Josephine Jacobsen

Josephine Jacobsen, an award-winning poet, died Wednesday of kidney failure. She was 94.
Jacobsen was 10 years old when she published her first poem in St. Nicholas Magazine. But it wasn’t until her later years that her work appeared regularly in The New Yorker. She published numerous poetry collections, including “In the Crevice of Time,” which received a nomination for a National Book Award.
In 1971, Jacobsen became a Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now called U.S. poet laureate. She also won three awards from the Poetry Society of America: the Shelley Award, the William Carlos Williams Award and the Robert Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime service to American poetry. She was inducted into The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994.
“Poetry is like walking along a little, tiny, narrow ridge up on a precipice. You never know the next step, whether there’s going to be a plunge. I think poetry is dangerous. There’s nothing mild and predictable about poetry,” Jacobsen once said.