August 23, 1911 [Los Angeles, California] – June 26, 1974 [Los Angeles, California
Jacoby was born in Los Angeles County to Grover Isador and Rosalie Seligman (both of whom were born in Los Angeles, as well as his maternal grandmother) and lived his entire life there. His maternal grandfather was Harris Newmark (1834-1916), a German businessman and philanthropist who had emigrated to the U.S. in 1853 (he later wrote a memoir, Sixty Years in Southern California: 1853–1913). Jacoby’s family started the Jacoby Bros. Clothing Store in downtown Los Angeles in 1878, selling out to the May Company in the early 30s. Jacoby only published one small volume of poems, The Human Patina, in 1938, but he edited two long-running national poetry magazines, Variegation (1946-1959), devoted to free verse, and Recurrence (1950-1959), devoted to poems that rhyme. Another shorter-lived journal, Comment in Motion, was devoted to translation.
