The poet Josephine Jacobsen, in an essay she wrote for The Sun almost 30 years ago, decried how hard it was to get inside things that should be easy to open (milk cartons, aspirin bottles), yet how quickly Americans seemed to expect personal intimacy.
Friendship, the Baltimore native wrote in her elegant way, should be a matter of "gradation - the stages by which acquaintance becomes congeniality, congeniality becomes intimacy. ... It is the flowering of long preparation."
Jacobsen, the celebrated author of nine books of verse who once served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position later renamed U.S. Poet Laureate), cultivated many acquaintanceships during her 94 years. But readers will be especially grateful for one that blossomed relatively late in her life. In 1982, Jacobsen met a poet and professor at Goucher College, Elizabeth Spires, who would become a sounding-board, confidante, occasional editor and full-time friend.
This spring, Spires, 56, published what will probably be the last collection of Jacobsen's work: a 32-page "chapbook," packed with vigorous reflection, called Contents of a Minute.
"Sometimes, someone gives another person so much of herself," says Spires, who is still on the faculty at Goucher. "The [project] was partly literary, partly an act of gratitude. I wanted the poems to have a little home, and it seemed like the least I could do."
If friendship starts small, then flowers over time, so did Jacobsen. She was born premature in 1908, weighing just 2 1/2 pounds.
"I must have been a fierce particle," she marveled in a 2003 conversation with Spires.
Her life was a blossoming. She started writing poetry as a child (the family moved to Baltimore when she was a preteen) and kept at it during odd hours as she and her husband, Eric Jacobsen, raised a son. She published four books to little notice between 1940 and 1966, and first came to nationwide attention in 1971, when the Library of Congress tapped her for its top literary honor at 63.
Won acclaim
Jacobsen unfurled such lyrically truth-telling work in her 60s, 70s and 80s - most of it poetry, but some of it criticism, reviews, short fiction and essays. She became a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and other publications, and ended up with such honors as the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and admission to the Maryland Women's Hall of Fame.
