Eyes that do not sleep at dawn
Deen, Rosemary
Josephine Jacobsen's watchings & metaphors EYES THAT DO NOT SLEEP AT DAWN ROSEMARY DEEN Any moment now Josephine Jacobsen's seventh volume of poems will be out: New and Selected Poems...
...Identify what you will not renounce" (TS 10) might be one of Josephine Jacobsen's mottos...
...tion of religious imagery in her poems...
...Josephine Jacobsen's watchings & metaphors EYES THAT DO NOT SLEEP AT DAWN ROSEMARY DEEN Any moment now Josephine Jacobsen's seventh volume of poems will be out: New and Selected Poems and The Sisters, (South Carolina: The Bench Press, 1987...
...It stands squat on its yellow webs splayed to hold scarcely up the heavy feathered dazzle...
...The poem "Bush" (TS 79) describes lions leaving a water hole at dawn...
...Myth-wise, the modern poem is a kind of palimpsest, to use Galway Kinnell's word: an inscription written on a parchment over a barely visible mythic text not quite scraped off...
...The poem pulls out a whole tissue of Josephine Jacobsen's thematic images...
...So "Distance is our quack-doctor.'' The latest version of this doubleness turns up in the title poem of The Sisters...
...At a time decades ago when "religious" poetry was plentiful, she was recognizable as a Catholic poet, and now in leaner times, there is the same proporrosemary deen...
...The natural insomniac can't sleep through the dark, but moral or metaphoric insomnia is the power to stay awake and take in the dark...
...Yeats's poem names Leda and Agamemnon, though not Zeus, and enacts a vision of a pagan annunciation...
...The speaker of "Short Views in Africa" (CI 54) spends the night watching the wild animals through "the blind's/ chink," a nice predicament...
...Animals to begin with are partly the "animal inside," anima, the sensate flesh and bone, the principle of bodily life or body-soul...
...The refusal to accept "distance" is a mode of conscience...
...She has done her stint of work for the Literature Panel of the National Endowment for the Arts, and co-authored two volumes of criticism...
...She is steady...
...In her body of poetry crowded with losses, almost no poem without its image of death, she works harder at identifying than lamenting...
...There is no mention of their kill, but a few lines later we see that the drum of the zebra's body is lined with red sunrise...
...Jacobsen's poem isn't simply understating Yeats or Greek myth...
...When we can ignore it because it is distant, then we "feel distance...as a priceless pain-killer/ locate and disconnect, reality...
...At the same time he has painted himself, and so he is present, identifying-with, "there with them...
...Here are some examples...
...Jacobsen is clearly an incarnationalist...
...Language and myth in these poems implicate: their parts imply each other...
...Looking at his painting he sees: not shank or horn or hide but an arrangement of these by him, and he himself there with them, watched by himself inside...
...323...
...As letters, A and B, they suggest writing and language, or one woman divided into her selfsisterness: "Before bed, A looked at herself in the mirror, using B's eyes...
...The metaphor skips the "natural'' link of the lions and their prey, the zebra, and connects the opened body of the zebra to the rising sun...
...in Mrs...
...says the ordinary reader who is familiar with — has been through — Troy, New York...
...A huge swan is looking in: cumulus-cloud body, thunder-cloud dirty neck that hoists the painted face coral and black...
...thunder-cloud," sky-god aspect of the swan...
...She is a distinguished reviewer of poetry, identifying the ways of the poet with an intelligent and savory discrimination...
...As you read it, the poem seems to unfold...
...a kind of breath" (SS 25...
...Commonweal's poetry editor, is co-author, with Marie Ponsot, of Beat Not the Poor Desk: Writing, What to Teach, How to Teach it, and Why...
...So the animal or the wild is the mind's longing for metaphor or antithetical images of itself...
...The swan breaks its stare and "waddles rocking" to the pond where it "Sets sail" and in its element is transformed "in one pure motion...
...Mrs...
...One sister, "B," like a daylight self, is "better adjusted...
...So when from these waters the swimmers emerge "brilliant with drops," the word drops has emerged from "gone down," and the swimmers "rise" in an imagined or humanized "resurrection," though that's the reader'-s word, not the poet's...
...The watcher is awake because her brain is working...
...If you have stock in poetry, it's good to know that the price of poems remains steady...
...In Yeats's poem the annunciation depends on the god...
...What is set apart always begins to feel like the sacred...
...The swan is ordinary, of course, with its "dirty neck...
...A surprise seems to "solve" the poems, but the end was there iathe beginning, in, say, the metaphor or word-play latent in the radical of a word...
...And all of it is "watched by himself inside...
...Interference is the cause of iridescence...
...Jacobsen's poems anticipates the release dawn will bring her...
...It grows distant, and as the poem ends, the swan becomes less self-contained than its natural description implied...
...its color is structural....(SS 104...
...My rough addition of the checks sent to her noted in our quaint files says we have paid her over twenty-six years a total of $707.50, if that fact is significant to the archeologist of poetry...
...I want to talk about her images and thematic ideas to introduce new readers to her poems and encourage old readers to give themselves the pleasure of rereading...
...But the more perceptively humans see animals, the more unnervingly alien they appear...
...her most recent poem for us earned $10...
...But the poem isn't over...
...The best example is the cave painter of the hunt in the poem "In the Crevice of Time" (SS 33 and TS 91...
...The swan is very accurately observed...
...For example, "A Motel in Troy, New York," (CI 64) begins with a shadow falling on cribbage players from their motel window...
...Hummingbirds, working metaphors like all animals to the imagination, teach the Trinity: requiring three in one — light, angle, eye, to flower into their color...
...The poem is a human look at something not human, ending in the irony of the absent girl — for without Leda, the swan can't be Zeus...
...But the poet points out that these tides have "come from over the bones of boys,/ of girls gone down...
...The other, "A," is both sharp-eyed," and "a great sleeper...
...Jacobsen's poem the existence of the myth depends on the imagined, human girl...
...Writing lets us look at ourselves in its mirror, using the writer's eyes...
...Two especially are remarkable: the Animals and the Watcher or Watchman...
...The words inky and painted seem plainly descriptive, but they are 322: terms from human culture...
...Her first book, Let Each Man Remember, appeared in 1940, so this makes her forty-seventh year as a public poet...
...BoyntonlCook...
...She has been in an oldfashioned sense, a woman of letters, a friend, colleague, and encourager of poets...
...An early twentieth-century poet would have made the swan incandesce into its myth...
...The ironic finesse of the writing (from squat to feathered dazzle) is a wonder and a pleasure, and such poems don't have to mean more than their triumphant writing...
...To make it easy for any reader to plunge in, 1 offer the sort of list Randall Jarrell used in his poetry essays, a selection of ten poems to show something of her range in her most typically perfect poems...
...She has had a long association with Commonweal, sending us poems, reviews, and an occasional article...
...But Mrs...
...The swimmers in The Sisters are trying to stay safe against an "invisible tide...
...Inky eyes peer at our lives...
...Crazed describes the breaking of dark like pottery glaze, implies the plenty of light you need to see such a fine pattern...
...A chink is a good vantage and a good focus, but blind rather cancels the advantage...
...The "shadowy girl" is the Leda or vanishing point of our perception...
...The momentary puzzle of the ending sends us back to reconsider the "cumulus-cloud...
...deserts more than strawberry gardens hum "like wire with absent water" (SS 97...
...Then the faint text under the newer ink of this present poem appears...
...Psychologically, crazed displaces and lightly disarms the insomniac's state of mind...
...She has just returned from a gathering of the Poetry Consultants to the Library of Congress, a position she held from 1971 to 1973...
...Her first poem for us was published in 1958 and for it she received $7.50...
...She is apt to return to "some spot they've already seen" and talk about it when she gets back...
...They signify writing or print and art, so they set the animal swan a little more apart from us...
...What girl...
...Set sail" now seems suggestive, if Troy makes us think of Agamemnon's expedition...
...Josephine Jacobsen, like her contemporaries Auden, Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, writes "modernist" poems, in which every part builds up a metaphoric or mythic whole...
...In the dialectic of consciousness, absence evokes presence...
...The swan is received by distance and the shadowy girl across the water...
...What interests her is the way the humans see the swan, and the way the swan turns away from our lives so that we can't receive it, as animal or god...
...We are grateful we've had Josephine Jacobsen's steady eyes for so long...
...The starved child, nothing but "skin, breathing/ wrapped over bones," — when that child is "overseas" — is not on our own doorstep...
...Apart, the painter arranged...
...This is a back-against-the-wall choice and may outrage readers who could make up their own list...
...Partly the animal is the wild in its constant but alien relation to the human: "The wild is a way of breathing...
...When the cock crows, "the dark is crazed like a plate" (SS 47...
...Metaphor is the structural equivalent of consciousness and self-consciousness, the Both/Otherness of human perception...
...The ending articulates the beginning, so endings are subtle and satisfying...
...The insomniac speaker of one of Mrs...
...We get in The Sisters what we got in The Animal Inside (Ohio University, 1967) twenty years ago, very crafty poems, richly-minded...
Vol. 114 • May 1987 • No. 10
