The energy and quality of Josephine Jacobsen's work in poetry, fiction, and criticism, as well as her public service on behalf of poetry, are remarkable. She has dedicated years of her long life and enduring talent both to her own writing and to the cause of literature. Josephine Jacobsen has always demanded a high standard of excellence of herself and has rejoiced in discovering the skill and insights of other writers. She is a “woman of letters” in the purest and best sense; and the range of her work, particularly in poetry, is singular and wonderful. I trust that my discussion of a few representative works will suggest the scope and radiance of Josephine Jacobsen's achievement as well as its power.

To speak of power in connection with poetry is to conjure up images of the poetry Mafia, cultural politics, and various other questionable arenas which by definition seem antithetical to the genre. Josephine Jacobsen's concerns are certainly not with poetry hustling; they are with the intrinsic nature of the poem itself. In a poem called “The Poem Itself”¹ she clarifies the issue:

From the ripe silence it exploded silently.
When the bright debris subsided
it was there.
Invisible, inaudible; only
the inky shapes betrayed it.
Betrayed, is the word.
Thence it moved into squalor,
a royal virgin in a brothel,
improbably whole.
It had its followers, pimps, even
its lovers. The man responsible
died, eventually.
When the dust of his brain left the bones
the bond snapped. It escaped to itself.
It no longer answered.
On the shelf, by the clock's tick, in the black
stacks of midnight: it is. A moon
to all its tides.

(AI [The Animal Inside], 55)

Here the pure poem escapes to speak of and for itself. It is. Pure energy. In a lecture called “The Instant of Knowing” delivered in Washington in 1973 while Josephine Jacobsen was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress, she commented that one must not “veer from the core of the job. … As I see it, the cause, the purpose, and the end of the position of Consultant in Poetry is poetry itself, as poetry is the poet's own job. … The center of everything is the poem. Nothing is important in comparison to that. Anything which in some valid way is not directly connected with that current of energy which is the poem is dispensable.”

A poem need not have power as its overt subject in order to concern itself with that issue. The “current of energy which is the poem” conspires with and enhances whatever subject it ignites. This is certainly true in “The Poem Itself,” and as additional examples I might have cited any number of poems from The Animal Inside such as “Deaf-Mutes at the Ballgame” or “Yellow” or even earlier poems which reflect her theory of poetry as energy and, therefore, as a vehicle of power. In an essay called “From Anne to Marianne: Some Women in American Poetry,” delivered as a lecture at the Library of Congress on May 1, 1972, Jacobsen writes about women in terms of power and powerlessness, “Power is related to energy, and poetry is energy.” (p. 24) This theory is a constant motif throughout Josephine Jacobsen's poetic canon.

In one of the “new” poems in The Shade-Seller: New and Selected Poems called “Gentle Reader” Jacobsen's subject is her response to reading a genuine poet, “A poet, dangerous and steep,” as opposed to a versifier or “a hot-shot ethic-monger.” Jacobsen recognizes the real thing in an instant, in a blast of light and comprehension. The short poem ends with this stanza:

O God, it peels me, juices me like a press;
this poetry drinks me, eats me, gut and marrow
until I exist in its jester's sorrow,
until my juices feed a savage sight
that runs along the lines, bright
as beasts' eyes. The rubble splays to dust:
city, book, bed, leaving my ear's lust
saying like Molly, yes, yes, yes O yes.

(S-S [The Shade-Seller], 52)

Josephine Jacobsen's theory of poetry as energy, as power, is here realized and made incarnate in the brightness of “the beasts' eyes” and “the ear's lust.” The poet knows that she has encountered the real thing. As Jacobsen remarks in her lecture, “The Instant of Knowing,” “Poetry is energy, and it is poetic energy which is the source of that instant of knowing that the poet tries to name. The test for the true poetic energy which rouses Barth's sleeping dragon is, it seems to me, the only universal test which can be applied to poetry.” In this poem, both the articulation of the theory in such radiant language and the theory itself miraculously fuse, and that, says Josephine Jacobsen, is what poetry is all about.

In an intricate poem called “Language as an Escape From the Discrete” from Jacobsen's 1981 collection, The Chinese Insomniacs, an arc is constructed from the insect world where two wasps mate (or fight) to a cat who puts “its furred illiterate / paw on my page” and who, like the poet, drinks milk and will inevitably experience one breath which will be final. The fourth stanza introduces a human element in the person of a questioning child, and the arc is completed in stanza five by the adult who

in love, says hush; says, whatever
word can serve, it is not here.
All the terrible silences listen always; and hear
between breaths a gulf we know is evil.
It is the silence that built the tower of Babel.

(CI [The Chinese Insomniacs], 41)

The darker side of the poet's ongoing search for the radiant center is thus energized by this exploration of the frustrating side of the medium of language. The poet gropes and grapples and finally turns the inarticulate into an advantage: all silence is not golden. Babel with all of its ensuing conflicts was inevitable and necessary.

In a more recent poem, “The Motion,” not yet collected into a volume of poems, Josephine Jacobsen examines the hush of the moment of change. What is transition? When and how does the geranium's bud burst into full flower? Time and the seasons move forward yet “turn over / without stir or whisper.” The energy crouches unseen, a flicker. Note the beautiful closure of “The Motion.”

If I could see it happen, I could
know when all tides tip; low luck
shifts; and when loss is ready. When
you are saying goodbye to someone you think
you'll see next week. And don't ever.

These lines, in their wisdom and scope, are beyond comment as the mysterious, stoppered aspects of natural forces beckon Jacobsen into truth's fathomless mysteries. How unlike the “power of Nothingness” as interpreted by Genet and examined by Jacobsen in her book on Ionesco and Genet.

Josephine Jacobsen often writes poems one must characterize as “narrative” in that they are animated by some progression or action that culminates in a resolution. The characters in these narrative poems are people we come to care very much about such as Mr. Mahoney in “Mr. Mahoney” or Father O'Hare and Mrs. Pondicherry in “Pondicherry Blues” or Mrs. Mobey in “Spread of Mrs. Mobey's Lawn,” all poems in Josephine Jacobsen's most recent collection The Chinese Insomniacs. Another poem in this volume called “The Fiction Writer” reveals not only her commitment to the storyteller's art but her ability to evoke its mysteries:

Last night in a dream
or vision or barrier broken
strange people came to me.
I recognized them.
Some I had made, I thought.
Still they were strange—fuller, somehow—
with distinct objects ahead of their steps.
Others who looked at me invitingly,
but threateningly too,
I had not seen.
Familiar though they were.
In his arms, in hers,
each carried a secret.
All were self lit, like fish
from deepest water.
Nothing told me then
if I were bench or dock.
Only cousin, cousin, cousin
said my blood, circling.

(CI, 23)

Her observations on reading submissions for NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] poetry fellowships in 1981 inspired her candid remarks in an essay, “Like Hunger and Thirst,” published in TriQuarterly in 1984. Attempting to catch the flavor and to categorize the manuscripts of the 873 entrants in that competition, she reports that the most frequently recurring subject matter dealt with the father-son relationship and with sexual experiences. The former subject, she reports, was discussed somewhat nostalgically and elegiacally, while the latter was generally treated with disappointment, “bewildered resentment,” or “a sort of acid regret.” Despite some good poems, the submissions were marred, she says, by a great deal of mediocrity, triviality, and plain badness. It is a distasteful business to define these traits: they have a tendency toward contagion. Jacobsen observes, “as we swim desperately in the tide of mediocrity, like Alice in her pool of tears, I can think of no lifeline so hardy as hostility to the trivial.” In her view, triviality does not have to do with subject matter, form, language, or technical tricks; it is quite simply an absence, “an awful little void where the life of the seed should pulse.”

In this essay she recites the difficulties facing the contemporary poet—outworn language, the disappearance of shared convictions and assumptions, the paucity of readers amid the abundance of writers. The very business surrounding poetry stands in the way of the poem: “the heavy processes of submission, of publication, of reviewers; the supercargo of grants and residencies, prizes and honors. Sometimes it is difficult, in the turmoil of appendages, to keep steadily in mind that solitary, dangerous encounter with the thing itself—that lonely meeting that can never be predicted or totally defined, and from which all authentic poetry, whether most minor or most major, arises.”

As a striking example of authentic poetry, she cites two lines which she once discovered in a 19th century New Hampshire cemetery, carved on a leaning gravestone: “It is a fearful thing to love / what death can touch.” For years she searched, unsuccessfully, for the source of that quotation. Indeed, neither this idea nor these individual words provide the key to the magic: it is the balance, “the cadence, the sequence of words, the action of the first line, the heavy fall of the last line's four monosyllables which call out the response.” All the technical effects of a poem, Jacobsen believes, must fuse in its language. Dishonesty, triviality, sententiousness, tiredness are first betrayed by the words themselves. The necessity of following such advice remains paramount throughout her work, particularly in the most recent.

When a poet plays Scrabble, the game, since it involves words, becomes the chanciest game of chance and its goal not merely to score but to examine the nature, the ambiguities, and the mysteries of language. Or so it seems in the first section, “A Game of Scrabble,” of Josephine Jacobsen's poem “A Dream of Games” published in November 1984 in Poetry.

As are many of her short stories, “A Game of Scrabble” is set on a tropical island: “Beyond the balcony the sea / flees in long quivers. … Below, slick and lovely, the frangipani / boughs, black as snakes and bare, spring / into pink at the top. …” The three players contemplate the Scrabble board grasping for words that spell out secret, often unintentional messages:

The tall child makes gory, doubled.
The smooth tiles spell
relationships, accidents.
… eath, … eath, Fingering
a d, one pauses there. A d
would do; br would be better.

An ominous atmosphere pervades the poem, suggesting sinister events which never materialize but which hover over the game board. The poet is more aware of it than are the other two players. The poet wins the game or, rather, her words, as in a poem, win. Once again, she has chosen well and made a new order out of the chaos of vocabulary.

In “Bridge of Knaves,” the second section of the poem, the game shifts from Scrabble to bridge and the poet examines the characteristics of the Jacks or Knaves of Clubs, Diamonds, Hearts, and Spades. They are a mercurial quartet bent on the slippery pursuits of the game. The poet endows each with a separate background and personality. The Knave of Clubs claims “deep chairs, deep rugs, / hot andirons, snow beyond glass; exclusions;” He is “the ancient heir.” The glittering Knave of Diamonds swaggers while the Knave of Hearts claims variety as his lure. The last Knave, the Spade, is viewed suspiciously by the other three:

Three Knaves know how absurd
is the fourth's eminence.
Spade must be the dealer's
irony; yokel, upraised:
the root's, the earthworm's visitor,
the flower's clownish uncle.
But in cardboard, one-eyed and natty,
in the end, he says, depend on me.

The regal cast in this section of “A Dream of Games” assumes surreal and animated postures as do the figures in dreams. The poet, the “dealer”, has won all the “tricks” in this game of guises.

In section III, “A Dream of Games,” Jacobsen explains that “The game is dreamed for the rules.” The game here is ostensibly a ballgame, but this final section is an amalgam of the various games and gamesters that concern the poet throughout “A Dream of Games.” The poet, posing both as shill and participant, wins the game by default. The poem, a game of catch, is the ultimate power arena where contests for fabulous stakes are won or lost.

The game is dreamed for the rules.
Monte Alban's old rule dreamed
that ball-court from which the loser died.
Chaos, soft idiot, is close
as breath. But the games appear,
celestial in order; contracts we make
with light: the winner humbled,
the loser connected with his law.

.....

Throughout her fortunately long and energetic literary career, Josephine Jacobsen's work has shown persistent and humane power. The clarity of her vision and the competence of her technique, even the selection of central themes, have been consistent in her prose and poetry. These elements are evident in her earliest work. The title poem of her first collection Let Each Man Remember (Kaleidograph Press, 1940) describes various reactions to stress. The cogent metaphor is selected from one recurring trauma of daily living—how people get up to face a new day. It is a situation which is not less terrifying for its commonality.

It is indisputable that some turn solemn or savage,
While others have found it serves them best to be glib,
When they inwardly lean and listen, listen for courage,
That bitter and curious thing beneath the rib.

(S-S, 57)

In the more than 45 years since writing those lines, Jacobsen has listened well to courage, “That bitter and curious thing beneath the rib.”

Note

1. The poetry volumes cited in this essay will be abbreviated as follows: AI (The Animal Inside, Ohio University Press, 1967); S-S (The Shade-Seller: New and Selected Poems, Doubleday, 1974); CI (The Chinese Insomniacs, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981). Magazine publications of other poems not yet collected in a book will be identified in the text as will the sources of short stories, lectures, and critical works.