Volume 24 167
title, True Minds,came from a Shakespearean son-
net about ideal commitment. He treasured Walt
Whitman; she, Emily Dickinson. He became the
poet-prophet of the Beats. She raised seven chil-
dren and didn’t publish again for 25 years.
She kept on writing, however, seemingly in-
different to whether anyone but the muse noticed.
At 81, she’s enjoying a second arrival that has
erupted with all the fanfare the first one lacked. It
started with the National Book Critics Circle
Award for poetry in 1998. A few weeks ago, the
Poetry Society of America made her co-winner of
its Shelley Memorial Award, honoring a whole ca-
reer. She arrives at Beyond Baroque in Venice on
Saturday to read from her fifth volume, Springing
(Knopf), which the New York Times Book
Review—featuring a large picture of her on its
cover, rare for a poet—recently called “a great
book.” It offers a selection of new poems, previ-
ously published ones and uncollected early work
that illuminates the buried progress of her writing
life.
One outcome of her blossoming status is that
she’s taken on a somewhat Ginsberg-like role as a
public poet. She’s been sought after as one of New
York’s senior poets after the attacks of Sept. 11.
On Sept. 22, writer-broadcaster Kurt Andersen in-
vited her to his nationally distributed Studio 360
program to discuss the cultural impact of what had
happened 11 days before. “What is good will en-
dure with all the treacheries of what is dreadful,”
Ponsot assured listeners in the still-reeling city, her
crackling voice both tough and refined. She spoke
of “the subset of strength that we all have in us.”
Giving echoes of Winston Churchill’s resolve a
pacifist twist, she added that “violence begets vio-
lence begets violence. It will take us perhaps an-
other million years to get past this. But I believe
we will.”
Then, she somberly read a poem called
“Oceans,” which starts:
Death is breath-taking. We all die
young,
our lives defined by failure of the
heart,
our fire drowned in failure of the
lungs.
Still planning on pouring the best
ripe part
of wines our need or grasp has
sucked or wrung
from fruit & sun, we’re stopped
before we start.
Ponsot is a petite bird of a woman whose gray-
white hair was wound into a bun on a recent day
as she stood in the kitchen of her small, bright apart-
ment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and prepared
lunch for a visitor. She has a daughter and six sons,
one of whom started to renovate her kitchen but
hasn’t finished. Drawers function but lack final fac-
ings. A blank wall waits for cabinets. “He’s busy
and had to stop, but I’m sure he’ll get around to it
when he can,” Ponsot says, sounding certain.
It could be a scene in a Ponsot poem. She might
compare the kitchen ceiling to the sky, contrast in-
ternal light with sunlight, refer to Dante’s Paradiso,
tie it to an illuminated manuscript in a museum
(maybe about Dante’s war-plagued era), summon a
phrase or two from Latin and end with a bit of dia-
logue between her and her son or—since she tends
to see men over women’s shoulders—her son’s wife.
All this would occur in the 14 lines of a son-
net or another of the many traditional forms she’s
mastered (“Oceans” is a sonnet), plus two utterly
untraditional lines just because she felt like it.
When this imitation Ponsot is suggested to her,
she laughs, something her witty poems make oth-
ers do quite often. She says the make-believe poem
reflects the focus she puts on the importance of “a
governing intention to live a perfect life in an im-
perfect world.”
Even when she describes a New York wildlife
sanctuary or a small rooftop garden (she’s the en-
thusiastic keeper of one) her work poses the con-
trast between an ethical tenderness and the brutal
ways human beings betray their “tremendous in-
terconnectedness” with each other and nature.
Invited the other day to speak to honor gradu-
ates at Queens College, where she taught for many
years, she read “Jamaica Wildlife Center, Queens,
New York,” about a beautiful but endangered cor-
ner of the borough where she was born.
Describing the “sea air off the flats and inlets
of Jamaica Bay,” she never makes an explicit caseOne Is OneOne outcome of her
blossoming status is that
she’s taken on a somewhat
Ginsberg-like role as a
public poet.”