Growing up in Gambier, I was anything but awed by — and only abstractly aware of — the august auspices of the Review, the offices they afforded writers I would grow to admire. (More on this, anon.)
I was also anything but grown up — to wit, an adolescent infiltration (indeed, incursion) of a reading by a gracious group of Young Writers, at which I read a story by my younger brother, not yet old enough to be Young — which came home to me last week when a friend and I dropped in on the Offices of the KR at Walton House, John Crowe Ransom’s first residence in 1937, during the days when professors lived, year to year, in college housing.
That Ransom, who died July 3, 1974, now resides in the abutting cemetery, I learned only recently, browsing Amy Clampitt’s learned letters (her study of Greek ought to be studied):
The other unlikely development this past fall was being invited to give a poetry reading at Kenyon College. It turned out to be a delightful place, in hilly country with huge oaks; John Crowe Ransom’s grave is right in the middle of the campus, and I paid a visit to it with a student hostess, a poet herself, who showed me her work and took me on a long ramble in the countryside.
It’s worth lingering over that “unlikely”: this was before the publication of her first full collection, The Kingfisher (1983), put her squarely on the map. Using the new KR archive, one sees that the magazine stood tall in recognizing early on the stature of one of last century’s most celebrated “late bloomer”s (so said The NYT in their obit headline) publishing eight poems that appeared in that Satchel Paige of major league debuts. (She was just 60 in the Summer of 1980, when KR published the first of those eight poems.)
I’ll return — again, anon, which I now see means in another post — to the conjunction of Ransom and oaks (namely, his Vaunted — or Old — Oak) but I want to turn first to another “late bloomer,” whose major recognition came, like Clampitt’s, at the age of 63.
This still, small place was their final stop before the plane home, and, just as they had planned it, it was beginning as it would end, hot and green, unpeopled, radiantly vacant.
Changing “plane” to “drive,” this sums up the recent sojourn in Gambier, which, although not as green as it has been, was happily in the height of the “unpeopled, radiantly vacant” season, the last week before students arrive.
The maker of that hushed sentence, which comes near the beginning of her KR debut in Autumn 1965, was Josephine Jacobsen. She was only 57 — it was still six years before she became the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (which fits, as Kay Ryan speaks for Sebald’s silence the way Jacobsen spoke for Beckett’s) which makes her 100 today, August 19, 2008.
I wish I could write that I read Jacobsen’s “On the Island” — or even On the Island, which only E.L. Doctorow kept from winning the Pen/Faulkner award in 1989 — or her first KR poem, “My Small Aunt,” when they washed up on the shores of Gambier, the latter arriving with Kenyon’s first class of women, in 1969. In between there was “The Absurd Quest,” an excerpt from the follow-up to her Beckett book, on Genet and Ionesco (with William Mueller.) Nor did I read the modest string of poems that followed “I Have Something to Declare” in the early 90s (“The Thing About Crows,” “The Minor Poet,” “Softly” and so on.)
Nevertheless it is to Gambier that I owe my first encounter with Josephine Jacobsen’s minute — but unquiet — poems. (Which, in turn, led to me to the KRchive, where I found her disquieting story.) When Sarah Gorham, Jeffrey Skinner, and Carrie St. George Comer read there on a dark, early November night four years ago, they did more than return the city to the white donkeys (Mine — by the Right of the White Election! … Mine — long as Ages steal!), they set in motion a series of generous gestures, a Series in which the latest is the last, the lost book of Jacobsen’s. From Elizabeth Spires’ introduction:
In 1995, at the age of eighty-seven, Josephine Jacobsen published her last full-length collection of poetry…With some difficulty — her eyesight was failing, and she could no longer type nor easily hold a pen — she continued to write a poem or two a year for the next several years. (Her last poem, “The Companions,” came to her in a dream and was dictated to her friend and secretary Charlotte Blaylock one morning.)
When Jacobsen died in 2003, Spires (her friend and the editor of her book of occasional prose, The Instant of Knowing) was left with “a precious sheaf” of poems, but one “too thin to publish as a book.” But then, a box of Jacobsen’s things (“family photos, personal letters, cancelled checks, and short stories and poems dating from the 1930s to the early 1940s”) showed up at an auction. And now Sarabande has put the last and the lost together, where they belong, shortly: The Contents of a Minute. From which:
THE COMPANIONS
Living close to death
is not just a case of living breath after breath.
It is to realize that to fraternize
with the dark prince is possible and wise,
so that in the final weather
when together you quit the room
though tentative and weary
you will have the enormous answer
to the enormous query.