Volume 24 169
Native New Yorker Marie Ponsot is one of the
most venerated poets writing in America today. Her
collection of new and selected poems, Springing,
just released, is already in its second printing, a
mark rarely achieved by poets publishing in today’s
literary marketplace.
Her verse is elegant, refined, and packs a punch
with a frequent twist of phrase or an unexpected
revelation. She makes us feel poetry is the neces-
sary antidote to our media-strewn culture, filled as
it is, with sound bites and fragmented images. But
then again, maybe it is just herpoetry that is a
cleanser and balm to our modern minds. failbetter
editorial consultant Meghan Cleary had a chance to
sit down with Marie at a tiny Italian restaurant and
linger well into the espresso course....
[failbetter]: Do you think forms live naturally
in language or do you think you have to summon
them out somehow?
[Ponsot]: I think there are the forms of syntax
which give you part of the mental light of the poem.
It is the way the mind takes in the relation of an
actor or a subject acting,you know.
The subject and the verb together link up in
some grasping way that grabs meaning for us—and
that’s a poem. That link between subject and pred-
icate is a formal leap. And then there are other ways
in which language is formal. Even the most collo-
quial truck driver cursing out a cab driver will have
a structure. Usually when someone is enraged, it
will have a rhetorical structure. Yes, I think lan-
guage generates forms because language conveys
meaning, and if there is no form holding anything
together, how are you going to hand somebody the
soup?
The great surviving forms of the Old Testa-
ment for example will turn up over and over again
in American literature. Whitman writes in that
form. Doesn’t look like a form to us because we
have sort of a narrow view of a form, like a qua-
train, “its got to have four lines and the second and
fourth line have to rhyme”, and stuff like that....
And that kind of form is great fun to play with. It’s
really fun to play with because it’s got to contain
these other levels of formality that are here in hu-
man language and it’s got to do all of that at once.
And thank god for our mother’s knee where we
learned all the hard stuff without pain, you know.
Who do you like to read?
I love the Cavalier poets, the Renaissance po-
ets, I love Dante. Not so much the Infernobut the
way the Infernoproduces the Purgatoriam—and
then together the Inferno and the Purgatoriam
produces the Paradisowhich is one of the great
works of literature. Very concrete images of the
Inferno,extremely concrete, and the effect on the
speaker of the poem and the guide and the effect
among the characters of the punishment that they
are undergoing and their history are all very, very
concrete. Then in the Purgatoriam,the level of con-
creteness is also very sharp but it’s kind of spread
out through air—they keep walking, they can
breathe easier, and Beatrice arrives and that makes
it all still lighter, more open and then the Paradiso
which is just this explosion of light and beautiful-
ness. So I read that. I just finished reading it about
two weeks ago.
What did you like to read as a child, what were
you drawn to?
Anything in print. I was a desperate omni-
lect....My mother was always, in her own
adorable way, trying to send me out to play, and I
did that, because I was good child, God help me,
but what I was really looking forward to was get-
ting back in there and backing into a corner with
my book, and I read it all. I read sort of grown-up
things, childish things. I read them over and over
sitting in the corner.
I read a lot of modern poetry too. I don’t read
very much fiction. At the moment I’m reading a
remarkable woman called Elaine Scarry, who has
three books that I know of, and all three of them
truly refreshing and the latest one I think every poet
should read, they would really like it, they would
just delectate in it. One of the words that has
dropped out of writing program writing, is imagi-
nation. People don’t know what it means anymore.
They think that it is something Paul McCartney
wrote about, and she is trying in a reallymeticu-
lous way to look at the events the whole phenom-
enology of imagining something and writing it. She
has a whole hypothesis about why some things are
present when we are writing—not only do we get
that out of our own head onto the page, but then
how does the reader get it back and pick it up?
I’ve been reading philosophy all my life be-
cause it is so interesting to me and I never saw any-
body write about imagination the way Scarry does
as—as an act. Theories of the imagination in clas-
sical philosophy are interesting, they’re wonderful,
but they don’t do this at all, they would think that
is un-philosophical, but we don’t think that any-
more. And she isa philosopher, it’s just wonder-
ful. It’s called Dreaming by the Book(Farrar, StrausOne Is One