Marie
Ponsot's latest poetry collection,
Springing,
has been praised by critic Harold Bloom, who proclaimed,
"Marie Ponsot's poetic achievement is fiercely independent.
A courageous eloquence is sustained throughout her work,
as she mounts up what Emerson called 'the stairway of
surprise.'"
Ponsot's
previous collection,
The
Bird Catcher, won the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Poetry in 1998.
Ponsot's
other books of poems include True Minds (1956), Admit Impediment, and The Green Dark.
She
is a native New Yorker who has enjoyed teaching at Queens
College, Beijing United University, the Poetry Center
of the YMHA, New York University, and Columbia University.
Among her awards are an NEA Creative Writing grant, the
Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, and the Shaughnessy Medal
of the Modern Language Association.
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"Ponsot attends to elegant forms without losing sight
of what they are there to express: the cadences of a life
passionately considered."
- The New Yorker
"A
Marie Ponsot poem is a little like a jeweled bracelet,
carefully carved, with small, firm stones embedded."
- The New York Times
"...
All her work projects the iridescent insistence of a poet
speaking just as she wants to speak."
- San Francisco Chronicle
"Ponsot
doesn't hurry her poems... and, consequently, they are
aged to perfection: complex and concentrated."
- Booklist
Marie Ponsot
Interview
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 necessary antidote to our media-strewn culture, filled
as it is, with sound bites and fragmented images. But then again, maybe
it is just her poetry that is a cleanser and balm to our modern
minds. failbetter.com 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 predicate is a formal leap. And then there are other
ways in which language is formal. Even the most colloquial 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 language
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 Testament 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 quatrain, "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 human 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.
failbetter: Who do you like
to read?
Ponsot: I love the Cavalier poets,
the Renaissance poets, I love Dante. Not so much the Inferno
but the way the Inferno produces the Purgatoriam-and
then together the Inferno and the Purgatoriam
produces the Paradiso which 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 concreteness 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 beautifulness.
So I read that. I just finished reading it about two weeks ago.
failbetter: What did you like
to read as a child, what were you drawn to?
Ponsot: 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 getting
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 imagination. People don't
know what it means anymore. They think that it is something Paul McCartney
wrote about, and she is trying in a really meticulous way to
look at the events the whole phenomenology 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 because it
is so interesting to me and I never saw anybody write about imagination
the way Scarry does as-as an act. Theories of the imagination in classical
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 anymore. And she is a philosopher, it's just wonderful.
It's called Dreaming by the Book (Farrar, Straus 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.
failbetter: Do you ever feel
like you don't have enough language?
Ponsot: What I feel is that there
are times when my access to my own language is somehow impaired, I can't
get at it-"there is something there, something 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.
failbetter: 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?
Ponsot: 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 subject." 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
theory you have about it, into some kind of light.
failbetter: Writing is so weird...
Ponsot: It is. It really
is. Language itself does the writing. 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 [gesturing
to the back of her head]. I think it's all swimming 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 perfect the first time
you'd die. You'd shoot yourself. You are going to have stuff coming
and coming...
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