The last time I saw Ben Belitt, in the summer of 2001, he took me out onto his back porch overlooking Paran Creek and pointed to the flowers filling his trough planters. "Consider the life-force!" he said, triumphantly. I do.

His was extraordinary. What vigor he had in that tidy form of his! Visiting twenty years earlier, I had gone with him to Powers Market across the street from his firehouse home in North Bennington, Vermont. Powers was part of his daily routine. Addressing the butcher with a flurry of ornate phrases fit, perhaps, for a 17th-century address to a king, he had embarrassed me as though I were twelve and he, my mom. But now, in 2001, his strangely self-effacing gift for gab—always focused on ideas or on me, never initiating remarks about himself—reassured me that although his teeth were out and the sink was filled with dirty dishes, he was as keen and as full of the life-force as ever.

* * *

He was assigned to me as my first-year advisor at Bennington College in the fall of 1973. Daunted by fellow students' sophistication, working as a gas jockey and sometime- mechanic throughout the following four years, I studied with him off and on until I graduated. He helped me choose a poem that would win a McDonald's employee prize (in a short stint before gas station work took over); he patiently heard out my lament over a friend who had returned home to tell his partner about our one-night stand, responding, "These boys who have to go home with their tails between their legs and confess all!" His immense, generous readings of our poems, in the one workshop I took with him, filled the air like cumuli each week, making our aspirations rise too.

For my own deluded reasons, I did not read any of his work until well into my third or fourth year. That was fortunate because something mandarin in his poetic manner might have persuaded me that our first year's undertaking— to flatten out the language of a poem about my great-uncle's death, week after week, line by line—was a matter of the blind and the blind, but by then I was too oblivious and too enamored of him to spook. Although my language kinked up like hair again, the control he taught me in that long, first endeavor together was a gift—and one key to the astonishing performances of his poems and translations.

* * *

His students could never figure out why he wasn't better anthologized, more recognized. Proffered was always that he was disparaged for his translations, those of Neruda and Lorca, Machado and others. The translations took liberties, much as Lowell's did, in his deliberate enterprise to re-imagine the poems in English, to create parallel, vital new works. Lowell weathered his own storm over like choices, but Ben did not, even though Rafael Alberti cited Ben as the best of his many translators; dismissed for these, Ben's work was dismissed in full.

This explanation may be more than apocryphal, but the vagaries of recognition are that: vagaries. It could well have been that a minimalist, first-person era had little truck with a poetry that fashioned even its most intimate revelations in language like a fire-storm:

Night. Night as I would have it,

night that I sought in its festival guises as sun-stone,

planetary rose, salt with its faceted enigmas, fern,

fires of the sexual whale saying: I am. I made it! in

catastrophic sperm, love's underside, love's failings, tears –

yes, love's ignominious reversals that my heart's starvation

would have reversed, if it could: night with its names for powers,

dominations, fears: houses, Homeric fictions: Dante astray

in the tiger-taken wood: Hell with its vertical vengeances:

and night, night without respite or guile, the light of common day.

("The Gorge: Cuernavaca")

His mind seized on tropes, on iconography: mummies, doppelgängers, quarks. Nature was fierce, fecund, indifferent; coming to terms with this involved a wrestling. His was a gorgeous, guttural English, with both Chaucer's choices and court English:

Night-sweat clotted their palms. They tasted

their gall. The sumac flickered a swatch

of its leaves in the lichens and venoms,

a dazzle was seen in the fog

as a vegetal world gave way to a uterine,

pitch pulled at their heels and blackened

their knuckles, the bog-laurel's fan

opened its uttermost decimal and showed them the Bog.

Paradisal, beyond purpose or menace, dewed

like the flesh of an apple with the damp

of creation, the disk of the pond glowed . . .

("On Quaking Bog")

The disk of the pond! What overtakes the reader is that within the piling-on—the baroque accrual of utterances (it's hard not to catch his word-fever while typing "him")—is a stellar economy of image. What embarrassed me with the butcher at Power's Market was nothing less than Ben's recognition that language and life alike needed to be breathed into, imbued, awakened with the life-force whether vegetal or animal. There was something, well, incongruous to me then: how, within the run-down finitude of North Bennington, could he hope to help anything to dazzle?

* * *

Ben was the author of eight books of poems; his complete poems, This Scribe, My Hand, was published in 1998 by Louisiana State University Press. He wrote two books of essays and over thirteen books of translations. A special issue on his work, with essays by Marjorie Perloff, Mary Kinzie, Hugh Kenner, Denis Donoghue, C.H. Sisson and many others was published in 1990 by Salmagundi which will, in its Winter-Spring 2004 issue, run a wonderful piece by Ben's friend Robert Boyers (who, with his wife, poet and co-editor Peggy Boyers, is now executor of Ben's literary estate).

Ben taught at Bennington College for fifty years, from 1938 to 1988; among his students were Kathleen Norris, Mary Ruefle, and Lynn Emanuel. He grew up in an orphanage, was a World War II army veteran, received degrees through his doctorate at the University of Virginia, and—early on—was the assistant literary editor at The Nation.

Over the years, he received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship; NEA, Rockefeller and American Academy of Arts and Letters awards; and the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry from the Poetry Society of America. He died at 92, on August 17, 2003, in Bennington.

* * *

My 2001 visit was just before the 4th of July, so we carried sparklers onto the back deck and watched them sizzle above the creek. I took pictures. Although I'd already asked him once, I asked him again, not believing his answer: "You're not writing, Ben?"

"No!" He was smiling. "I've written all I need to and besides, there is this marvelous station on the radio, where they play music all day long!" I had noticed the Bach followed by a sonorous announcer while we had been indoors; Ben, characteristically, marvelled at his fortune. "All day long!" he said and clapped his broad hands. "Imagine! And I have all day to listen!"

The Guanajuato Mummies

The body of those deaths is given us now (the child

guide says for a peso) by a trick of mineral gases—the stale

exhalation of silver and the weight of the quarries—

with a potter's underground skills. In the cupboards' glass

plate stacking the corridor, the re-arisen

recumbents, clown-white on their jawbones, disgorging

a petrified vomit, are erect now.

Parodists

of perpetuity in oversized jackets, with their funeral

pants at their ankles, top-bananas with cornkernel

teeth and tarantular breastbones; their colors,

paraffin, gesso, parched brain-coral, adobe; their

attitudes, prudery, venery, impenitence;

their posture, forensic; fingers

folded under, like the wingbones of bats, da Vinci

flying machines; a spider's reminder of hair; the

pupils discernible under their oval cocoons;

their sex, a fold in pastry, slingshots, rosettes; some

raised to toe-point, sinews locking like

cloves into garlic, baroque or balletic, others

driving the total weight of their dying into their sandals;

ossobucco and tin in the shanks; rib cages

like empty prosceniums, burnt estuaries, smashed cradles—

children of cheesecloth and candles, Noh-devils

foetal again in their death chambers of iron and chalk.

None will be naked again. The covert

and promiscuous life of the newly unburied, the

flamboyance their breathing concealed or their body's

avidity made poignant and virginal—fountains of

semen and spittle, penetrations, erections—we know

now, were a gift of the spirit, expenses of grace and election.

Robbed of their nakedness, the dead are robbed of their mystery.

In their bellies' overturned sacks a feral pornographer

fingers a testicle, nipples and wombs turn

sterile: chewed-paper wasp nests, winter apples, prunes.

Yet it is in their mouths that they speak to us still. The shock

of encounter with—what? a collapse of the will? the preposterous?

nothingness? the terminal truths of betrayal?—

has opened their jawbones like grackles, sprung all the hinges,

turned all the lips heart-shaped: wolf-whistles, the coloratura's

invisible shout that splinters the wine-glass, the leer

of a gargoyle's bravura. Inside the cages there is screaming.

The buried, the gassed, the self-murdered, the

pregnant, burn in the ovens of Auschwitz, kindle and crackle

like napalm in a blind conflagration of noises

pitched out of range like the ears of a pointing retriever:

crying havoc, vendetta, universal rejection, universal derision,

the rage of the charlatan saint and the faulted believer.

We come out into sunlight, at last. We see cut watermelons,

papaya, pyramidal oranges, gelatinous diamonds

where the pineapple sweetens its center in the hive's core.

We are wracked with the pangs of our fasting. We are alive.

The children approach us with sugary ribbons:

"A mummy, señor?" they say. And they offer us candy.

Mocking, solicitous, the children insist. The children wait to be paid.

We bite through the skulls in the cellophane wrappers.

We burn in the sunlight, afraid.

—Ben Belitt

From The Double Witness (Princeton Press, 1977)

 

De Campos Thou Art Translated (Knot)

I do not guide because I do not guide because I can not guide and don't ask me for mementos just dwell on this moment and demand my commandment and do not fly just defy do not confide defile for between yes and no I for one prefer the no in the knowing of yes place the no in the ee of me place the no the no will be yours to know

—Haroldo de Campos, translated by A.S. Bessa

Haroldo de Campos is a defining figure for the poetry of the Americas. His work is essential not just to an understanding of Brazilian poetry but also to the geography—conceptual, intellectual, cultural, and social—of postwar poetry in the world at large. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the world at small, for de Campos is determinately peripheral to the large-scale cultural and economic forces that have, more often than not, wreaked havoc on the possibilities for poetry's indomitable spirit as local, resistant, rebarbative, intractable, radiant; as infra- and cross-cultural rather than pan-cultural; as intellectual fire rather than sentimental noise.

Haroldo de Campos died on August 16, 2003, at the age of 73, just months before a planned trip to the U.S. However, he was able to see the manuscript of Novas, a selection of his poems and essays, edited by A.S. Bessa and Odile Cisneros, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.

* * *

De Campos is best known as one of the inventors of Concrete poetry in the 1950s. But concrete, or visual, poetry is only one aspect of de Campos's work and his identification with this movement may obscure his overall achievement. The dynamic of this overshadowing, however, is a central part of the social meaning of his work.

De Campos wrote literary and political essays, which often appeared in São Paulo's daily newspapers. He also created poems in many new and old forms, including abstract lyrics (resembling in some ways the early work of Clark Coolidge, such as that collected in Space) and a new form of prose poetry that he called Galáxias, which is characterized by the pervasive use of portmanteau words (along the lines of late Joyce) and absence of periods, and is possibly his greatest literary achievement. Yet perhaps de Campos's most resonant work was his writing about, and his practice of, translation, what he called transcreation. Indeed, the poetics and politics of trans- and re-creation informs not just de Campos's incredible range of translations into Portuguese— Genesis and Ecclesiastes, Homer and Dante, Joyce and Pound, Mallarmé and Mayakovsky—but his work overall.

De Campos believed that translation was a key issue for Brazilian modernism. And Brazil itself is a necessary starting point for consideration of de Campos as poet and transcreator. I approach this topic with both enthusiasm and trepidation, for what I know about Brazil is determined, to a great extent, by what has been exported; indeed, what's available to me in translation.

The problem is translating de Campos without losing the Brazilian. According to de Campos, the literary work in Brazil starts full-blown with the Baroque. To my mind, de Campos is both Baroque and anti-Baroque. With de Campos, it is perhaps more cogent to speak of polyglotism, or what might also be called the syncretic. Indeed, the tensions among the polyglot, the multilingual, and the syncretic is a manifestation of the overlay of a reductive yet elegant modernist formalism on a Baroque foundation. And, indeed, this is the back story of de Campos's poetry.

* * *

The first book of poetry published by a Brazilian author was Música do Parnasso by Manuel Botelho de Oliveira (1636-1671); it was written in four languages; Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. If one reads that book as a virtual ground for de Campos's project, it puts into play a very different framework from that of his North and South American contemporaries who conceive of poetry as monolingual. But de Campos's polylingualism is not simply a measure of his internationalism for both the apparent extroverted internationalism of Concrete poetry and of trans-creation has another, intensely introverted, dimension, which is a crucial dynamic of de Campos's work.

In the Brazilian modernism of the early 1920s, there was a focus on the specificity of Brazil but also on the fact that Brazil—its culture, its art—was unknown to the outside world. And at this point a fundamental conflict emerges between exporting and refusing to export "Brazil." The fear of exporting culture is that one may end up extracting, reducing, translating (away), sacrificing the heart for a hollow representation. Moreover, there is the sense that one must have a culture in order to be in dialogue with other cultures; so, first, there is the need to build your culture into something substantial. Dialogue, in other words, export, comes into conflict with self-development. Or put it this way: Inter-nationalism comes into conflict with willed isolation, the insistence on cultural solitude, which necessarily entails remaining unknown to the outside world. This issue, so central for de Campos, and other Brazilian poets, was addressed, in the 1920s, by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), when he writes of anthropophagy or cannibalism. Cannibalism is a way to deal with that which is external. While related to both translation and assimilation, cannibalism goes further: by eating that which is outside, ingesting it so that it becomes a part of you, it ceases to be external. By digesting, you absorb.

In 1952, when he was twenty-three years old, de Campos co-founded the Concrete poetry movement, the most visible Brazilian international literary export up until that time, and, as a result, also very well known, even if initially controversial, inside Brazil. Simultaneously, he was writing neo-Baroque poems, poems that remain unknown outside Brazil. Concrete poetry was a successful Brazilian export: it became part of, insofar as it could be assimilated into, the international modernist style. You can look at a Concrete poem and get the sense you understand it, without knowing Portuguese or anything about Brazil, or, indeed, anything about the author. The design of the words on the page, the evident lyric wit, made de Campos's Concrete poems tremendously appealing. In its initial guise of minimalist reduction, these poems look international, suggesting a utopian possibility for postwar literary modernism, connected, for example, with both the architectural style and left politics of Oscar Niemeyer. The fact that a radically experimental visual poetry has been Brazil's best-known poetry export, and as a result achieved a significant measure of acceptance within Brazil, reverses the dynamic in almost all other places, where comparable forms of innovative poetry work have been among the most marginalized.

The situation of Concrete poetry echoes the doublebind of Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov's zaum (transrational) poetry. On the one hand, zaum was able to transcend language barriers, as a kind of Esperanto. Everyone would be able to understand transense or made-up words because nobody could understand them. In other words, like Concrete poetry, it appears to need no translation. On the other hand, in its materializing of the word, zaum is completely opaque: untranslatable. It is this other side of the coin that is related to de Campos's turn from his earlier sleek international modernism to Baroque transcreation, as he moved toward a capacious opacity by a process of absorption and cannibalization. Within the light of de Campos's subsequent work, his Concrete poetry takes on a double life, for its very lucidity is the surface reflection of its refractory, ludic otherness; it's like the sun shining on the surface of a body of water whose depth has not yet been sounded. Indeed, in many of de Campos's poems, an immediately appealing play of sound, on the order of sound poetry for the non-Portuguese-speaking listener, doubles with a semantic complexity unavailable in the sounds themselves.

In other words—I keep coming back to that phrase—in other words, we have to translate even, especially, de Campos's translations. The words alone are not enough. What is required is an act of cultural transcreation and poetic exchange. If I were to situate de Campos within an American poetry context, the contemporaries of his that would come to mind immediately would be Robert Creeley, Jackson Mac Low, Susan Howe, Jerome Rothenberg, and David Antin.

In considering Brazil's export culture, among the best known work is the bossa nova, as created in the magnificent rhythmic asymmetries and lyric understatement of Antonio Carlos Jobim (1925-1994) and Vinícius de Moraes (1913-1980), both roughly contemporary with de Campos, and continuing on with what has come to be called MPB (Música Popular Brasileira). Indeed, de Campos's movement away from assimilatable export, as he backed away from the window onto (or out of?) Brazil provided by international abstraction, might be contrasted to the Tropicalismo of that most gifted singer/songwriter/poet Caetano Veloso (born in 1942), who has achieved a phenomenal international success over the past two decades.

Haroldo's brother, and fellow Concrete poet, Augusto de Campos created a small storm among Brazil's innovative poets by once suggesting that Tropicalismo was more interesting than any of their work. I don't know what Haroldo thought of this, but I read his approach as being quite different. For Haroldo, the 1950s crystallized a moment of political possibility, of utopian extroversion; after that, he turned toward a non-utopian grappling with social complexity —what he called "sign materialism." Sign materialism provides a way to read his journey from Concrete poetry to linguistic concretion by means of transcreation. Translation then becomes a bridge, going back to his earliest work and drawing on his interest in Pound's, Zukofsky's, and Benjamin's radical approaches to translation. What de Campos calls transcreation is, in effect, re-creation: in translating, the poet (cannibalistically) creates an original work in his or her own right, one no longer beholden to the source.

Thinking of this in terms of dependency—and in terms of Brazil—trancreation/re-creation becomes a metaphor for refusing dependency. The poet resists exporting; resists, that is, becoming dependent on what's exportable. At the same time, the poet resists importing; resists, that is, developing a subsidiary relation to the powerful literatures beyond. Transcreation is a means of appropriating and remaking in one's own right. In the process, the work made becomes refractory, opaque. It must itself be translated, and yet it can't be translated. De Campos's translations are not subsidiary or secondary to some original but have themselves become original work. De Campos's elaborations and extensions around a shifting center are the Baroque element of his work, with its insistence on the materiality of its languages and on holding to its own specific gravity. It comes to this: de Campos's work resists translatability through its cultural and linguistic thickness. In this way, de Campos reverses any reductive understanding of his internationalism. The work exemplifies what de Campos calls concretion, in contradistinction to "concrete": a neo-Baroque complexity that stands with its back askew to the internationally absorbable simplification represented by his best-known work, his primary export item, "Concrete Poetry." The work of de Campos is a dream of and by translation, but with no bottom language.

De Campos thou art translated (knot).

Circuladô de Fulô

'rounded by flowers under god's under the devil's mercy god shall guide you for I myself can't guide godbless those who give me 'rounded by flowers and those who are still to give sounding like a shamisen made of a tensed wire a stick and an old tin can at the end of the partyfair at highnoonhigh but for many that music did not exist it could not because it could not popplay if not sung that music is not popular if not in tune it does not atone nor tarantina and yet struck in the gut of misery in the tensed gut of the meagerest physical misery aching aching like a nail in the handpalm a rusty blind nail in the palm clasping palm of the handheart exposed as a tensed nerve retensed a renigrated blind nail everlasting in the palmpulp of the hand in the sun while selling for meager cruzeiros gourds in which the good form is fine meagerness of matter morphing famineform of halfbaked clay in the rottenroot of distress until others vomit their plastic plates of embroidered borders empirestyle for mistress misery for this is popular for the patrons of the people but people create and people engender and people wonder people are the languageinventor in the malice of the mastery in the smartness of marveling in the vein to improvise stuttertrying to traverse oiling the sun's axis for people know no servitude pure or quasi metaphor people are il miglior fabbro in the hammering gait aiming the impossible in view of the nonviable in the crux of the incredible oiled hammergait and the sunaxis but the wire that wire bladewire painpained like a demented plangent wire hammering its widowed dischord in blazing brasses of howling hunger 'rounded by flowers 'rounded by flowers 'rounded by flooowers for I myself cant guide check this book this object of consumption this undergodunderthedevilsmercybook which I arrange and disarrange which I unite and disunite voyages of a vagamonde in the vagaries of vague moons god shall guide the devil shall guide you then for I can't don't dare or care don't trick nor touch or trade but only for my change my pennies my pains my rings my fingers my minuses my nadas in the antennas in the galenas in these nests in these rests as we'll verify in the verbenas in the sugary açucenas or minor circumstances I know all this don't count all this disappoints I'm not sure but listen how it sings value how it tells savor how it dances and don't propose that I guide don't pose dispose that I guide unguided that I pray for promise that I trust you leave me forget me let me go untie me so that at the end I stand erect at the end I revert at the end I concert and for the end I reserve myself as it will be seen that I am correct it will be seen that there is a way it will be seen that it's been done and that through wrongs I made it right that from a scent I made a cent and if I do not guide I do not lament for the master who taught me does not teach any longer baggage of mirrormoon in the mirage of the second that through inversion I was dexterous being inverted by the sinistrous I do not guide because I do not guide because I can not guide and don't ask me for mementos just dwell on this moment and demand my commandment and do not fly just defy do not confide defile for between yes and no I for one prefer the no in the knowing of yes place the no in the ee of me place the no the no will be yours to know

—Haroldo de Campos

From Galáxias, 1965. This poem was set to music by Caetano Veloso.

Translated by A.S. Bessa

 

The lovely lady posted in red
No Hunting. Last night
the supreme hunter crossed the meadow,
into the house, to the target.

—"Obit," Josephine Jacobsen

Josephine Jacobsen's entrance into the world on August 19th, 1908, was premature and dramatic, greatly surprising her American parents who were vacationing in Canada and anticipating her arrival several months later. Weighing only two-and-a-half pounds, she was not expected to survive, but her formidable and devoted mother, Octavia Winder Boylan, was determined that she would. In a memoir, Josephine imagined the indignity of being put in an incubator and fed, like a baby bird, with an eye dropper. A year ago, at 94, recalling the circumstances of her birth, she said to me wonderingly, "I must have been a fierce particle."

Like her father, a doctor and amateur Egyptologist who died when she was five, she had a gift for happiness, and it spilled over to anyone fortunate enough to be in her orbit. She described herself as "a short-term pessimist but a long-range optimist," and humorously wrote in "Distinctions": "It is hard to love the pessimist/ holding forth from his dank ditch/ searching for woes as for Easter eggs/ like Proust's butler.// It is hard to love the optimist/ putting his jolly mask on grief,/ predicting joys which never come/ but will be said to have done so."

Despite her father's death, her childhood was happy enough, but peripatetic, with Josephine, her mother, and her beloved nurse Alice travelling constantly, never staying in one place long enough for Josephine to go to school. Taught by the occasional private tutor, she became, early on, a voracious reader. She also began writing poetry and saw her first poem published in the children's magazine St. Nicholas when she was ten. It was not until she was 14 and had, as she said later, "missed geography entirely," that she was enrolled at Roland Park Country School, a private girls' school in Baltimore, where she graduated in 1926. When the headmistress indicated that Josephine was college material, the idea was brushed off by her mother who believed that only girls who had 'no prospects' would go to college. Instead, the beautiful Josephine Boylan wrote, travelled, and acted with the Vagabond Players (a well-known Baltimore theatre troupe) until, in 1932, she married Eric Jacobsen, a tea importer, and, fittingly and poetically, was changed into a double dactyl. Part of the same generation that included Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, and Ammons (the last a close friend who dedicated his book, Tape for the Turn of the Year to her), Josephine quietly, and with little fanfare, published her first four books—Let Each Man Remember (1940), For the Unlost (1946), The Human Climate (1952), and The Animal Inside (1966)—with small presses outside the literary circles of New York. For her, it was the writing itself, not prizes or possible honors, that mattered the most. A busy wife and mother (she had a son, Erlend), she did much of her writing—poems, short stories, and critical essays— 'on the side,' in brief intense spurts at Yaddo and MacDowell, and during two-month stays each winter on Grenada. It was only in 1971, at the age of 63, when she was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, that she became better known.

Much of her best work was still to be done, and the soaring excellence of the poetry she wrote in her sixties, seventies, and eighties easily rivaled or surpassed what many of her contemporaries had achieved earlier in their careers. (Her friend William Meredith told her she was "postcocious.") Coming into her own when confessionalism was in its heyday, she took a more oblique approach. In a short biographical piece written for Contemporary Authors, she explained, "If there is little trace in this account of early days of the things which are darker, of pain and loss, it is never because these things were nonexistent, but because they are in the very texture of writing, where they belong."

The words applied to her poetry as well, each book (The Shade-Seller, The Chinese Insomniacs, The Sisters, In the Crevice of Time) stronger and more resonant than the last. But it was only in the last fifteen years of her life that she received many long overdue honors: the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the Poets' Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

It was my good fortune to become friends with her in the middle years of my life and the last twenty of hers. The friendship was relaxed, candid, and penetrating, no subject off-limits, despite the two generations that separated us. I helped her compile her occasional prose into her last book, The Instant of Knowing (Michigan, 1997), poring over faded xeroxes of essays, book reviews, interviews, and discovering several dozen short prose pieces on place, language, popular culture, and manners, all gems, that had appeared in the late 1970s in the unlikeliest of places, the op-ed page of the Baltimore Sun. One of my favorites, titled "Openness, a Vast Confusion," examined our culture's penchant for being on an immediate first-name basis. What she said then seemed especially apropos to the slowly deepening way in which I came to know her. In it, she described the stages of a friendship whereby "...acquaintanceship becomes congeniality, congeniality becomes intimacy. Everyone has experienced a lightning flash of intimacy—with a child, with a stranger. But it is not accidental or casual; it is the flowering of long preparation....Every child who has tried to pry loose the gripped petals of a bud to see at once the loose, unfolded secret of the full bloom knows how hopeless is the forced instant blossom. That loosening has been prepared by earth and roots and weather, rain and sun, heat and chill."

When her husband Eric died suddenly in December 1995 (they had been married for 63 years), I saw her at her most shaken and devastated. Was it the measure of our friendship that, an old sweater pulled around her, she did not try to put on a brave face but let the tears flow freely? Later, more composed, she recalled how one of the ancients (which one? if only I could remember...) had advised his companions never to restrain their grief. In a very long life, after losing a father, mother, brother, stillborn daughter, grandson, and, finally, husband, she could write, with sibylline wisdom, that our tears "are a classless possession yet are not found in the museum of even our greatest city."

A year or two after Eric's death, and after several falls, Josephine moved from their apartment at Broadmead, a retirement community outside Baltimore, to a large sunny room in the main building, close to support staff and nurses. She brought as much of her life as would fit into her reduced quarters. Two bookshelves of books precious to her. An old chest where, over drinks late one afternoon, we discovered a small trove of unpublished poems. And paintings, photographs of family and friends, and poetry broadsides that gave the room the feeling of an intimate, welcoming gallery.

High in one corner of the room was a large curling willow that her son Erlend had brought back from a walk one day. Its spidery branches corkscrewed wildly out in all directions, a gaunt, bare bouquet that she never tired of looking at. Full of energy yet intensely fragile, it remained intact and undamaged in that increasingly crowded room that saw, over the years, a steady stream of friends come to visit. I marvelled at its indestructibility and wonder where it is now.

The Japanese have a word for the spirit that inhabited that willow. Wabi. Wabi is a way to approach life. It is the beauty found in extreme simplicity, a contentedness in bareness and doing without. Wabi beauty possesses depth, and an object imbued with wabi is believed to contain an old soul. As more and more was taken away—the loss of those dear to her, the loss of her privacy and independence, the diminishment of her eyesight—Josephine was like that willow branch, inhabiting the final years of her life with more and more depth, the calm, perfected radiance and shine of an old soul.

She wrote that "...a childhood, an adolescence, tends to dictate whether [a writer's] mode shall be mining or voyaging—both offering endless opportunities." She was, in her poetry, both miner and voyager. There will never be another like her.

First Woman

Do animals expect spring?

Ground hard as rancor,

wind colder than malice.

Do they think that will change?

Sky no color and low;

grass is no color, and trees

jerk in the bitter gust.

In this air nothing flies.

Do they believe it will change,

grass be soft and lustrous,

rigid earth crack

from the push of petals,

sky retreat into blue,

the red wide rose breathe

summer, and the butterfly

err on sweet air?

First woman, Lucy, or another,

did you know it all waited

somewhere to come back?

On the first stripped, iron day

did you believe that?

On this merciless morning

I wake, first woman,

with what belief?

— Josephine Jacobsen

From In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems. (Johns Hopkins, 1995)