Lady Laureates: Discovering Bogan, Adams & Jacobsen

Last week the Library of Congress announced that Philip Levine would be the next U.S. Poet Laureate. Any website or press release will tell you that Levine is the author of numerous books and has received numerous awards, but what I most appreciate about him is the kindness and candor he seems to possess in the interviews I’ve read. I think Levine will do great work in the post of Poet Laureate, but the news made me curious to find out more about the poets who’ve held the position in the past. Since its inception in 1937 ten women have held the post of Poet Laureate (originally called the Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress). Their names and dates of Laureateship are:

Louise Bogan 1945-46
Léonie Adams 1948-49
Elizabeth Bishop 1949-50
Josephine Jacobsen 1971-1973
Maxine Kumin 1981-1982
Gwendolyn Brooks 1985-1986
Mona Van Duyn 1991-1992
Rita Dove 1993-1995
Louise Glück 2003-2004
Kay Ryan 2008-2010

Other than Elizabeth Bishop, I was largely unfamiliar with the female poets appointed to the post before the 1980’s, so I spent time this week getting to know the work of these women who held the most prestigious posts for poets in this country.

The first woman appointed Poet Laureate, Louise Bogan, was born in 1897 in Livermore Falls, Maine. Known best for her formal lyric poetry, she also reviewed poetry for The New Yorker for thirty-eight years and was a well-respected critic. Various articles I read differed slightly in their presentations of Bogan and how personal she was in her work and how private she was in her life, but they all seem to agree that she felt ideology and politics had no place in poetry.

I’m often quite wary of formal poetry, because those forms and rhyme schemes often seem to hold poems hostage, but Bogan’s forms seem to be cages built from the inside. Her poems are emotionally profound and smart. “Medusa” is one of her best known poems, but I’m drawn to her poems like “Evening in the Sanitarium,” where all the residents seem to be women disaffected by modern life, and “Daemon,” which deals with the (in this case) torturous process of writing. Her poem “To a Dead Lover” ends beautifully, but with my least favorite wisdom: “And I have life—that old reason/To wait for what comes,/To leave what is over.”

Léonie Adams was born in Brooklyn in 1899. She was an educator, poet, and mentor of many poets, including another future poet laureate, Louse Glück. A contemporary and acquaintance of Bogan, Adams was known for her lyric poetry, often exploring love and the seasons composed in tight form and dizzying syntax. I admire her work most when the density of imagery and language hits me with such a force that it almost bruises, for instance the following lines from her poem “Dirge at the Edge of the Woods”: “All which is green sickens,/And it is but for a time/Those embered veinings blaze/A year’s delirium”. I also love it when her lyric density allows for striking juxtapositions, as it does at the end of her poem “Send Forth the High Falcon”: “the unschooled heart/Shall lull both terror and innocence to rest.”

Josephine Jacobsen was born in 1908. She was a poet, short fiction writer, and critic. The Library of Congress says her poetry “is known for its spare, elegant language,” and while that is true of some of her poems I found her most of her work to be lush and sweeping. The second stanza of her poem “Florida Friday” begins with the gorgeous catalog: “Loquat and cumquat, hibiscus, oleander/Limeblossom; down the endless glossy groves/The Spainard’s sweet and swollen legacy/shines on boughs”.  This sibilant stanza is followed by the round, vowel-rich lines: “Outside the church is shell-infested sand:/Oblong, violet, opalescent, serrated/(Not as the conchologist would name them), shells/Done with the moods of moon.” Jacobsen’s work pays ecstatic attention to the world. She also has a keen imagination. Here are a few stanzas from her poem “The Animals”:

At night, alone, the animals came and shone.
The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals:
The lion the man the calf the eagle saying
Sanctus which was and is and is to come.

The sleeper watched the people at the waterless wilderness’ edge;
The wilderness was made of granite, of thorn, of death,
It was the goat which lightened the people praying.
The goat went out with sin on its sunken head.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Philip Levine does as Poet Laureate to bring poetry to a wider audience, but I’m also grateful that his appointment led me to discover Bogan, Adams and Jacobsen.

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