Marie Ponsot held us in her spell, reading with radiant authority and a deep pleasure in the power and play of language at the University Club, NYC, where friends and family gathered Nov. 19 to celebrate her legacy as poet, teacher, and benefactor to The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College. It came as no surprise that Ponsot, class of 1940 and this year’s recipient of the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (among her many other honors), asked the audience to hold applause when it broke out after she read a second poem. Quiet observation and imaginative attention to the power of poetic structures are key in Ponsot’s poetry. One thinks of Ponsot’s most recent book, Easy, and realizes that this ease is hard won, as she affirms in a PBS News Hour profile.
Each of the twelve poems Ponsot chose for Tuesday’s event reveals experience enfolded within experience, as in “Pre-text,” in which the first, lunging steps of a “sudden baby” lead backwards in time erasing suddenness in an eloquent gesture. In “On a Library of Congress Photo of Eunice B. Winkless, 1904,” a young woman’s proud but precarious control over the “animal horse” results in her fall into “a pool like a tame star.” In Ponsot’s luminous yet uncompromising vision, we come up short but still win. “Did it again. Damn Fool!” the rider exclaims, and the poem ends with an observation on the authority of the imagination, the poet asking, “And when do I act on better evidence?” In “Hard Shell Clams,” Ponsot commemorates the intimacy of a day shared with her father, yet remembers also “what I would not let us say.”
A series of glowing tributes to Marie Ponsot’s legacy followed a convivial settling in. Dean Richard Greenwald of St. Joseph’s introduced President S. Elizabeth Hill, who praised Ponsot’s “generous embrace of life” and her poems that “blaze like the sun or glow like warming embers.” Alice Quinn, who edited Ponsot’s return to publishing with her 1981 Admit Impediment, remembered being careful not to damage “the copious beauty” and celebrated Ponsot’s “thrilling relation to the poetic canon and poetic form.” She described the eleven poems that appeared in a recent edition of Poetry as “marvels of intellectual curiosity and acuity that will also break your heart.” To illustrate, she read Ponsot’s “Roundstone Cove,” which ends with the acute and comforting observation, “Fog hoods me. But the hood of fog is sun.” Rosemary Deen, co-author of Beat Not the Poor Desk, described Ponsot’s inspired teaching syllabus and expressed enduring admiration for the way this “mother, breadwinner, cooker of two French meals a day, and poet” managed to find “those twenty minutes before going to bed” to write. Finally, Jackson Taylor, Director of The Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s and first to hold the newly endowed Ponsot Chair in Poetry, introduced Marie Ponsot by quoting her advice to him: “You gotta get lucky. The way to get lucky is to be open to luck.” Clearly, there is always another lesson to be learned from this brilliant poet.
UNABASHED
Unabashed
as some landscapes are
(a lakeshape, say,
lying and lifting
under a cupping sky)
so angels are,
entire with each other,
their wonderful bodies
obedient, their strengths
interchanging—
or so
we imagine them
hoping
by saying these things of them
to invent human love.
From Springing: New and Selected Poems, from Knopf, 2003
Karen Steinmetz’s poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Coal Hill Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among other literary journals, and in the anthology Still Against War/Poems for Marie Ponsot. Her novel The Mourning Wars was published by Roaring Brook Press/Macmillan in 2010. She is a Lecturer in Writing at Manhattanville College.
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