Rosalie S. Jacoby — Kaleidoscope and Later Poems

June 30, 1888 or 1889, Los Angeles, California–June 9, 1966, Los Angeles County, California

Rosalie Seligman Jacoby’s Kaleidoscope turns early Los Angeles through a deliberately changing lens. “Los Angeles” imagines the city passing from larva through chrysalis to butterfly; “Grand Avenue” remembers a residential street before traffic and excavation; “Cry of the Dispossessed” confronts Indigenous displacement while exposing the limits of a privileged settler viewpoint. Then the book changes scale. “Voices from the Nursery” enters children’s rooms, games, fears, jokes, and questions through carefully crafted speakers. Jacoby moves easily among rhyme, free verse, dramatic dialogue, cinquain, civic poem, nursery monologue, and visual arrangement—the variety is the book’s governing idea. Four later poems recovered from her son Grover Jacoby’s magazine Variegation reveal a shorter, sharper, more imagistic style and extend the record of a poet whose work joins family life to the changing streets and cultural ambitions of Los Angeles.

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Catalogue

Poetry Clubs & Civic Culture

Associations

Children and Schools Indigenous California: Representation and Appropriation Literary Families Variegation and Recurrence

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bibliography

Jacoby, Rosalie S. Kaleidoscope. Neuner Corporation, 1926.

———. “God Elects.” Christian Science Sentinel, 1928. Prose.

———. “Spring Performance.” Variegation, no. 1 (Jan. 1946): 9.

———. “At Sundown.” Variegation, no. 4 (autumn 1946): 15.

———. “Climbing Radiance.” Variegation, no. 8 (autumn 1947): 13.

———. “Beach Morning-Glory.” Variegation, no. 18 (spring 1950): 15.

Acknowledged Christian Science Monitor poems: “At Seven,” “Chums,” “My Nursery,” “The Post Box on the Corner,” and “She Sings.” Exact issue dates require further research.

Works About the Author

Christian Science Publishing Society. “God Elects,” Christian Science Sentinel record, 1928.

“Correspondence with Grover I. Jacoby Jr., 1947–50.” William Carlos Williams Papers, Yale University Library. Research lead concerning the Jacoby family’s literary network.

Harris Newmark, Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913. Family and civic background for Jacoby’s inherited view of Los Angeles; it should be read critically as a prominent settler-family account.

Homestead Museum. “The Stock Market Gives Every Indication of Finding Itself: Saturday Night Magazine, Los Angeles, 12 Oct. 1929.” Modern contextual article reproducing and discussing the Jacoby feature.

Levi, Linda. “Caption and Documentation for the 1913 Harris Newmark Family Photograph.”

Los Angeles State Normal School. Catalogue, 1894–1895. “Lottie Seligman” in the Training School first grade.

Newmark, Harris. Sixty Years in Southern California, 1853–1913. Knickerbocker Press, 1916.

Recurrence: A Quarterly of Rhyme, 1950–1959. Companion journal edited by Grover I. Jacoby Jr.; essential for understanding the paired free-verse/rhyme editorial program.

Saturday Night (Los Angeles), 12 Oct. 1929. Two-page feature on Rosalie S. Jacoby; page images saved in the research assets.

United States Copyright Office. Renewal record for Rosalie S. Jacoby, Kaleidoscope, 1953. Saved text and.

United States Patent Office. “Planting-Trowel Patent.” 1934. Records Rosalie S. Jacoby as a one-third assignee, not as the inventor.

“Bill Mohr’s scholarship and public discussion of Los Angeles little magazines.” Useful context for Variegation, Recurrence, and their position in the regional network before the Beat movement’s national breakthrough.

Variegation: A Free Verse Quarterly, 1946–1959. Complete and partial issue holdings in the BKS Extremes Journals archive; the principal source for Rosalie Jacoby’s four recovered later poems and for Grover I. Jacoby Jr.’s editorial network.