SOURCE: Jacobsen, Josephine, and Betty Parry. “Josephine Jacobsen.” Plum Review 9 (May 1995): 59-72.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in 1986 and published in Belles Lettres, Parry inquires about Jacobsen's literary influences, beginnings as an author, and methods of writing.]

PART 1

[Parry]: You once told a fascinating story about Japanese artists who, after they became famous, changed their names and started fresh. Where is this from?

[Jacobsen]: A book by Matisse called Jazz. He writes that an artist should never be a prisoner of style, of reputation, or of success. He describes Japanese artists who, in an earlier age, had become oppressed by the accumulation of responsibility, the fear of self-repetition, the terrible weight of expectancy. They wanted, like snakes, to shed their skins and start fresh. So they moved to a new identity, stripped of everything except a paintbrush in order to protect their freedom. J'aime ça, because I came to this profession so late and in such a curious way, and as it closes in around me, I feel its tremendous weight. I get an enormous amount of requests for jacket comments, for recommendations—all the peripheral part that is so important. When young poets are starting, they desperately need this kind of help. I have never been able to withhold it, and it doesn't seem proper to do so. When you try to separate the profession from the poems, it's like Mae West peeling a grape. When you try to get the grape from the peelings, you realize the profession of poetry has overgrown you like ivy. You have an overwhelming desire to go somewhere and wake up in the morning with a completely different identity.

Your stories and poems deal with the “instant of knowing,” sudden self-discovery, terror in the commonplace. Is your world like that?

Yes, life is absolutely brimming with terror. I can't conceive how you can live in the world today and not be aware of it—particularly anyone who feels passionately. A line I wrote at an early age speaks of “the tissue paper between the foot and the plunge.” I think we live from minute to minute, from hour to hour with our friends, our loves, our lives at risk. We are hostages to fortune.

Like that wonderful line you found years ago on a tombstone in a New Hampshire cemetery.

“It is a fearful thing to love / what death can touch.”

How do you feel about daring, taking artistic risks?

That's a difficult question, because my daring has been a kind of reverse daring. All of us who are not young have moved through various poetic climates. There have been many periods when the stream flowed toward certain types of poetry—political, social consciousness, structurally innovative—which I approved of and thought absolutely necessary but which were not what I felt I could or should do at the moment. I think you have the double weight of not only feeling that you must take risks but also the compulsion that however strongly you feel about issues and wish you could write poetry that was more politically oriented, this may not be what you have to offer. It's just as hard to swim against the stream of the current as it is to be innovative in the technical sense. What I have tried to do is develop my poetry naturally and not be coerced by any topical trend. That is as daring as I have wanted to be.

What are the changes that you see in your work through the years?

I think there have been manifest differences in terms of technique—approaching and retreating from conventional forms, continually investigating what should be done in and out of specific forms. If you cut into a tree, you can tell its age and check its growth by the number of rings. I would hope that if my books were compared, the work would show a steady development in depth, perception and control.

I gather that in recent years you have received many accolades, and demand for your work has increased.

Yes, the picture has changed a great deal. … This is a whole new phase.

Do you feel that it is overdue?

All my friends tell me it is. William Meredith made the most wonderful remark a few years ago. He said, “Josephine, you hear a lot about people who are precocious, but all I can say about you is that you are postcocious.” This cheered me up to no end. I came into poetry in such a strange way—no academic or professional connections, no input of any kind. I just dropped my poems in the mailbox.

So recognition came late. How did it happen?

I don't understand how it happened. I kept writing, and just after I was married I sent some poems to Poetry (which I learned received about 60,000 poems a year when Harriet Monroe was editor), and she took some of them. This absolutely stunned me. Then for a long time I was very busy—poetry was the peripheral part of my life. The first thing that made me feel that I was a professional was the success of The Testament of Samuel Beckett, which William Mueller and I wrote. I was fascinated with Beckett, who was practically unknown at that time. I felt that sections of his work were pure poetry. In 1971, to my surprise, the Library of Congress called and asked me to be the Poetry Consultant. [Jacobsen was the first woman chosen since Elizabeth Bishop, who served from 1949-1950.] While I was at the Library, Doubleday took The Shade-Seller. It was nominated for the National Book Award. I was in my 60s, so to say I came late to the game is putting it mildly.

I gather that although you had almost no formal education—less than 4 years in all—that your mother encouraged you to read extensively.

I didn't go to school, and either there were no truant officers in those days or they never caught up with us. Mother had great intellectual curiosity and the greatest disregard for schools. She was very restless. After father died, when I was 5, we traveled constantly. I never stayed long enough to develop any friends, but I was not conscious of any deprivation. I read a tremendous amount.

What poets influenced your work?

The three poets who influenced me most at that formative stage were Auden, Yeats and Archie Ammons. Yeats and Auden influenced me directly into the stream of poetry, and Ammons influenced my whole conception of what poetry could mean to a person.

What did you learn from Auden and Yeats? They are so different.

They couldn't be more opposite. From Auden, I got wit and humor, contemporary language, and that ordinary objects play a part in poetry. From Yeats, I learned not to be afraid of grandeur: that myth and tradition and a word that is so dubious that I hardly dare use it—romance—were still part of poetry.

An evaluation of your work in The Hollins Critic quotes you as thinking of poetry as a “solitary and dangerous encounter.”

I do. I don't know whether my own poetry has been so solitary because I had no connections with any movements or whether it is a temperamental thing. My poetry is very slow in the writing, very personal, though oddly enough it has never been personally centered. I've never written what is known as confessional poetry.

What do you mean by dangerous?

I think you take enormous risks in poetry. So much poetry is contrived according to demand, is aimed at certain kinds of publications, or is done to enhance an individual reputation. For me, it's like Jacob wrestling with the angel. In every encounter with a poem there is a possibility of an abysmal failure. It's like the difficulty of trying to climb a mountain: the chances that you are going to fall are very steep, and the sense of triumph if you get there is very strong.

You have a natural gift for elegant language or style, but your work shows an even greater concern for total creative process.

I have always been baffled by having been praised so often for style, yet I never thought of it consciously apart from the work. I am much more interested in other elements, so that whatever style I developed came out of the work rather than being imposed on it.

Have you ever experimented with different styles?

I started conservatively with lyric and rhymed poetry and then wrote nothing in the way of rhymed poetry for the next 20 or 30 years. A few years ago I went through a period of immense contraction—the desire for compression—and wrote a great many short poems, poems with a very impounded vocabulary. “The Monosyllable” and “Finally” from The Chinese Insomniacs are good examples.

Of late you have also become a critically acclaimed short story writer.

I love short stories. I always felt the form was for me. I think the training in poetry, the fact that every single word has a vital importance, carries over into fiction. Most of my poems are poems of movement, of action. Something is happening within the poem, which is a minute story. I admire descriptive poetry but I write almost none. My primary interest is always people and situations that affect people.

Do you have a particular method of writing?

It is unbelievable how little time I spend writing. Almost all of it has been done in two months a year. For a long time I tried to hew out an hour here or there but I found it destructive to my work. It's like a pool: If you keep chucking stones in it, you can't get any reflection. I know people who can sit down and write at the kitchen table. Alas, I have to have protective leisure. I can't start unless I know that nothing is going to interrupt until I finish.

How do you feel about past discrimination and its effect on women poets?

I feel very strongly. The first lecture I gave at the Library of Congress, “From Anne to Marianne,” dealt with that issue. Nobody in their senses can regard as a coincidence that in the last 25 years there were an extraordinary number of excellent women poets, whereas from Anne Bradstreet to Elinor Wylie and Edna St. Vincent Millay, there was hardly a woman in the history of America who wrote any kind of good poetry. Emily Dickinson was the outstanding example. Women haven't changed that much. Life hasn't changed that much. What has happened is because of the assumptions that women had no intellectual capacity and that there was nowhere for them to go if they had. God knows how many silent poets went to the grave because being a poet was not a practical, emotional or mental option.

You talked about Edna St. Vincent Millay's refusal to be pigeon-holed.

She was really the original feminist. Emotionally she had the guts and spirit to relate person to person, not woman to man. She wrote some of the most beautiful love sonnets in the English language.

What about the accusation that most women are emotional, confessional poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath?

I think both Sexton and Plath were good enough to overcome the element and write some very fine poetry. I don't feel that the circumstantially personal in their poetry helped. I'm not sure that it is a strictly feminine trait. I think it is true that men and women react slightly differently emotionally. Some of my more militant feminist friends would say that is a sexist remark, but I see it as a difference in emphasis, not as an advantage or disadvantage. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Bishop have a scope and control that many fine men poets lack. And if you want to get into highly emotional poetry, Theodore Roethke and John Berryman are as emotional as any women.

Are women as creative artists affected by not having had real power?

Isn't that true of any group that has been oppressed? It's nonsense to pretend otherwise: It's a statistical fact. Being oppressed in America, whether it's Black people or women, inevitably breeds a lack of self-confidence, an ambivalence about success.

What is your estimation of contemporary poetry?

What's the Dickens quote, “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.” There is more good poetry—I am not speaking of great poetry, which, alas we don't have a great deal of, but good sound poetry that not only merits reading but has real caliber—being written than in any other period in my lifetime. On the other hand, there is unquestionably more total trash being turned out than in any other time. After 4 years on the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] Literature Panel and 2 years judging national contests in which there were hundreds of submissions, I probably have as good a grasp of what is being done in contemporary poetry as anyone. I don't think any good poet is going to be threatened by a flood of terrible poetry. So I say let the flowers bloom, let all the flowers bloom.

Do you think that the pluralistic concerns of society are having an effect?

I think there are a great many things feeding into contemporary poetry that it never had to cope with before. There were so many common assumptions 75 years ago that have shattered now. All of us, including me, God knows, are confused about contradictory political and ethical issues in which no matter what you do you come out wrong. The more troubled a society you get, the more poetry you are going to get—good and bad.

What is the role of a poet?

I think that you have to consider the individual gift. I don't approve of the Ivory Tower approach. I like to see poets embroiled in life, involved as human beings even if it isn't what activates your poetry. The danger is that society pushes poets into situations where they feel they are a separate, excluded group who have to stand off and make statements. Poets are very conscious that they are not writers whom the average person reads, understands or identifies with. Very literate people who are up on history, biography and novels haven't read a poem since “Hiawatha.”

What is the next step in your work?

In what I'm doing now, the scope has widened and there is something from my whole life that goes into each poem. The poems have got to be deeper and wider. The recent poems are more concerned with universal things that are also highly personal—themes like life, death, love, honor, loneliness, betrayal—experiences that condition everyone's life. There is always the risk that once you leave the personal, you get into rhetoric, and if there is no universal root, you get personal statements with no wider application. I would hope that I will continue to examine each poem in light of that. I wrote a poem called “The Sea Fog,” about the fog coming around this vessel and all the doors and stairs being changed and finally coming down to the stateroom in total isolation looking in the mirror and saying, “Who are you? Do you really have any idea who you are?”

Why do you say, “Who are you?” Who should one be?

Again I come up strongly for differences. For me it would be integrity, speaking of what you really have learned, what you really know, not what someone wants to hear, or what you think is going to be most remembered. I think that when poetry or religion or patriotism or art is manipulated by personal gain, it's the bottom line, or, as my kids say, the pits.

In a lecture, “One Poet's Poetry,” you said, “The essence of poetry is the unique view—the unguessed relationship, suddenly manifest. Poetry's eye is always aslant, oblique.” What do you mean by oblique?

Poetic vision doesn't see things head on. The poet's angle of perception is not like any other. Emily Dickinson said it best: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

PART 2

We talked about your own poems and your reflections on poetry and literature earlier. I'd like to focus on what's happened in the intervening years—your recent awards and the new book, In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems, your ninth collection of poems. In discussing theories of creativity and aging, you've quoted Robert Frost's line, “What to make of a diminished thing.” Judging from recent accolades you've received for your poems, it certainly sounds as if your work has not only continued to resonate but has grown stronger.

I was particularly pleased that the American Academy of Arts pointed out that my best work had been done in my seventies and eighties. Each time I write a poem I think by the grace of God I'll never do exactly the same thing the same way again. If the poem itself goes wrong, I just destroy it or start over again.

You continue to give so much of yourself both as a poet and professional, yet you still have creative energy for your own work.

The physical energy is going so rapidly that it's frightening. The odd thing is the creative energy doesn't seem to be going as fast and the creative opportunities still exist, but the physical energy is going out like water from a sieve and this is what I have to come to terms with. I hope that I have the sense to understand when the vital energy begins to wane and examine each poem in light of that.

Your amazing ability to sustain a deep personal poetic vision—to write poetry that makes a difference—informs all your work. How do you choose these themes?

Most external events in the world have certain emotional qualities that resemble those inside yourself. What you think about Bosnia is not isolated. Most public tragedies are based on vital human emotions—death, loss, love, the break-up of everything you treasure. I seldom portray specific events but those events connect with universal experiences.

“Lines to a Poet,” the first poem in the book, begins:

Be careful what you say to us now,
The street lamp is smashed, the window is jagged.

It uses compression and the texture of language to portray emotion.

That was written in 1944 when Eric and I were overseas, and I felt that nothing else was worth commenting on but war. The poem, “For Wilfred Owen,” was from that time too. Remember “Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.”

How about the changes in the way you write?

The last few years I've written fewer poems because the actual physical energy isn't there. It's harder to write at home rather than at a writer's colony, because there you're disembodied, there's nothing to do but write, eat and sleep. Last week not one single thing has been on my initiation, while at a colony there's that wonderful sense of purpose. Some things, like seeing old friends, are pleasurable and sustaining but not productive of the inner isolation you need to write.

How long has it been since you were at Yaddo or MacDowell?

Four years, and three years since Grenada. When we spent winters in Grenada, I would set the alarm for six and go out on the porch. The dark was beginning to thin; after a cup of coffee it was light enough to write, and I would work from six to eight.

What about now?

I don't try to do anything professional in the morning. Moving is painful because of arthritis. I usually write from two to five in my study in the apartment.

Tell me about the walk-in-closet study you showed me and that wonderful Rousseau above your desk.

I always liked that Rousseau, so I asked Eric to copy it. It's the artist out on a limb—a lady on a sofa naked in the jungle. That's what I always feel, no armor, no idea of what is going to happen, hoping yet fearing, equal parts of hope and fear, that I will be able to cope with what comes. Though I was never prolific, I'm writing fewer poems now, but I hope that there's greater precision and concentration in the new poems.

It's an interesting coincidence that you were 80 when you won the Lenore Marshall prize; as was Sterling Brown. It seems to take our society a long time to recognize artists if they happen to be women or African American. I know that one of your own special interests when you served as Consultant in Poetry from 1971-1973 was in bringing African Americans to record and read at the Library of Congress.

That's true. Among those who came when I was there were Sam Allen, June Jordan, May Miller, Leon Damas, Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson and Lucille Clifton.

Let's talk about the new book and how it came about. Who chose the format and title?

I was asked by a person high up at Hopkins, “Have you thought about submitting?” When I did, the response was positive, and they couldn't have been nicer. I was dealing with more than 250 poems of which about 170 are in the book. When Hopkins accepted the manuscript, they did say that is was too big a book. I had to sift through an enormous number of poems in a loose leaf notebook and some did slip through the net. I had nothing to do with the format, but I'm very happy. The title takes you back on the unbelievable journey—continuum of time—I was startled when I saw the cover, but I've heard nothing but good comments. I didn't want blurbs, only quotes from published reviews.

It's a wonderful book. In my opinion, it should win a major prize.

The book is there, and I'm happy about that. The work is what matters.