Poetry for Students

(Rick Simeone) #1

168 Poetry for Students


against developers and politicians, but it’s clear
what she’s talking about. She notes how even a poet
exploits these details, turning them into “bite-sized
images” that “intelligence eats & eats eagerly.”
“You can’t change the major rule that death is
the price of life,” Ponsot says, chewing on a grape.
“But there is a particularly human capacity to make
choices about how to use that life. You can keep
making water filthy until the water dies, or you can
decide not to.”
She was born Marie Birmingham, to a family
that derived its relative affluence from a business
supplying imported gourmet food and fine wines
on a private basis to very wealthy New Yorkers.
Her late stature disguises an early bloomer. She
says she can’t remember not writing, and found her
mature poetic voice quite young. “I didn’t know
you were supposed to find a voice. I just wrote the
poems and let them do that.”
She discovered James Joyce’s short story, “Ivy
Day in the Committee Room,” at 13, and became
devoted to Joyce’s work. She excelled at Latin and
French by the time she graduated from public
school in Queens at 15, entering a small Catholic
college there called St. Joseph’s. Joyce taught her
to trust the power of a single creative moment to
embody the whole of human consciousness.
Dante’s Divine Comedythrilled her when she read
it as an assignment as a college freshman—the last
part, the Paradiso,most of all.
As a child, she had experienced an exultant plea-
sure in the most basic sensation of being alive but
couldn’t quite find images and words to describe the
all-encompassing sensation. As she read Dante’s long
poem, “it was clear that the ‘Inferno’ was intolera-
ble if it wasn’t going somewhere pretty quickly. And
it was. Beatrice leads him to the ultimate vision, and
then she disappears. And, in the text, he disappears,
too. And there is just this visionary moment.
“It’s a sky vision,” says this poet whose work
brims with skies that suggest both internal and uni-
versal infinities. “It’s an out-of-your-own-body,
out-of-your-own-mind, out-of-your-own-sky vi-
sion. And when you see that somebody has found
a story that leads to it, a kind of showing forth of
that in words.. .”
She stops talking, and her clear blue eyes roll
upward with an awestruck savoring of the experi-
ence. “It is the great sense of the great value of
everything,” she says.
In 1941, at 19, she got a master’s in 17th cen-
tury poetry at Columbia. The war years, during
which she worked in Manhattan bookstores, seeped

into her. She found a way to think about them in
the Catholic Worker,the Pacifist newspaper co-
founded by the activist Dorothy Day. Around the
war’s end, a relationship with a Navy man who suf-
fered deafness and depression from shellshock gave
her insight into men who’d returned from the war.
On Studio 360,she read a poem about a young,
World War II flier she knew who had “burned, that
boy, my age, Lt. Little, / prayed for in my parish
monthly thirty years.. .”
In 1947, Ponsot made her first trip to Europe, to
Paris. On the ship, she first met Ferlinghetti, who’d
served as an officer in the Navy. In a cafe, she met
a painter named Claude Ponsot. They soon married
and returned together about a year later to the United
States. The marriage came apart in the 1960s, and
she increasingly raised their children on her own.
Though she came from a well-off family, her
marriage and subsequent life gave way to financial
difficulties. She taught writing and translated
French literature to support her family. Though too
busy to worry about getting published, “while chil-
dren slept and popovers popped,” she wrote at
every opportunity. “You just do it,” she says. “You
do it because you’ve got to get your focus, even if
it is for only half an hour or 20 minutes.”
In 1981, a poet friend urged Ponsot to submit
a manuscript to Knopf, which was planning a new
series of poetry books. The result, an unusually
thick volume, just started to catch up with the years
of unseen writing.
Her next book took eight years; the one after
that, 10. She says she’s a slow, painstaking writer.
Springing,with 26 new poems, took only four
years to produce—an instant in Ponsot time.
Ferlinghetti, speaking from San Francisco re-
cently, says he’s not surprised at her growing im-
pact, that he’d never met anyone with her “very acute
sensibility, before or since.” Ginsberg, he says,
“transformed the poetry world of his time, but she
is not a poet of her time. That is not one of her at-
tributes. She is a poet out of time, in the way that is
true of the best poetry.” Softly, he speculated: “She
may last longer than Ginsberg. Who knows? It just
shows how right I was to publish her all along.”
Source:Allan M. Jalon, “A Poet’s Progress,” in Los Ange-
les Times, May 29, 2002, Section E, p. 1.

Marie Ponsot with
Meghan Cleary
In the following interview conducted by
Meghan Cleary of Failbetter.com, Ponsot discusses
poetry form and process and literary influences.

One Is One
Free download pdf