'Suspect But Unsuppressable'

Thanks to a friend I’m reading an American poet new to me, though I should have known her work a long time ago: Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003). She published her first poem at age eleven and her first collection at thirty-two, and seems to have blossomed later in life. Her first loves among poets were Robert Service and Rudyard Kipling. She never went to college and remained an ambitious reader. Jacobsen is a recognizable American type: independent, not a joiner, a tireless autodidact. In a poem titled “How We Learn,” she writes: “this is how we learn. / Eye to eye.” In a “Statement on Poetry” (worrisome title) she gave to Contemporary Poets (1985), Jacobsen writes: 

“I have not involved my work with any clique, school, or other group: I have tried not to force any poem into an overall concept of how I write poetry when it should be left to create organically its own individual style . . . I have not utilized poetry as a social or political lever. I have not conceded that any subject matter, any vocabulary, any approach, or any form is in itself necessarily unsuitable to the uses of poetry. I have not tried to establish a reputation on any grounds but those of my poetry.”

 

From the library I borrowed In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems (1995) and The Instant of Knowing: Lectures, Criticism, and Occasional Prose (1997). In the prose piece “Lion Under Maples” (1991), Jacobsen describes a stay in Portland, Maine, with her mother when she was sixteen. Her only acquaintance there was another teenage girl, “bronzed and athletic, an expert sailor. . . . This left me free to read.” The ellipsis is typical of Jacobsen. She’s good at leaving things out and seems to have a horror of vulgar explicitness. In the library where she and her mother were staying she found a complete set of Shakespeare. She writes:

 

“I read, before we had to leave, every single one, except Coriolanus and one (I forget which) of the Kings, being drawn back, in midcareer, to Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and Macbeth. At that point I had no patience with Lear, whom I regarded as a graceless and self-centered curmudgeon who didn’t know a good thing when he saw it. It was years before I returned to find another man.”

 

At sixteen, I would have been baffled by Coriolanus. I had read Lear and, like Jacobsen, found the king’s bullheadedness and tantrums insufferable. He was too reminiscent of people I had known since I was a kid. I wasn’t ready for the play. An emotional/intellectual explosion seems to have occurred in me around the same time as it did for Jacobsen. She continues: “After this apocalyptic opening of my eyes and ears, the whole welter of English poetry broke over me.” For me that started with the anthologies edited by Oscar Williams.

 

From what I’ve read of Jacobsen’s work, it seems she assumed that education was never complete, that one goes on reading and pondering and living, and reaches few definitive conclusions. She writes: “There is, as Tom Wolfe, for example, has pointed out in The Bonfire of the Vanities, a currently thriving admiration for illiteracy. We reel from too much, too fast, surface communication, which proliferates into a frenzy of quick yells, while communication at any depth goes on, like an underground river, suspect but unsuppressable.”

And this was written pre-Twitter, pre-YouTube, pre-Facebook.