The Chinese Insomniacs
Deen, Rosemary
The human society inside us TIE CHINESE INSOMNIACS Josephine Jacobsen University of Pennsylvania Press, $9.95, $4.95 paper, 79 pp. Rosemary Deen GOOD POEMS have some of the qualities of...
...the themes have gone into the structure of the poems...
...since I must, die...
...Poetry like this stands for something important about language: that we learned it, that language is potentially the human society inside us...
...It stands there, "squat on its yellow webs/ splayed to hold/scarcely up the heavy/ feathered dazzle...
...The "quest" of "Mr...
...Josephine Jacobsen's poems construct out of language a "universe," a world complete in its own terms, so (hat within it all the poems' sentences , are universal," even those that don't assert anything...
...In the family of man, we are all cousins...
...The knowledge of power and the refusal to have one's power regulated arbitrarily is frightening...
...That crucial soiled snake neck arched to a white high curve received by distance and the shadowy girl across the water...
...solid, less destructible than their creators, recognizable even in the dark...
...Silence" opposes rhetoric as the art of ornamentation...
...Though he has become confused, it is not in this...
...from her whole life will no "saga descend.'' Her' 'clawing for heather, the black curved nails...
...He roams the hospital corridors "illicitly," though before his biopsy he was "tractable" in room 820...
...Often our culture seems to be outside us when we study it, but it is inside us when we speak a more than private truth...
...Mahoney" approaches the heroic - or as much of it as we can stand...
...and hear between breaths a gulf we know is evil...
...Josephine Jacobsen's literate universe is a token of possible human life...
...Theme has gone into its structure: first in the shape, like an old English riddle or charm, where the reader waits to see whether the poem will bear the spell the poet has placed on it...
...Reading these beautiful poems, we see how the "universal" in poetry is structural rather than thematic, a poet's themes being really promises, suggesting a world we want to inhabit...
...Tough, lean, fast as light slow as a cloud...
...One day she fell in love with its heft and speed...
...Rosemary Deen GOOD POEMS have some of the qualities of objects...
...Inky eyes/peer at our lives...
...and is received by distance...
...The learned, skilled, practiced "silence" of poetry speaks the images of companionable human life that may help us to hang on to it...
...So calling someone cousin means we recognize the relationship, acknowledge an identity...
...The patient nurses "gentle him by the elbow," "spear him from strange doors," keep saying, "Yours is down this way/Mr...
...Silence" is anti-heroic, the opposite of rhetoric, where rhetoric celebrates the claims of power...
...Their big, thematic words haven't tamed them, or blown them apart...
...They have him in a room, but it is not his...
...Mahoney cannot find his room...
...Silence," embraced as it is by quotation marks, sounds highfalu-tin, but it's a pretty accurate word...
...Speech creates the community of those we talk to directly, struggle with in words, whom we don't lie to or ignore...
...it is done by a process of division...
...the witch mask clamped on the bride face/bring nothing, but life for the nourished . . . Only the/ next day made possible...
...says, whatever/word can serve, it is not here...
...Negative silence, the refusal or inability to speak, is the soul asleep...
...Some say, rise...
...Her poems are not about love and death, or about herself in the way confessional poems are...
...She says that outside, "the lucky/man's quarry dies," but inside Here, if the hunt succeeds, though time's trick overtakes the hunter, his quarry lives transfixed...
...We catch glimpses of a beautiful and terrifying power within us which we can recognize better when we displace it into animals, and even place the animals into the myths of our culture...
...Consider "The Monosyllable...
...In its need for the "silence" of speaking indirectly, of pleasure too deep for words expressed in ringings of rime, charged rhythms and leanness of language, and in the way it keeps on trying to speak the unspeakable, it identifies us...
...The crib-bage players behind their glass wall window in "A Hotel in Troy New York" see a "huge swan/ .. . looking in: cumulus-cloud body, thunder-cloud dirty neck/ that hoists the painted face/coral and black...
...did not stall...
...So we can't name them with names outside the poems...
...Josephine Jacobsen's poems are like that now...
...The disappearance of the subject into the poem is one of the things she means by "silence" ("the gardens go into their/ naked rose...
...The emblem of such power in Josephine Jacobsen's poetry is the animal...
...With it, she said, I may, if I can, sleep...
...The community need for speech is so deep that the lack of it deforms human enterprise: All the terrible silences listen always...
...What we might call loss, she sees, by "time's trick," fused with its counterpart, permanence: "the rose and green are set now on the apple's icy bark...
...But 820 is a swamp, a blasted heath, A dozen times returned, he knows it is wrong...
...It took care of rain, short noon, long dark...
...It had rough kin...
...Mahoney...
...The woman discovers that she has been nursing a "dangerous" vocation/(the poem resembles Crashaw's St...
...The epigraph to the fine poem "The Clock," says, "This stream of energy must be regulated...
...In The Chinese Insomniacs there is a "companionable" league of those "who had to watch," staying awake across time: Crashaw, Hardy ("The Travelers''), Chinese poets in 455 AD and 500 BC, Yeats, Shakespeare, and the poet who watches hunters in the woods outside the writers' colony...
...Of the Eskimo woman in "Food," there is nothing "heroic to tell...
...Poetry is one way language is "an escape from the discrete...
...and then in the way monosyllables answer each other, as rise answers fall, and the main verb may . . . rise, however speculative, still subordinates the verbs that interrupt it: sleep, die...
...The child in "The Leopard-Nurser" imagined her vocation to "the speechless hurt great leopards/ . . . beautiful, fluid and fatal/to all save me, their skilled/and speechless nurse...
...A word in one poem answers a word in another, apparently very different poem in the same way that the opposed, polar terms of metaphor are in speech together...
...Fluid suggests that animal power is not "regulated," ruled from outside, the way we are by clocks...
...Teresa "Hymn...
...There is a room in which he does belong...
...Jacobsen always calls cousin...
...The real evil in speechlessness is that without language we are "discrete...
...Silence" in these poems is itself the possession (rather than the assertion) of power, especially of experience for which words are not adequate: "the illiterate body says hush,/in love says hush...
...then it goes back to the water where it "sets sail/in one pure motion...
...And the "divisions" of "love's event/and death's" bring us to the evil of ordinary silence...
...Because language stands for what we have learned, it builds a certain relationship: not eros ("the illiterate body says hush"), not agape (for things may be words, "clear as those hasty sticks/the soldier crossed and held, high/in the rosy smoke for Joan"), but philia, the relation Mrs...
...It is the silence that built the tower of Babel...
...This intellectual quality of Josephine Jacobsen's poems is what makes them serious and keeps them from the dark...
Vol. 109 • September 1982 • No. 16
