—
Too old, too old for a child's soft reckoning—
Ancient, terrible words, to a race unrecon-
          ciled:
Death, spring. …
The composite heart of man knows their
          awful age—
They are frightening words to hear on a child's
          quick tongue.
They overshadow, with their centuries'
          heritage,
The tenderly young.
Death, says the child, spring, says the child,
          and heaven. …
This is flesh against stone, warm hope against
          salt sea—
This is all things soft, young, ignorant;
          this is even
Morality.

Here, as in so much of her poetry, Jacobsen presents human existence as having a disturbing double aspect: a precarious, desperate balancing of life and death forces, one light, one dark, one hopeful, one unassailably grim. The formal arrangement of the poem, with the abruptly cut-off fourth line of each stanza, heavily emphasizes the words death, spring, tenderly young, and mortality, the words almost a précis of the poem's argument. But even as Jacobsen acknowledges the fact of death, she also perceives nature's recurring cycles and promise, both cruel and hopeful. In the texture of the poem, one intuits a certain timeless knowledge: that the law of life is barbaric.

The concerns articulated in “Spring, Says the Child” have occupied and preoccupied Jacobsen for a lifetime. If we are “a race unreconciled,” then where can we look for consolation? In “Instances of Communication,” one of Jacobsen's most masterly poems, the poet traveler posits one answer:

Almost nothing concerns me but
          communication.
How strange: Up the Orinoco, once, far
up the Orinoco after jungle miles, great
          flowerheads
looping the treecrests, log-crocodiles,
          crocodile-logs, bob-haired
Indians naked in praus: a small, hot, town
          and in an upper dining-room
plashed at by a fountain, cooled by fans,
          guardian of a menu the size of a baby,
speaking six languages, with seven capital
          cities behind his eyes, a headwaiter,
a man, who said without hope, “And when
          does your ship sail?” And no one
said to him, “What are you doing here?”
In the hall of the inn at Mont Serrat I came
          out of my room and
“Stand back, stand back!” cried the criada in her
          softest Spanish, “the bride—
the bride is coming!” out of her room, down
          the hall, down to the steps
on her way to the church, to the groom.
          She was pale, and dark; she clouded
the carpet with the mist of her train, she moved
          by me but turned and bent and caught
my fingerbones seeing me like fate, watching
          the three of her, the old, tall, childhood girl,
the darkly seen half-a-thing, and the white
          bride lost on the point of love, and “Buenas,
o buenas tardes!” she called into my ear, she
          crushed my fingers and laughed with panic
into my widened eyes and went proudly on
          whispering
over the hall runner.
I drove five madwomen down a roaring
          redhot turnpike in a July
noon; the one behind me had a fur ragged
          coat gathered about her in that furnace;
she reached in the horrid insides of a purse
          and offered me a chocolate, liquid
and appalling. “Look! Look! A bird!”
          I cried and flung it over the side
and munched my empty jaws as she turned
          back, and cried: “How good!”
And while the others hummed and cursed,
          and watched simply, suddenly she put
her lips—behind me—to my ear and soft
          as liquid chocolate came purling
the obscene abuse. “Hush, hush, Laura, hush,”
          said the nurse; “the nice lady
likes you!” Laura did not believe so, and
          went on softly, slowly, lovingly,
with O such a misery of hate.

Underlying the deliberately difficult, rapid syntax of the first three stanzas is a sense of isolation and panic, madness and terror, in which the characters speak different languages, both literally and metaphorically. Throughout the poem, the narrator feels the press of other people's identities. She sees but cannot rescue the hopeless waiter from his remote exile; their conversation is limited by the empty language of social convention and by cultural boundaries. Likewise, she sees the Spanish bride in a mystical, transfigured state, but the girl's “o buenas tardes!” fails to adequately express the gravity of her wedding day, when her girlhood identity and innocence will be forfeited. And in the third stanza the narrator and nurse must suffer the obscenities of the madwoman Laura. All three vignettes contain disturbing examples of failed speech, and yet, playing against this, each also contains an example of the narrator's uncanny ability to fathom the interior of the people she observes. It is a Keatsian moment where the poet becomes a nerve-like receptor to the lives around her and finds herself in helpless, knowing communion with them.

In the final stanza, Jacobsen shifts from these painful, disturbing scenes of human communication to a sacramental communion:

In frosty Philadelphia the freighter lay and
          loaded in the Sunday ice.
The great cranes swung, the huge nets
          grabbed and everything echoed from cold:
docks, warehouses, freightrails, ships' prows;
          everything clicked and echoed;
but it was possible to go down the long cold
          docks over the strange dark street under
the dim sky into a cold great warehouse
          Sunday still, up still cold stairs, along
a dark dim cold thin hall through a brown
          door into a small square room with lit
peaky candles and kneeling take—cool, slick,
          thin, little larger than a quarter—
God's blood and body charged with its speech.

Stanzas three and four are striking in their juxtapositions: we are led from the hot hell of the turnpike to the cold heaven of the “great warehouse,” from the image of the obscene chocolate offered by Laura, an unwanted communion, to the Eucharistic host, a divine communion. In receiving the sacrament of Holy Communion, the speaker is in the grip of something powerfully symbolic, literally in communion with a wordless, mystical language, the antithesis of the obscene speech in stanza three. It is an epiphanal moment that takes us back to Jacobsen's remark that “the aesthetic experience is similar to the religious experience, and vice versa.” For Jacobsen, faith and imagination are closely connected, not exclusive of each other, the physical world a place of potential symbol and metaphor, a place where divine speech—the speech of poetry and prayer—can exist. In “Instances of Communication,” the world of imaginative experience and the world of religious experience brilliantly intersect and momentarily become one.

If religious faith is one form of consolation in a time-bound world, one path to epiphany, even more so for Jacobsen is art. In “The Interrupted,” a poem about art and antiquity, she writes, “These [statues] escape from their maker's limit to rejoice us with hope.” In the title poem of In the Crevice of Time, she describes the moment when a “hunter-priest” made the first cave painting, “his art an act of faith, his grave / an act of art: for all, / for all, a celebration and a burial.” It is a recurring theme in Jacobsen's work. Art, for Jacobsen, connects us to the timeless and eternal, as in “The Enemy of the Herds, the Lion,” a poem about a memento mori, a “decorated box-lid, ca. 2500 b.c., which was found in the grave of the Lady Shub-ad at Ur.” The poet describes the image on the box as “a lion-sheep without division,” predator and victim “tranced and ardent in the act of taking / utter enough to be love.” She asks, “What / word did her box-beasts mean?” and considers various answers:

Possi-
bilities; the chic symbols
of the day, on a fashionable jewel-toy,
the owner modishly ignorant; or, corrupt,
an added pulse to lust.
Or:
mocking, or wise, remembrance
of innocent murder innocent death,
the coupled ambiguous desire,
at dinner, at dressing, at music.
Or,
best, and why not? of her meeting
all quiet terror, surmounted by joy,
to go to her grave with her; a pure
mastery older than Ur.

Again, Jacobsen presents the twinned, inseparable aspects of human existence, its joy and terror, in her juxtaposition of life and death, death and art. (The phrase comes up again in “The Clock” where she writes, “In joy and terror / I move in time where / nothing points to error.”) Hunter and hunted, death and life, are, in the poem's phrase, “without division.” This idea of “terror, surmounted by joy,” infuses much of Jacobsen's work and is absolutely central to understanding what she is about as a poet.

Although there are many Josephine Jacobsen poems that delight and entertain, she is, in her greatest poems, capable of staring death in the eye and drawing its wrenching lineaments down to the last wrinkle. This two-mindedness—in which she is both in the moment and yet also self-consciously aware of time's rapid passage—is perfectly embodied in “The Chanterelles,” a poem about mushroom-gatherers. Even as they cook their find “in cream and Neufchâtel / and onions, to devour it together close to the first flames,” they are also aware that more deadly, poisonous mushrooms, “some single, breastbone white; others the color of dust, the color of rain,” grow among the chanterelles in the dark fairy-tale wood. It is the experience of a happy picnicker in a sunlit field watching, out of the corner of her eye, a dark cloud approaching.

The recent poems that make up the last section of In the Crevice of Time are some of Jacobsen's very best. There is an open, direct, colloquial quality to them, and a remarkable sense of self-disclosure. Guises and disguises (Dickinson's “slant truth”) are abandoned, poetic pretense dropped. In “Calling Collect,” she implores someone on the other end of a telephone line, “For the love / / of God let me hear your voice locate me. / Over distance, long, it is saying my name. / I speak to you,” an address as much, perhaps, to her readers as to a personal beloved. Running through these poems is an intense desire to connect. One has only to scan the titles to see that time and death are very much on Jacobsen's mind: “Next Summer,” “Survivor's Ballad,” “The Chosen,” “The Night Watchman,” “Winter's Tale,” “We Pray Most Earnestly,” “You Can Take It with You,” “The Blue-Eyed Exterminator,” “The Thing about Crows,” “The Shrivers,” “Loss of Sounds,” “Hourglass.”

In “First Woman,” the narrator observes a bleak winter landscape that mirrors her own ravaged spirit. The poem is a desperate interrogation of self, the poet reaching far back into the deep past to address the skeletal remains of “Lucy” (so named by archeologists), the earliest known woman:

Do animals expect spring?
Ground hard as rancor,
wind colder than malice.
Do they think that will change?
Sky no color and low;
grass is no color, and trees
jerk in the bitter gust.
In this air nothing flies.
Do they believe it will change,
grass be soft and lustrous,
rigid earth crack
from the push of petals,
sky retreat into blue,
the red wide rose breathe
summer, and the butterfly
err on sweet air?
First woman, Lucy, or another,
did you know it all waited
somewhere to come back?
On the first stripped, iron day
did you believe that?
On this merciless morning
I wake, first woman,
with what belief?

The vocabulary of “First Woman” speaks for the naked condition of the spirit and the violent elements that would destroy it: rancor, malice, bitter, stripped, iron, merciless. There is an immense projection of emotion outward onto the landscape, the poem nothing less than a harrowing self-portrait, a poem of brutal “inner weather.” One of the most remarkable aspects of “First Woman” is the way Jacobsen pushes the possibilities of the lyric, so often centered in one moment, to encompass past, present, and future: the deep past of Lucy's original knowledge, the bitter present, and the hoped-for future with spring's “push of petals” and summer's “red wide rose.” It is a poem poised on the brink of an abyss, a “crevice of time,” but through a supreme act of will, the poet resists giving in to despair. In “First Woman” Jacobsen has gone full circle, from the first intimations of knowledge in her early poem “Spring, Says the Child” to the hardest and harshest recognitions imaginable, earned only through age and experience. It is one of the most successful contemporary lyrics I can think of.

Isn't it for this kind of truth-telling, this way of seeing that penetrates to the very core and marrow, that we read poetry? It seems no accident that a deliberately sibylline countenance floats on the cover on In the Crevice of Time, bringing to mind the Sibyl's proverbial words to Aeneas: “Yield not to disasters, but press onward the more bravely.” In a long life of writing, Josephine Jacobsen has.

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