![]() ![]() Though Jacobsen has been writing and publishing for almost eighty years, she remained outside the literary world until she was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. Loving to sculpt and to manipulate ideas, I'm happiest when I can give new meaning to old urges, or can warm a concept into art that's worth its weight.Josephine Jacobsen, born in 1908, had her first poem published when she was just ten years old. No thing, for me, embodies mystery, gives life to clay, or conveys narrative enduringly as can the human form. Light touches on dark subjects help me break away what's monolithic or opaque. I give myself assignments or I take commissions to find challenges to make heroic work in which the themes must be expressed with beauty and with irony. ![]() ![]() Meredith Bergmann: My work has always seemed cut out for me. She subsequently received many additional honors and awards, including the Shelley Memorial Award for lifetime service to literature, from the Poetry Society of America, 1993 election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1994 the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal, 1997 and many honorary degrees. Although she steadily published poetry books with small presses from the 1940s into the 1960s, her work gained recognition with her appointment as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971, when she was 63. While raising her only child, Erlend, Jacobsen gained writing time during residencies at the Yaddo and MacDowell writers' colonies and during winter vacations to the Caribbean. In 1932, she married Eric Jacobsen, and happily remained with him until his death in 1995. After graduating from high school in 1926, she joined a Baltimore theater troupe, the Vagabond players, and maintained an interest in theater throughout her life. Although she did not go on to college, her experience at Roland Park and with private tutors served as a foundation for a distinguished literary career, during which she published poetry, essays and reviews (often for The Baltimore Sun), and short stories. Her mother relocated to different towns on the East coast so frequently that Josephine had no formal schooling until the age of 14, when she enrolled in Baltimore's Roland Park Country Day School. Josephine (Boylan) Jacobsen was born in Ontario, Canada, in 1908: prematurely, while her parents were on vacation, and was raised in Long Island, New York, until her father died when she was five. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems. They arrive in the comfort of comrades and aĬleared from the clock's confusion that held them They come shining happily inside a moment Piling the dust over the motionless face: It was the tentative gesture that he gave. The knowledge of death, and time the wicked thief,Īnd the prompt monster of foreseeable grief: Said in one gesture, "neither bird nor leaf." The thick gross early form that made a grave In an offering strange as some new kind of death. There with them, watched by himself inside Saw frozen there not shank or horn or hideīut an arrangement of these by him, and he himself Who straight in the instant between blood and breath The frightening motion of the hunter-priest With legs and spear, in the still caves of Spain ![]()
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