Post by ekswitaj on Jul 4, 2008 12:58:36 GMT 2
THE MONOSYLLABLE
Josephine Jacobsen
One day
she fell
in love with its
heft and speed.
Tough. lean
fast as light
slow as a cloud.
It took care
of rain, short
noon, long dark.
It had rough kin;
did not stall.
With it, she said,
I may
if I can,
sleep; since I must,
die.
Some say,
rise.
Josephine Jacobsen
One day
she fell
in love with its
heft and speed.
Tough. lean
fast as light
slow as a cloud.
It took care
of rain, short
noon, long dark.
It had rough kin;
did not stall.
With it, she said,
I may
if I can,
sleep; since I must,
die.
Some say,
rise.
Josephine Jacobsen, “The Monosyllable” - Barbara Crooker
Josephine Jacobsen’s “The Monosyllable” is a perfect marriage of form and function, comprised of fifty-three words, all of them monosyllables (I can’t resist adding here the Garrison Keillor quip, “Shouldn’t there be a shorter word for monosyllable?”). Spare, lean, and muscular, this poem is a tour de force as it tumbles down the page. It is a simple poem with complex ideas, moving from the word itself, to what the word might embody (rain, noon, night), to the ineffable, that which moves beyond words, the Logos, the creative word of God. Jacobsen has written “Nothing concerns me except communication,” yet this poem has, at its heart, a paradox: she wants to impart knowledge to the reader, yet is aware at the same time that human language is too limited to adequately do this. But she also knows Williams’ dictum, “You have no other language for it but the poem,” and begins.
The monosyllable is both the least of words (lean, light, cloud) and the greatest (heft, tough, fast). It takes on slow weight (the weather imagery) as it pulls us to the conclusion—the transience and fragility of human life versus the power and promise of the eternal, the frailty of human doubt (Is this all there is?) measured against the hope of the resurrection. These are the struggles great literature is not afraid to tackle. And she achieves this with the merest of words: “stall, sleep, rise.”
In terms of prosody, the monosyllable, of course, can realize no more than one beat. None of these lines have more than four syllables. Jacobsen also uses short stanzas—most are just five lines long—which work to heighten the rhythmic effect. Her short lines, mostly two and three stresses (the one stress lines are at the beginning and end), echo things like footfalls, raindrops, heartbeats, again merging form to function, wedding it with meaning.
Elizabeth Spires, writing the introduction to Jacobsen’s The Instant of Knowing (Collected Prose), said that “For Jacobsen, the making of art, the writing of a poem, is a form of consolation in a time-bound world,” which is, of course, another conundrum, as the artist attempts to create something that will live beyond her lifetime, with the full knowledge that even if it does, human life spans are but a blink in eternity’s eye. Civilizations rise and fall, and most of what we deem “immortal”—art, literature, music— is lost.
In Jacobsen’s “Statement on Poetry,” she writes, “I can perhaps best introduce my own poetry by saying what I have not done, rather than defining what I have done . I have not involved my work with any clique, school, or other group. . . I have not confused technical innovation, however desirable, with poetic originality or intensity. . . . I have not conceded that . . . any form is in itself necessarily unsuitable to the uses of poetry.” This reinforces my notion that women who write formal poetry are doing something different, starting with their subject (which is, of course, only the “triggering town” (Richard Hugo); the poem itself is larger than that), and selecting a form to fit, rather than starting with the form (which is itself a made object) and molding the subject to its shape.
There seems to be a new interest in Jacobsen, with a book of critical essays recently appearing from Sarabande, which leads the reader to wonder why Jacobsen and several other mid-twentieth century women writers have been neglected by the canon; I would like to speculate that this may have been in part because her first four books were published by small presses, she was not affiliated with academia (she didn’t teach), nor was she involved in the literary world until she was chosen Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress when she was sixty-three. Most of her writing was done “in the interstices of family life” (Maxine Kumin) and in brief intense spurts at Yaddo and MacDowell. So, just as some women artists are marginalized for reasons of power and status, others, like Jacobsen, are also outside the circle of the close-knit world of publishing and connections. And her Catholicism, which deeply informed her work, also labeled her an “outsider.”
I’d like to let Jacobsen have the last word here. In “The Poem Itself,” she ends: “On the shelf by the clock’s tick, in the black/stacks of midnight, it is,” echoing MacLeish’s dictum, “a poem should not mean, but be.” This little poem “The Monosyllable,” “Tough, lean/fast as light,” is, and it contains universes indeed.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at The West Chester Poetry Conference in the closed-door Critical Seminar on Forgotten Women Formalists.