Poetry for Students

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