![]() ![]() Jacobsen was always ''a lady she was not ladylike, she was ladyhood - distinguished, straight-backed, with her hair piled in a wonderful way, and her husband supporting her and making sure no one got her too tired - she must have been a young thing of 88 or 89.''Īs a Southerner of a certain generation, Ms. Jacobsen its highest honor, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Ponsot was among those present when the Poetry Society of America gave Ms. Mahoney'' as a poem that is ''perfect and perfectly matchless.'' She continued, ''It's absolutely generous minded, respectful of the whole human race, and makes you think for a second it's not so bad to be human.'' In 1997 Ms. Jacobsen's most devoted readers, the prizewinning New York poet Marie Ponsot, points to ''Mr. Mahoney,'' inspired by a hospital stay during which a disoriented fellow patient kept wandering into the wrong room. Jacobsen was also capable of kindness, not just in her encouragement of younger writers but in poems like ''Mr. Refined and restrained, she memorably said, ''Knowing what you cannot do is a writer's second-best gift.'' Yet she also wrote devastatingly ironic poems like ''The Minor Poet,'' ( ''The minor poet sits at meat/ with danger smoldering in his eye,/ to left, to right, his dicta fly'' Equally savage in effect is ''When the Five Prominent Poets'': She never said a bad word about anyone, often despite strong feelings to the contrary.'' Yet she was brought up a proper Roman Catholic young lady in Baltimore, and as her son Erlend said when she died: ''She could have been a perfect diplomat. This juiciness, likened to Molly Bloom, James Joyce's erotic icon in ''Ulysses,'' was a lasting aspect of Ms. This poetry drinks me, eats me, guts and marrowĪs beasts' eyes. O God, it peels me, juices me like a press The ironically titled ''Gentle Reader,'' anthologized in Carolyn Kizer's ''100 Great Poems by Women'' (Ecco Press), describes the experience of reading a poet, ''dangerous and steep,'' late at night: Poetry's physical thrill, shared by writer and reader, remained a primary inspiration. She later described the experience to a Baltimore Sun interviewer in terms of quasi-erotic intensity: ''I stood on the sidewalk, obstructive, stunned, looking at my words, naked, displayed to the world, and happily I did not know that this deflowering would be a climax never reached again.''īut this ''initial ecstasy'' proved a motivation for the rest of her long career. When she was 10, a poem of hers appeared in a children's magazine, St. She did not gain widespread recognition until her 60's, although her collected poems, ''In the Crevice of Time'' (Johns Hopkins University Press), and selected prose, ''The Instant of Knowing'' (University of Michigan Press), which appeared when she was an octogenarian, are still in print and winning new readers at a vigorous clip. Although she never attended college, she earned the respect of her fellow writers and was named poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (the honorary job now called United States poet laureate) in 1971. The poet Josephine Jacobsen, who died last week in Maryland at age 94, was a cultural exception. ![]()
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