Loyal and irked readers, I have heard your cry in the desert. I have returned. I promised (in the very first post!) that this would surely become more and more neglected. I apologize. I truly did not expect that anyone read these artful musings. I bring to your attention today the poetry of Rolf Jacobsen, brought to my attention by my well-read literary compatriot, Obed Velasquez. Jacobsen is a Norwegian fellow who was born in Oslo in 1907. At the time the city was actually called Kristiania, which betrays his age. As an aside, because this is interesting, Oslo was built in the eleventh century by the Norwegian King Harald III and destroyed by a fire in 1624 and rebuilt by Danish-Norwegian king Christian IV as the city "Christiania" alternatively spelt with the K for a short time. The city reclaimed it's original name, Oslo, in 1925 when tender young Rolf Jacobsen was turning 18 and realizing how much poetry there is in the world. The passage of time plays no small role in the poetry of Jacobsen as he is often centered on the modernization of the world and how little penchant the whole process has preserved for Nature and such. This considered, it would not be unfair to call Jacobsen a romantic poet though his poetry does not read like the romantics whatsoever. But at it's rudiment sits the same fertile soil of angst and knitted brow at the sight of smoke stacks and urbanization and hurried feet. That said, Jacobsen is hailed as Norway's first Modernist poet and a primary figure in Scandinavian Poetry on a whole. For all the college drop outs out there, Rolf studied extensively at the University of Norway but never did graduate. And now he is revered and read world round, so you still have a chance, stick it to the man! I'm just kidding and not kidding, you know the tone - it's my signature. Rolf was married in 1940, and fathered himself two children so it appears he had that part of nature down-pat too. But world war II was a bad time for Rolf, and really, who was it a good time for? He was persuaded or coerced, or maybe the sources are just too kind and he just volunteered out of fear or sadism or cowardice, to join the Norway Nationalist Socialist Party after having been occupied by Hitler's forces. Rolf Jacobsen was basically a Nazi. When Germany was defeated, poor Rolf was in the clink for three and a half years, doing hard labour. Sad. This is truly so sad. I would like to now point out that Dostoevsky was put in Siberia for ten years as well. And how about Bruno Schultz, another victim of Nazi rule, murdered on the street corner by an SS Officer. Truly depressing, the way these things work out. When he got out he settled in Hamar, north of Oslo, and took to journalism and book-selling. And this too, the dear brother became a Catholic. As some may have inferred from this blog, I adore Catholic poets. This transpired in 1950. It must have been a catalyst because it had been several years sicne he had written but 1951 marked Rolf Jacobsen's returned to his pre-war past time: Poetry. The rest of this story speaks for itself in the lasting minimalism and eloquence of Jacobsen's work.


The Silence Afterwards

Try to be done now
with deliberately provocative actions and sales statistics,
brunches and gas ovens,
be done with fashion shows and horoscopes,
military parades, architectural contests, and the rows of triple traffic lights.
Come through all that and be through
with getting ready for parties and eight possibilities
of winning on the numbers,
cost of living indexes and stock market analyses,
because it is too late,
it is way too late,
get through with and come home
to the silence afterwards
that meets you like warm blood hitting your forehead
and like thunder on the way
and the sound of great clocks striking
that make the eardrums quiver,
because words don't exist any longer,
there are no more words,
from now on all talk will take place
with the voices stones and trees have.

The silence that lives in the grass
on the underside of every blade
and in the blue spaces between the stones.
The silence
that follows shots and birdsong.
The silence
that pulls a blanket over the dead body
and waits in the stairs until everyone is gone.
The silence
that lies like a small bird between your hands,
the only friend you have.


Skylab

We've come so far, thought the astronaut
as he swam around the capsule in his third week
and by accident kicked a god in the eye
--so far
that there's no difference anymore between up and down,
north and south, heavy and light.
And how, then, can we know righteousness.

So far.
And weightless, in a sealed room
we chase the sunrises at high speed
and sicken with longing for a green stalk
or the heft of something in our hands. Lifting a stone.

One night he saw that the Earth was like an open eye
that looked at him as gravely as the eye of a child
awakened in the middle of the night.


Rolf Jacobsen died on February 20th, 1994. I was seven years old. He looked like my Grandpa Houle.