![]() I can perhaps best introduce my own poetry by saying what I have not done, rather than defining what I have done. Here's a good Jacobsen quote: "I don't really value very highly statements from a poet in regard to her work. Much of Jacobsen's poetry deals with the experience of being human and the natural world. But why won't he/she finish it? If you want to sketch on canvas, that's fine but it isn't called a painting, is it? A prose poem is a prose sketch, isn't it? How is it a poem? Just musing.) It's like going to a painter's house and seeing a bunch of primed canvases with a pencil sketches on them- you can see it's going to be an interesting painting. I have read some wonderful prose poems, I just always lament that they didn't finish it. I don't see the necessity of having another genre. I don't understand the term very well because to me, there is poetic prose and there's poetry. (Breaking off briefly to say that this is the only kind of prose-poem you will read here. Joyce has, maybe, two periods in the whole chapter in which Molly speaks, forming his own sort of prose-poem as you read it. "the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower" Here's a little piece of Molly Bloom's soliloquy: In "Gentle Reader" she calls up Molly Bloom from James Joyce's Ulysses to describe her ecstasy at reading a poem. She had a considerable outreach program to change that which was fairly successful. In her tenure as consultant she grieved the lack of African-American poets attending the Library of Congress events and the infrequency of their being published. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1997. She was Poet Laureate (or "consultant" as they now call it and I sort of petulantly ignore from its business-like jerkiness) of the U.S from 1971-1973. She wrote fine and thoughtful poetry criticism, too. ![]() She was part of no school or "set" or academic enclave or conclave. Most of her poetry was published after she was 50. She attended no college and her first book of verse was published when she was 32. ![]() Born in Canada she lived most of her life in Maryland. This poem is a good illustration of that. Hap Notes: Josephine Jacobsen (1908-2003) wrote fiction but her true love was poetry. This poetry drinks me, eats me, gut and marrowĪs beasts' eyes. O God, it peels me, juices me like a press Late in the night when I should be asleep
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