A Conversation with Josephine Jacobsen
[In the following interview, Christie appraises Jacobsen's stance on the craft of poetry, her public recognition, and literary accolades.]
Josephine Jacobsen's books include nine volumes of poetry, two of criticism, and four collections of short stories. Her honors include the Lenore Marshall Award, a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. On the Island: Short Stories was nominated for the PEN-Faulkner award; others of her stories have been included eight times in the O. Henry Prize anthologies. From 1971-1973 she served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position recently renamed Poet Laureate. Her collected poems In the Crevice of Time was a National Book Award finalist and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award in 1995. This conversation between Ms. Jacobsen and A. V. Christie took place in Ms. Jacobsen's room on the outskirts of Baltimore at the end of January 1999. On the walls of that room are a reproduction of a self-portrait of Flannery O'Connor, a brilliantly colored Mexican oval mirror, a sketch of her son Erlend in watercolor above a watercolor of her husband Eric, two reproductions of van Gogh painted by her husband, and some delicate spider mums in a vase.
[Christie]: In your essay “Lion Under Maples” you speak eloquently of the early influences on you as a writer. What do you recall as being particularly formative?
[Jacobsen]: I seem to have always gravitated towards poetry. When I was eleven years old, I had my first poem published in St. Nicholas, which was a wonderful children's magazine that didn't condescend. I don't think there's anything analogous to it now. I sent them a poem, and then I sent them a second, which won the silver badge, and then a third that won the gold badge, and then I was too old to compete. I'd reached twelve—I've never felt so senile.
From the time I became literate, from the time I could read at all, I seem to have been drawn to two things: poetry and drama. They were very interchangeable in my mind. In fact, for all the first part of my life, I firmly wanted to be an actress, if I proved to be good enough. I loved the stage so much, and at that point I was very practical. I thought there would be nothing simpler than to write poems all day and then go and act at night. There would be no conflict between the two. I didn't realize how arduous both were. But I had such a peripatetic childhood, that it was very hard for me to have coherent theories of time. From the time I was five, when my father died, until I was fourteen, when I came to Baltimore, we traveled almost continuously. We had an apartment in New York for the winter months, but in the summer we went away to Connecticut and Massachusetts, and spent several summers up in Sharon and others at Stockbridge. I think almost everybody draws from specific roots. So there was no real grappling of roots at all.
Do you think that constantly coming in contact with new things shaped the way you began to write? You have an incredibly keen and quick sense of seeing.
I was constantly confronted with so many different things at such a young age that newness was almost a constant. There was stability in the family—I mean love and all that—but no physical stability of any kind. It didn't worry me. I assumed that that was the way everybody was, that it was natural, and I enjoyed it.
So it wasn't a fearful newness.
Not at all. Funnily enough, the place I felt most located was in Atlantic City at the old Venice Hotel. Mother thought Atlantic City in the summer was horrible, so we went there in the mid-winter months. Mother loved it when it was fairly deserted—just the ocean and the sand. We spent six or seven Januarys and Februarys there. And again, I seem to have accepted the fact that this kind of travel was a perfectly normal facet of life.
The Venice Hotel was a very old-fashioned place, and I got to know all the employees. There was a big black man named Divine who ran the elevator. Isn't that a wonderful name? I'd never heard it before in my life. His brother was a waiter, and I used to enjoy the waiters so much because they carried three enormous trays—one in each hand and the third atop these round, hollow turbans that fit on the top of their heads.
I had my meals in my room with my nurse—it's part of another generation, another era—and Ben, Divine's brother, would come in. He would put his right-hand tray down, then he would remove the one from his head, and then he would talk to me for a while. He was a great, great friend. I ate my supper at my desk and on Sunday nights I was allowed to go down to the lobby. They had a little orchestra that played Sunday night. Between that hotel and the New York apartment where we stayed mostly in the spring and the autumn, I witnessed constantly changing scenes. I always had to make quick judgments, quick opinions, locate myself very definitely.
One might expect, psychologically, a real desire to hunker down.
Absolutely. This child needs some roots! Well, I think the roots were elsewhere: they were in the work and in the family. I envy someone like Anne Tyler, to whom her whole milieu is important, because it must be wonderful to call a place your own. I never had an area that seemed to belong to me. But on the other hand, I had to submit myself to transit, which I think was good.
When you say your roots are in your work, creating a place for you that possesses a kind of constancy, what do you think are the particular and recurring features or concerns in your work that have rooted you?
Well, I think the strangeness of the familiar. I didn't have an awful sense of strangeness because I traveled so much; rather, I discovered the most marvelous distance and unfamiliarity in familiar things. I think that's a great help when you're writing.
I think of your poem “The Fiddler Crab.” The speaker looks at her hand and tries to make it look and move like a crab—a strange moment of difference and kinship. Also in your essay “Lions Under Maples,” you describe some formative moments involving a dogwood, a long-leaf pine, an August meadow. You were attuned to a kind of expression that eluded you. You mentioned that, looking back, these were poetic moments, the beginnings of William Carlos Williams' idea that one has no other language for those moments than the poem.
I think those were definitely poetic experiences. I feel so strongly the memory of those trees. I don't know—it was a sense of both shelter and escape simultaneously. If I saw a tree, I was up in it. I didn't quite understand the satisfaction I was experiencing. The pine trees made the most marvelous noise when the wind went through them, and the dogwoods had bright berries in the fall, and birds galore, and then those wonderful, flawed blossoms. I think by the time I was in my teens, I found that there were so many things that I could not express in prose, that it must have dawned on me that there was a deep, native language.
What left its impression on you from your earliest reading of poetry?
I had a copy of Robert Service's Dangerous Dan McGrew and when I was about eleven or twelve, I could say the whole thing. It was easy for me to memorize because of its compulsive rhythm and drama. And Alfred Noyes—remember “The Highwayman”? It was something that everyone knew at the time. I didn't have any sense of critical discrimination, but I don't feel that it was a waste of time to read these poems. Then I graduated to Kipling. You feed on what you find.
My mother was a great reader and a tremendously intelligent woman. She was one of the most widely read people I've ever known. But it was my father who liked poetry. I didn't know this, though, until I came across his notebooks and a journal he kept. He was also an amateur archeologist and Egyptologist—he gave me a beautiful scarab that was given to him by de Lesseps who was involved in the building of the Suez Canal. It came out of the setting and got lost. It had an inscription.
If I had to find one controlling emotion that runs through more of my poems than anything else—not every poem by a long shot—it is the idea of loss. Practically the only long poem I ever wrote delves into the life of a poet, a person who died some years ago, and the poem ends by quoting a phrase from one of his poems: “The last great look of loss.” I thought it was the most marvelous phrase.
I would say that loss in one sense or another is really what we spend our lives experiencing. Attachments, loves, the body—we learn to lose. My life has been one of retracting, moving from smaller and smaller to smaller. The loss is terrific. I've moved from a big house to a good size apartment to a small apartment and then from the small apartment into a single room. It's mayhem.
One of the first things I remember my mother teaching me was to wave good-bye: “Now say good-bye to the nice lady,” and I would wave my hand like a little fish in the air. When I did that, I didn't know I'd be doing that for the rest of my life. But if you try to clutch to people and things, life then becomes a farce instead of a tragedy.
I know you've mentioned elsewhere that Auden, Yeats, and A. R. Ammons were influences. I wondered if you would speak to that.
I do think that I was heavily influenced by Auden. In the first place, he was the first poet that I ever encountered to whom humor or wit or irony was an integral part of the work. That was a great release for me, because a lot of my poems, particularly the very dark ones, have humor as a basic part.
I think the most depressing poem I've ever written is “Pondicherry Blues.” For me it was much easier to go from farce to horror than it was to go from contentment to horror. The shock was so great. But Auden was willing to take you off balance, completely by surprise. Do you know his “Christmas Oratorio”? I would like to make that poem a one-woman crusade, if I were thirty-five years younger. I think it's a great, great religious poem, and I can understand that it shocks and offends people, but I think it is absolutely marvelous. I keep asking people who are very knowledgeable if they know it, and they say no. I think it's because it fell in between two groups—one group would have found it offensive, and the other group would have shied away from its religious content.
But the mining of humor or irony was a brand-new idea for me, the notion that those qualities could be legitimately embodied in poetry. I remember writing poems in which I learned this tentatively—the one about the poet who “drops only the most unbreakable names” and who “weeds his garden of friends on a monthly basis.” [From the poem “Birdsong of the Lesser Poet.”] I never felt free to do that kind of thing until I read Auden.
You have said that reading Yeats often reminded you of the workings of grandeur. Could tell me what you might mean by that and if, in some of your poems, you sense grandeur?
I would like to think I have. It's so easy to overestimate your own work. I think “Sailing to Byzantium” is a gorgeous poem. I loved it, and I think it fed me, but I don't think I ever tried to imitate it. It's strange—poets that influenced me most were poets that I never could trace to myself in my subsequent writing. Like Archie Ammons, a dear friend and a marvelous poet. I think I was tremendously nourished by his poetry, but I don't think there's any resemblance. In the last ten years I have often been compared to Elizabeth Bishop, and I can't see that. I think she's a wonderful poet; I'm very pleased to be likened to her.
Archie Ammons has such an ability to range. I think the question of the size in his work is so interesting. He can go into the minute, tiny detail and make it vital, and take some enormous thing and enclose it in words. He can write about a pebble and make it grand. He's more in touch with the mutability of the size of something. He can confer with a mountain, and then he can make it humorous or light or shrink it. Then he'll see something moving through the grass and write about that so that it will tower over you. I admire that.
When you think of your poems or stories, are there a few that you feel tap into the grand?
Oh, I wish I could say so. But I don't think grandeur is something that I find in my poems. Not in the big, full sense of the word. Of course a few of them deal with something like death or loss, and maybe those themes lend a little of their own grandeur to the subjects.
What I hate is a poem that starts out magniloquently, as if it was going to be a second Milton, and then, when you get through the poem, you find that all of that bombast had no pith. So what I try to do, consciously or unconsciously, is exactly the opposite: to pin down something concrete and small and then see gradually the immense expansion and depth of which it's capable and that you would never have seen in it at first. In other words, I like it to expand from the small, never to contract from the large
So that it earns its outward reach.
Absolutely.
And is this what you believe a poem should try and do?
I am very leery of prescribing for poems, because people have such different approaches; but yes, that's one generalization that I would tend to make—to always be sure that the poem has more growth in it than it has shrinkage.
Could you talk a bit about your short stories?
I go back again to my humble beginnings in school. I wrote a number of stories for the yearbook and then for that vast professional publication, the Junior League magazine. I was always interested in stories because, as I say, I think drama and motion are key—drama in the intense feeling and motion in the sense that I thought you ought to discover something when you read a poem or a story. It ought to take you. You say, “Oh, that's very moving”—a poem ought to literally be moving, taking you from the spot where it picked you up and depositing you somewhere else. I find the things common to the early poems that influenced me are a strong rhythm and a dramatic element. The story part in poetry—the epiphany, the part that moved me and caused me to look at things with new eyes—was always the part that I greatly valued, so I wrote stories a lot in my teens and early twenties.
When I finally wrote some stories that I thought I could send out, I mailed them to my agent, who was a delightful woman, and she loved the stories. She worked over them for about five years, and she sold one story. It was a very humbling experience, and I realized that I didn't know anything about the writing of a short story. And then there was a lapse of about twenty years, and after I had a small reputation as a poet, I thought, well, if I write stories because I want to, and I enjoy them, and nobody publishes them, that's all right. From then on, every story I wrote was published. I learned something in those twenty years. I have no idea what. I've gone back over the early stories to see if I could trace what was lacking, and I can see the amateurishness of them, but I'm really not sure what I learned. It's still a mystery to me.
Did you feel that there was something you could accomplish in a short story that you couldn't accomplish in a poem—was it ever a sense of limitation to do with poems?
Actually, I think it was the other way around. I felt much more freedom to range in a poem—the form was much stricter, and the things that you had to take into consideration were innumerable. But on the other hand, when I began to write a poem or when I finished writing a poem, I never felt that everything was down there on the page. It seemed to me when I got an—I hate the word “inspiration”—I don't know … Henry James was always talking about his données, the things that were given to him. When I got one of those, or when I saw “the lion”—whatever you will—I always felt that I was never sure exactly of the limits involved. I knew where I wanted to go, but I was never sure how I was going to get there.
With a story, I felt much more competent. I loved the form. I knew what I wanted to say, although I did often change it en route. But the poem was scary because it was an electrical shock. Poetry is a release of energy. There's something so strong and formidable about it. I never felt that I knew how a poem was going to end. And I never felt when I got a poem on the page that there wasn't something that had slipped by me. With a story I felt much more in charge. I loved writing them. With poetry, I was scared all the time.
I think of that line in your poem “The Blue-Eyed Exterminator”—“his success is total.” I guess one would never want a total success in a poem because there would be a kind of thorough deadness on the page and not the kind of energy that you're describing.
That's right! Christopher Marlowe had a wonderful quotation. I used to know it all by heart. Now I don't know it anymore. But it begins “If all the pens that ever poets held” and then it goes on, “Yet should there hover in their restless heads / One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least, / Which into words no virtue could digest.” And I always have that feeling that the periphery of the poem is something that you couldn't quite include in the poem. And that's what makes it so wonderful, and also so scary. I mean, how much of your gift or your inspiration, or the thing—what word can we use (“inspiration” is so lofty and “gift” is so amorphous)—whatever that experience was, could never be totally contained. There was always leaking out around the edges.
And also, as opposed to writing a short story, where I pretty well knew before I started writing whether or not it was going to be successful from a writer's point of view, with a poem I had no clue, and if I didn't feel it was successful, I tore it straight up. There's a poem of mine coming out in Ploughshares that talks about all the ill-fated poems that were discarded. My chief virtue as a writer is that I never sent out anything that I wasn't totally satisfied with—not proud, because often I wasn't—but totally satisfied that I had done the most that I could do. When it's first done, you're so close to it. You know how oil paintings, if you get right up close to them, are just a bunch of paint and nothing? You have to stand back before you see it. And that's what I always tried to do with poems: let them vegetate. Very often I can see things rising up that shouldn't be there, or a little tiny hole where a particular word should have gone.
Your discussion of the word “moving” reminds me of the remark you make in your essay “One Poet's Poetry” that you may order your roast beef sandwich with the same words that you use to make a poem.
That's what I think is the terrific hazard for the writer that the painter or the composer does not have to face. I mean, no one can say what an E-sharp means. They may express it, but they cannot definitively say what it means. But a poet is always waiting to be tracked by the dictionary, and words carry with them this tremendous sense of use that they've had for thousands of years. I think that is a great challenge.
In looking at the poems in In the Crevice of Time and charting some of the movement of your work, it's not difficult to see that your poems move from taut, formal poems to a freer verse.
There was a real sequence in that because when I started writing, as I say, rhythm was always one of the things that appealed to me most; rhythm is tremendously important to me. What happened was that when I started writing poetry, I felt that I needed a form. I felt that each poem had to be beautiful in its form, and it had to fit into the form. At that time, I wrote in very strict form; I have never been one to be influenced by the tide that is flowing. I hate that in poetry, that “Now we write this / Now we write that” mentality. Now, of course, there's the new formalism, you know. But I wrote in forms because that was the way I had to write at that time, and almost all of my early work was that way.
Then I began to realize that I had enough freedom and power to write according to the demands of the individual poem. That demand might be for free verse or it might be for a more formal structure, and, for a long time, I was exhilarated. I wrote in all kinds of very free forms—but always with structure, always with rhythm. By the time I got to be fifty, I realized that this method was right; it was the thing that must be done to give the poem the form it is struggling toward. What is that line from Gilbert and Sullivan, “Everyone that comes into the world is a little conservative or a little liberal”? Well, I thought that every poem that comes into the world is crying for a particular form. And many of those poems that I have discarded were thrown out because I realized that what was on the page was not what the poem wanted to say, was not the way it wanted to move.
So in the last—isn't it amazing to be able to say—in the last forty or forty-five years of my life, in the last forty or forty-five years of my life—for heaven's sake!—the form has been according to what I felt the poem wanted. I haven't written as many lyrics, but I've written quite formal poetry and a great deal of, not unstructured certainly, but free poetry.
I've written quite a few things in recent years that have come from a sort of melange of both formal and free forms, and I now feel no constriction of any kind as to what my current poetry should be.
If you want to be read, there may be this temptation to begin moving your work toward some shadowy sense of what is visible, gets published, is popular.
Absolutely. That's why Emily Dickinson's line about the admiring bog was so wonderful. Because the fatal thing is that there's a point at which they meet. In other words, if you were going to try and write the best poetry you can write and never send it out or if it never gets accepted, it must be heartbreaking to someone who knows that he or she is a good poet and can never communicate. There has to be that, but then it takes over so quickly if you don't watch it. There are so many prizes and so many awards and so much competition. Once, I was having a drink at the Hopkins Club with Kenneth Rexroth and he said, “You know, writers are not nice people.” I said, “Now Mr. Rexroth, isn't that a very big generalization?” And he said, “No. The trough is too small, and there are too many piglets.” Though crudely, I thought he put it very well.
Talk of writing at the millennium is quite fashionable right now. Do you see writers working in new ways?
One good thing that can be said is that I think it is a more flexible time for poetry than almost any other. Richard Wilbur, for instance, who I think is an excellent poet, has gone his serene way. He has never been stampeded by the idea that he must not write lyrics, and he writes the most beautiful ones. I think there's less constriction; there's more distraction, but less constriction on poets now than there has been.
This new formalism—anthology after anthology has come to me, and it really is as if you've gone back fifty years more or less. There are these spells and cycles, and I do think they're very deadly. There are so many deadly things around poetry waiting like snakes to get at it. There's the popularity thing, the publication thing, the honors thing, the awards thing—if you concentrate on those for one minute, your poem is gone.
What would your advice be, then, to a young poet, to keep to a sense of his or her personal project?
It's odd because there's sort of a dichotomy there. I think someone who is learning to write poetry should read, read, read, read, read, read all the fine poets and soak themselves in them and go back to them because that reading is part of the process. It's not an imitative process, or even if it is an imitative process, I think you read, read, read. Yet, at the same time, you want to cut out all the distraction and the poetry biz part. Sometimes it's rather hard to steer a central course. I mean, you want to communicate, you want to get published, you like to read other poets. This is a part of the poetry business that is not contemptible, but then there is the other part that really is, and I think you've got to be good enough to separate the two.
You've often said it's perilous business writing a poem.
Oh, very perilous. It's like the old business in the Bible of wrestling with an angel. That's why the image of the lion keeps occurring to me—because it's beautiful, it's gorgeous, it's powerful, and it's scary. Will you be able to wrestle with it without your demise or the lion's demise?
I wrote the poem “Lion Under Maples” up at the MacDowell artists' colony, where you do not usually see lions trotting around. I find that image creeping back into all my poetry. There is a solitary encounter and a really frightening encounter. Fright isn't exactly the right word either. It's a sense of the overwhelming, a sense of your possible helplessness to cope with this amazing thing that's happening.
It does sound like a spiritual moment because you are that close to something with huge potential for insight but also with real demands. I wonder if you might address that parallel.
I am always a little nervous about using the word spiritual because it's applied to so many things now that it's just such an easy word. But I think it's definitely true that the poems of mine that I'm most satisfied with are the ones that have what we mean when we talk about a spiritual content. There ought to be a new word because that one has been so abused.
I have an unfinished piece of yours called “The Artist as Pilgrim” in which you talk about van Gogh, about his sense of mission as an artist. If I read a few passages could you comment a bit?
“‘It begins in the sense of mystery,’ as van Gogh writes in his twenties. It continues in the sense of the call, the standing forth, the isolation of an all-demanding vocation. It persists in the sense of profound emotional identification, with poverty, simplicity, and the joy, magnificence, and sometimes terror of the manifestations of physical beauty. It culminates in what van Gogh calls the single eye, that absolute submission to the mandate of art which corresponds to the ‘not my will, but thine be done’ of the religious.”
You also mention that one of his physicians in the late part of his life said, “the word love of art is not exact. One must call it faith, a faith to which Vincent fell martyr.”
Yes, there's an inexplicable core there somewhere. Basically, I don't see how you can really separate art from religion, because both of them are a quest for something which you have to experience; it's a necessity. The essence of it cannot be put in words; it's a hunger or a necessity that never leaves you, and cannot be satisfied by any other means. It has to be put into language, and it's impossible to put into language. So you have a predicament. When I think of van Gogh's paintings being sold now for millions of dollars, and that he painted to stay alive—he painted for the lady who cooked the meals for him, and he painted for the postman, and he painted for everything he couldn't pay for—it's really heartbreaking. The early rejection of the artist is, of course, a cliché, but I don't recall any case where that is so clearly evident as it is with van Gogh. We all are artists or pilgrims in such a literal sense.
How would you characterize your own religious sensibility, and how does it enter in to your work?
I have written a number of specifically religious poems, though they're greatly in the minority. On the other hand, there are poems I think that lead that way or sort of get implicated, involved in—well, “religion” again is a difficult word. My religion, like my work, is very private. There are poems that I would characterize as having a religious content that have nothing that sticks out as such. Of my early poems there are some that are overtly religious like “Non Sum Dignus.” I think “In Isolation” and “February Midnight” do not specifically engage in any religious expression, but I think the emotion that is left is there.
I think of a later poem, “Instances of Communication.” At the end, there is the full sense of the host in the mouth and body and word. Previous to that image, the poem contains moments of real disconnection.
Exactly. There are examples of terrible isolation of one kind or another and then all that speech that wasn't there is resolved in the last verse. In my work, instead of overtly religious poems, there is more often a strong implication of the religious or spiritual. That goes along with my feeling, a marvel, that if there is a God, he should be so concerned with human beings: human beings are at once the most marvelous and the most disappointing of things.
You put it so well when you talked about “Instances of Communication”—the solitudes in the first verses and the terrible necessity to speak and to communicate. And I think that's what drives poetry also. There's a terrific sense of reaching out in that great undulating darkness; out there are other poets and other artists. I think that is really the theme—I once said nothing concerns me except communication. That is an exaggeration, of course, but I think the necessity to communicate and to be heard is really one of the basic needs of any artist, of any person for that matter, but particularly of any artist.
Does that complete the poem for you? That's what finishes it?
Yes. I had a poem published not long ago—here I go again, not long ago! It probably turns out to be twenty-five years—about a long distance telephone call and the things that make it miraculous (“Calling Collect”). The fact that you're standing there, and these wires are carrying your voice through states and through counties and through cities to some freely chosen destination. And when the operator says, “This is a collect call,” your friend accepts you. Seen this way, every call is collect.
I know at one point you thought you'd written your last poem. At ninety, you feel entitled to retirement. What is it like to write poems at this point in your career? What enters in?
There's a poem I wrote that came out in The Atlanta Review recently, called “Piazza di Spagna.” I would have been very happy for that to be my last poem. I think the chance of there being many more poems is very dubious; the physical things are all so much against it. I get tired very quickly, and energy is the basis of writing poetry. And I can't write as I always did, with a pencil, dashing things out and scratching them out and changing them, moving them around. Physically it's hard. Mentally it's hard—the focus is very wearing.
And also, when you live in one room, the exposure of just simple, sensuous things that happen to you when you're out of doors—I mean everything that's happening in the street or in the meadow or wherever you are—those things suddenly grab you and there's a distillation from that. It's a tremendously limited life now.
Stanley Kunitz is one year older than I am. He and Archie are the only contemporary poets that I know of. Stanley said last year, “I have another book in me.” I was overcome. I thought—beata Lei—how wonderful to really feel that way. But on the other hand, I will never sit down to write a poem. I mean, the impetus is never going to come from the fact that I want to write a poem. It's got to be an encounter—it just has to be. And if there isn't anything out there, I'm not going to postulate something. I could, after eighty-some years of writing poetry, sit down and write a poem in five minutes, but God-willing, I never will.
I know poets who bloomed suddenly, who became famous and admired very rapidly, and, all of a sudden, they ran out of whatever it was. They are still writing, and I think that's very sad. They don't seem to have that sixth sense that I prize so, of being able to look at something and say, I'm sorry, I'm heartbroken—but that's a very bad poem. I would dread that. It can overtake you, and you don't know it. That's the worst part—you don't know it.
What difficulty there must be for poets to reinvent themselves at mid-career. One can't continue by writing the same poem over and over again.
Exactly. There's a wonderful little book by Matisse called Jazz. In it he told how the Japanese poets, when they began to feel that some particular thing was expected of them (and that's another trap for the poet, I think: they get stylized and in a rut, and people expect them to write one particular kind of a poem), they would go somewhere, to another village, and change their name and just start all over again. They endured again all the struggles and trials and discouragements because they did not want to be pale copies of themselves.
It's curious to me that even on the book jacket of your stories, two of the three blurbs really just mention your poems. And I wonder if your short stories haven't been talked about enough.
To tell the truth, if I had to choose, I would say I'm a poet who writes stories. They don't mean as much to me as the poems do. But I've been happy with the stories and enjoyed them immensely. One of the things that I liked was that some years ago I was one of the five runners up for the PEN/Faulkner award, and that gave me a feeling that I must be doing something right because that's not an award based just on popularity. But it's true that such small reputation as I have is based almost entirely on the poems.
When I came to the short stories just recently for the first time I felt such a strength there, too, and I wondered again about your quiet reputation.
Well, “quiet” is a very tactful way of putting it. You know, there have been times when, after people would introduce me as “Josephine Jacobsen, the writer,” the person I was being introduced to would say, “Oh, how nice—do you write under your own name?” That happened to me loads of times. And I'd sheepishly say, “Well, in point of fact, yes.”
You've said that you hoped a reader would see depth, perception, and control in your work. Could you talk a bit about what each of these terms means to you and why you value them?
All poems have to have depth. I think that's what poetry's about. In my stories I thought there were two levels: there was the story that was being told, and I wanted that to be interesting, and to be a real story in the sense of a tale, you know? But I didn't want readers to feel when they'd finished it that that was the total meaning of the story.
One of my stories, “Season's End,” is about a boy who did or did not steal a watch. And, to my own surprise, the teacher came to be almost the main story. I felt that there was a hole in this teacher's life somewhere, and this one boy had become very important to him (some people probably would have seen a homosexual accent in this and there was not a shred of that). This boy appealed to him so tremendously that he did not want to find out if he was a thief. The story is set in the autumn, and the teacher is a man in his middle fifties. It certainly seemed autumnal; he did not want to think that this boy that was so young and so fresh and so full of the things he admired was also a thief. He took the chance of being totally unjust. So there's a subsidiary character and the subsidiary depth, I hope. And that's what I tried to do in most of the stories: to say when it was over. Well, it was not only about that, but it was about this also.
And perception?
Not that this proves anything, but I was just happening to think of it as an interesting physical phenomenon. I don't know if you've ever noticed this. But it's almost like a camera: at the moments when you've had tremendous basic shocks, there's a physical impression, as if someone had taken a photograph of it. I've noticed that over and over again. Two or three times in my life, I've had dire news, I guess everyone has, and in every single case the physical properties of the event are just as real to me as the emotional properties.
Just before my husband went off to the war, we were staying at the Waldorf Astoria because it was cheap. Now that sounds silly, but they had a Junior League floor there and you could live for very little. We had said goodbye there. And then I couldn't do it, and I said, “I'm going to walk to the elevator with you” and he said, “No, that's going to be just as bad.” “No, I want to walk to the elevator.” And we rang the elevator bell and then just stood there.
I can still see the carpet, the little settee that was on the side, the round push button of the bell, the surface of the elevator, what the elevator door was like when it opened, exactly as if it had been branded onto me. And when I heard that my most beloved and remarkable and lovely oldest grandchild had been killed by a truck in Boston, the news came over the phone. I can still see the phone—the radiator had one of those metal covers, and there were piles of books on that, and I can see the phone was right by there. It's very interesting. Evidently, the impression goes so deeply it gets into the physical. Each time I think about those events, it's as if these physical objects are right before me, like details in a picture.
When you talk about control in a poem is it an emotional or formal control?
Well, it's both. I feel very strongly that the actual placement on the page, the actual length of the lines and everything must be suitable for that particular poem. And then the emotional control is much harder because I don't think you really do control the emotion. If, after you read it, you feel it's strident or that the emotion has been too rawly exposed, you can go back. It usually gets filled up to the brim and doesn't run over, and if it does, it's just a bad poem. I think I'm very conscious of both all the time—the emotional content and the physical control. Eliot said it's not about expressing your feelings, it's about escaping from them, and I think that that's true. I suppose all poems are to some extent about yourself; in other words, you're looking at the world through your own eyes, but I have never expressly written a poem about myself. I don't have any inclination to, so there's no merit involved.
I wanted to go back to the darkness in your work. You've spoken of fear, of lives lived at risk. What sustains you?
There's one line in an early poem of mine that I'm still proud of because it expresses something I dearly believe. It speaks of “the tissue-paper between the foot and the plunge” (“Variations on Variety”). I feel life is like that every minute. It's not very restful. I think you have to have some sort of belief in something; you want to know that there's someone—God or whoever it is—who knows that you're there and cares about that fact. Life is so risky that it terrifies me. And if you've been terrified for ninety years—that's a long time.
So you do have a sense that you are heard or known.
Oh yes, and it fluctuates like everything in the world. I don't believe anyone that says that one's faith or confidence in anything unseen or undemonstrable is stable all the time—it's just not so. I think that it fluctuates terribly. You have only to read the great religious poets, of which I certainly am not, to realize the times they went through—not of giving up belief, but of the whole cosmos being shaken.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to talk about your two poems “Stroke” and “The Coy-Dogs” [see pages 43-44]. Can you talk about your sense of where these poems got started?
Regarding “Stroke”—I think our sense of time is so re-established and assured by clocks; we really divide our life up into little sections according to that mechanical device. Yet for people who, I gather from reading, are in prison for life, time is an utterly different thing. Time is the most porous, flexible thing in the world. How could anyone compare fifteen minutes waiting for a wonderful event to happen, and fifteen minutes outside of an operating room of a hospital, waiting to hear news? It just is not the same time. Our time is a fiction that we've imposed on life in order to get along. It's very convenient, but it's very easily destroyed. I feel it is not real at all; the divisions are just arbitrary and there to help us. We say we're going to meet at a quarter of eleven and that gives us a target.
Real time, itself—I don't know what it is. I don't even know if it exists, and I doubt if it does. As I say, to a prisoner, to a man walking to the electric chair, now that's what, maybe five minutes? For other people skimming entirely the surface of life, that same amount of time can glide by; then there's the ecstasy of lovers, or poetry, where time doesn't seem to exist at all. So when the clock struck one, I was just thinking that there's no way of knowing if that's 12:30, or 1:00, or 1:30. And I thought, what a fiction the whole thing is. Here I am now, and nothing in me is going to tell me what time it really is. It's purely arbitrary. It's imposed upon me.
And the poem “The Coy-Dogs.” I'd not known of the term.
Out West they use it to refer to a particular animal that is a blend of a coyote and a dog. A lot of these dogs started out as abandoned pets. They have inherited, from whatever input there was of either wolves or coyotes, this kind of eerie treble note. There are certain sounds and certain scenes, particularly sounds, that awaken—I don't know what it is—certainly not a sense of specific guilt, but something that has gone wrong, a desolation that for a minute you feel part of.
Before dawn, when it's still dark and you wake up and this ululation is going up higher and higher, and more and more piercing, it's a sense—not a fear—of some sort of obscure complicity: somehow you have done something or we have done something, or everyone has done something, that has had an unexpected result that you recognize when you hear it, even though you don't know what you've done. As if there is something they're reminding you of, an un-named wrong. You feel a cousin to it. It's a very eerie sound and an eerie feeling. They used to howl out about a mile away from us just before the sun came up. First the coy-dogs, and then the ravens, and then the sun came up.
Sound can pierce deeply, can't it, connect us to our deepest memory?
Absolutely. I think it's the wordlessness. It doesn't give you any toe-hold to put it into words. It's an indescribable reaction.
Lastly, are you feeling now that your work is reaching people in ways that pleases you?
Yes, in the last ten or fifteen years. I haven't said this because it sounds so very egotistical: I have a very small group of readers, very small group of sales, but I have had the most wonderful reviews. The critical enthusiasm has been very bucking up. I don't know how you get a wide readership. To this day I don't know. What pleases me is that the poems have made their way, and the stories have made their way, absolutely without any help. Such as they are, they are mine, and they have gradually sort of chipped away at the mammoth indifference. I do feel now that among people who love poetry, who know poetry, that I do have a certain reputation. It's come very, very late.
I do think In the Crevice of Time will be a volume on readers' shelves, side-by-side with, known, and returned to like Elizabeth Bishop's Collected Poems.
That's so wonderful to hear. It has been said a few times, and every time it's said, I think that this is what I want more than prizes or gold or anything. The fact that somehow the voice will filter down. It makes me think of a poem I wrote—I must have been in my late teens, because it's in the very first book—I remember it ended “Cut back, cut back, the early, the feebly blooded shoot. The knife is sharp, and surly, but cousin to the fruit, cut backward to the root. … A man in desolation, with you a century dead, will turn and raise his head.” It was the idea that I never relinquished.
That's the supreme conviction.
That is it.
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