Poetry for Students

170 Poetry for Students

and Giroux, 1999) and it’s not dreaming, it’s better

than dreaming! It’s imagining.

I believe it’s the life of language in our heads,

the preconscious life of language because all the

language we have is in our heads. Put your hands

on your head and all the language you’ve possibly

got is in there.

Do you ever feel like you don’t have enough

language?

What I feel is that there are times when my ac-

cess to my own language is somehow impaired, I

can’t get at it—“there is something there, some-

thing there”—the trickle is so thin I can’t get it and

that’s frustrating. You just have to be unbearably

patient and keep pressing. And wait.

When you sit down to write a poem, generally,

do you find the poem comes out because you are

writing, or do you have something in your head and

it comes out then?

Occasionally, I have something in my head

that’s on its way. When the weather is friendly I

like to go for long walks and I’m not sure but I

think the rhythms of walking gives me some sort

of language access. Somehow the purposeless of

walking, not going somewhere,just going. And

looking around and seeing this and seeing that,

sometimes a phrase will come to my mind out of

the morass of stuff that interests me enough for my

mind to keep going with it, to keep thinking it, and

I might come home with five or six lines and the

rest of it, you know, comes out of that.

You can start anyplace and language will be

your friend if you really want to work on it. You

can say to yourself, “all right, the first thing I see

when I open my eyes I am going use that as a sub-

ject.” Ordinarily, writing about a subject is lethal.

Most of the really dull stuff you get is because

someone decided to write a poem ABOUT, and it

comes out really wrong because every cliché in

your head clusters around it and the subject attracts

the cliché long before it attracts real language, and

you have to work it out, you have to sweat it out,

and it takes strong exercise for your sweat to

cleanse you of that so that you are approaching the

subject or event in itself, and can say something

about it that is not a cliché and advances the the-

ory you have about it, into some kind of light.

Writing is so weird....

It is.It really is. Language itself does the writ-

ing. We know that we have language. That is one

of the things memory is packed with, everything

we know is remembered verbally, the conversation

of language, is what we store, and I think the that’s

not very tightly compartmented back there [ges-

turing to the back of her head]. I think it’s all swim-

ming around back there, you know, I think it’s all

swimming around, all the time.

Language itself is weird and it does some

amazing things.

We don’t have perfect access to all that stuff.

That’s why rewriting is vital. If you had to get it per-

fect the first time you’d die. You’d shoot yourself.

You are going to have stuff coming and coming...

Source:Meghan Cleary, “Marie Ponsot: Interview,” in Fail-

better.com, No. 7, Summer–Fall 2002, pp. 1–3.

Sandra M. Gilbert

In the following review, Gilbert profiles the

well-aged poets Ponsot and Rajzel Zychlinsky,

noting the “pleasure in time’s gifts of ripeness

and sweetness” in “One Is One” and other

Ponsot poems.

Age is not all do rot. It’s never too late. Sweet

is your real estate.

So declares Marie Ponsot at the end of her ex-

uberantly witty “Pourriture Noble” (“Noble Rot”),

subtitled “a moral tale, for Sauternes, the fungus

ceneria, and the wild old.” And indeed this con-

temporary fabliau tells a charming story’ of the ori-

gin of the famed Chateau d’Eyquem sauternes. The

grapes seemed to have grown “too old, I too soon

squeezed dry” because while the lord of the manor

was off carousing “rot wrapped (them) like lace”;

but (for, Ponsot counsels, the “meanest mistake /

has a point to make”) the astonished “vintner

d’Eyquem” reports that the wine issuing from these

grapes has

the best bouquet you can remember of sundown sum-

mer & someone coming to you smiling. The taste has

odor like a new country, so fine at first you can’t take

it in it’s so strange.

And for people as for grapes, the poet implies,

the “new country” of age can make a wine that’s

“thick, gold-colored” and “pours like honey”—

except it doesn’t taste like honey, it’s more

“punchy, / you’ve never drank anything like it.”

Though they were born a little more than a

decade apart, have had dramatically divergent life-

experiences, write in different languages and have

significantly different views of the world, Marie

Ponsot and Rajzel Zychlinsky have in common

a poetic intensity that seems, like the bouquet of

the vintner d’Eyquem’s sauternes, to have been

so sharpened and refined by age that it has what

One Is One