One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

Marie Ponsot

"We begin making poems as babbling infants, and that's a first reason to claim poetry as primitive. Inspired and perhaps hard-wired, infants babble. Poetry begins as babble."

Marie Ponsot was born Marie Birmingham in 1921 in Queens, N.Y. Her father was a partner in a business that imported wines for affluent New Yorkers. Her mother was a teacher and her grandmother kept notebooks filled with favorite poems. Ponsot's first poems appeared in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle when she was still a kid. She graduated with a B.A. from St. Joseph's College for Women and earned an M.A. in 17th-century literature from Columbia University. Shortly after World War II, she went to Paris where she met Claude Ponsot, a French painter. "We picked each other up in a bar," the poet once quipped. They married and lived in Paris for three years. Their oldest child, Monique, was born in 1951 and was followed by six brothers. Ponsot and her husband were divorced in 1970.

Over the decades, Ponsot held a variety of jobs and raised her children. She was a freelance writer of radio and TV scripts, and in addition to the fables of La Fontaine, she translated scores of children's books from French to English. Ponsot taught poetry at Columbia University and NYU and English at Queens College.

Ponsot's first book, True Minds, was published in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's renowned City Lights series in the same year as Allen Ginsberg published Howl (1957). Not surprisingly, the book did not receive the attention it merited, and she was initially considered a Beat poet. In an interview with Megan O'Grady (Vogue) Ponsot gave this account: "What a fate! I had just had my sixth child, so I had a houseful. Larry [Ferlinghetti] had done this wonderful thing and put together a chapbook. He and I had known each other in Paris, and we used to exchange poems and talk about them, and he had held on to them and wrote to say that he wanted to do a book. He asked me to send anything else I had, and I did, any scraps that were lying around." Almost five decades later Ferlinghetti would tell The Los Angeles Times: "She is a poet out of time, in the way that is true of the best poetry. She may last longer than Ginsberg. Who knows?"

Ponsot's second collection of poetry, Admit Impediment, was published in 1981. This was followed by more volumes: The Green Dark (1988), The Bird Catcher (1998; National Book Critics Circle Award), Springing (2002), and Easy (2009). Although she is sometimes regarded as a metaphysical poet, Ponsot has always been sternly independent. Her honors include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize and the Shaugnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.

Ponsot takes as her theme such topics as family life, camaraderie, marriage, and nature. She is known for verbal exactitude and syntactic intricacy, and she regularly makes use of thorny poetic forms (e.g., the villanelle, the sestina, the tritina). As a result, her verse is sophisticated, and can take the reader on unexpected journeys. In Ponsot's own words, her poems "are meant to be beautiful." The San Francisco Chronicle described her as "one of the most elegant, intelligent poets around."

The following poem is from The Bird Catcher. It is a poem Dinitia Smith (The New York Times) found very harsh. That may be so, but I imagine it may be somewhat welcome for some readers of this column in the aftermath of Valentine's Day. I particularly love the address to "you punk"; it gains deeper sense in light of the following remark of Ponsot in a 2009 program with Judy Woodruff on America's Public Broadcasting System: "I like to walk.  …  There is a wonderful rhythm. And I think it has a lot to do with the other rhythms of the body, like your heart beating away -- punk, punk -- all the time."

 

One is One

Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked
stiff. You? you still try to rule the world -- though
I've got you: identified, starving, locked
in a cage you will not leave alive, no
matter how you hate it, pound its walls,
& thrill its corridors with messages.

Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl
in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages,
your greed to go solo, your eloquent
threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do.
You scare me, bragging you're a double agent
…