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Easy: Poems
A “delightful” ( Poetry), celebratory volume of late-life poems from the award-winning octogenarian Marie Ponsot.
96 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
9 people are currently reading
66 people want to read
About the author
Marie Ponsot
40 books16 followersMarie Ponsot was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator.
After graduating from St. Joseph's College for Women in Brooklyn, Ponsot earned her master's degree in seventeenth-century literature from Columbia University. After the Second World War, she journeyed to Paris, where she met and married Claude Ponsot, a painter and student of Fernand Léger. The couple lived in Paris for three years, during which time they had a daughter. Later, Ponsot and her husband relocated to the United States. The couple had six sons before divorcing.
Upon returning from France, Ponsot worked as a freelance writer of radio and television scripts. She also translated 69 children's books from the French, including The Fables of La Fontaine.
She co-authored with Rosemary Deen two books about the fundamentals of writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk and Common Sense.
Ponsot taught a poetry thesis class, as well as writing classes, at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. She has also taught at the YMCA, Beijing United University, New York University, and Columbia University, and she served as an English professor at Queens College in New York, from which she retired in 1991.
Ponsot lived in New York City.
Ponsot was the author of several collections of poetry, including The Bird Catcher (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times Book Review.
Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the 2015 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
After graduating from St. Joseph's College for Women in Brooklyn, Ponsot earned her master's degree in seventeenth-century literature from Columbia University. After the Second World War, she journeyed to Paris, where she met and married Claude Ponsot, a painter and student of Fernand Léger. The couple lived in Paris for three years, during which time they had a daughter. Later, Ponsot and her husband relocated to the United States. The couple had six sons before divorcing.
Upon returning from France, Ponsot worked as a freelance writer of radio and television scripts. She also translated 69 children's books from the French, including The Fables of La Fontaine.
She co-authored with Rosemary Deen two books about the fundamentals of writing, Beat Not the Poor Desk and Common Sense.
Ponsot taught a poetry thesis class, as well as writing classes, at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. She has also taught at the YMCA, Beijing United University, New York University, and Columbia University, and she served as an English professor at Queens College in New York, from which she retired in 1991.
Ponsot lived in New York City.
Ponsot was the author of several collections of poetry, including The Bird Catcher (1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), which was named a "notable book of the year" by The New York Times Book Review.
Among her awards are a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, The Robert Frost Poetry Award, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association, the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, and the 2015 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
September 7, 2016
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Leave it to the graceful Marie Ponsot, now in her late eighties, to view her life in poetry as easeful. As she tells us, pondering what stones can hear, “Between silence and sound / we are balancing darkness, / making light of it.” In this celebratory collection, Ponsot makes light, in both senses, of all she touches, and her pleasure in offering these late poems is infectious. After more than a half century at her craft, she describes her poetic preferences unpretentiously thus: “no fruity phrases, just unspun / words trued right toward a nice / idea, for chaser. True’s a risk. / Take it I say. Do true for fun.”
Ponsot is accepting of what has come, whether it’s a joyous memory of her second-grade teacher in a New York public school or the feeling of being “Orphaned Old,” less lucky in life since her parents died. She holds herself to the highest standard: to see clearly, to think, to deal openhandedly and openheartedly with the world, to “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral: / bury the loss” and also to “Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.” She confides that she meets works of great art “expectant and thirsty.”
Indeed, Ponsot’s thirst for life and its best expression, for the sprightly phrase and the deeper understanding running beneath, makes this book a transformative experience. The wisdom and music of Easy, like all of Ponsot’s poetry, will remain with her readers for decades to come.
My Review:
COMETING
I like to drink my language in
straight up, no ice no twist no spin
----no fruity phrases, just unspun
words trued right toward a nice
idea, for chaser. True's a risk.
Take it I say. Do true for fun.
We say water is taught by thirst
earth by ocean diving
birds by the lift of the heart
oh that lift
----curative, isn't it----
a surge a sursum as
words become us
we come alive lightly
saying Oh
*
at the wordstream of sentences
transparent in their consequence
cometing before our eyes
trailing crystalline
across our other sky
and we drink from it
for the jolt of language
for its lucid hit
of bliss, the surprise.
Mrs. Ponsot is a friend of my BFF's, and a lady of quite noble vintage (90 quite soon); as you see from the above, pp60-61 in the book, she's lost not one step in her grande-dame-hood. I loved the clear, refreshing dip I took into the 52 poems in "Easy: Poems".
I am always delighted by poets whose impulse is to communicate not obfuscate; I love Wallace Stevens and WH Auden and Sharon Olds, and of course Mrs. Ponsot, for their sharp eyes and their stiletto-thin pencils. These lines are so well crafted that you can cut yourself on them:
"...From its baseboard stares
the head of a boar made
by someone who had seen a boar.
Cornered, caved, tarnishing
regardless in the dark at the back
edge of a royal burial, it sucked
the dust of three skulls
of three young women
whose heads it crushed
as it was planted there.
...
two singers and a lutanist, untarnished,
breakable, intentional, faithful
servants and instruments of song.
..."
--from "What Speaks Out", pp44-45
May I, and all I love, be able to create such wonderful, bright, unsparing beauty as we close in on our centenaries. This is how to do Getting Old. Brava, Marie Ponsot, and many many thanks for paying forward your dark-adapted eye.
The Publisher Says: Leave it to the graceful Marie Ponsot, now in her late eighties, to view her life in poetry as easeful. As she tells us, pondering what stones can hear, “Between silence and sound / we are balancing darkness, / making light of it.” In this celebratory collection, Ponsot makes light, in both senses, of all she touches, and her pleasure in offering these late poems is infectious. After more than a half century at her craft, she describes her poetic preferences unpretentiously thus: “no fruity phrases, just unspun / words trued right toward a nice / idea, for chaser. True’s a risk. / Take it I say. Do true for fun.”
Ponsot is accepting of what has come, whether it’s a joyous memory of her second-grade teacher in a New York public school or the feeling of being “Orphaned Old,” less lucky in life since her parents died. She holds herself to the highest standard: to see clearly, to think, to deal openhandedly and openheartedly with the world, to “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral: / bury the loss” and also to “Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.” She confides that she meets works of great art “expectant and thirsty.”
Indeed, Ponsot’s thirst for life and its best expression, for the sprightly phrase and the deeper understanding running beneath, makes this book a transformative experience. The wisdom and music of Easy, like all of Ponsot’s poetry, will remain with her readers for decades to come.
My Review:
COMETING
I like to drink my language in
straight up, no ice no twist no spin
----no fruity phrases, just unspun
words trued right toward a nice
idea, for chaser. True's a risk.
Take it I say. Do true for fun.
We say water is taught by thirst
earth by ocean diving
birds by the lift of the heart
oh that lift
----curative, isn't it----
a surge a sursum as
words become us
we come alive lightly
saying Oh
*
at the wordstream of sentences
transparent in their consequence
cometing before our eyes
trailing crystalline
across our other sky
and we drink from it
for the jolt of language
for its lucid hit
of bliss, the surprise.
Mrs. Ponsot is a friend of my BFF's, and a lady of quite noble vintage (90 quite soon); as you see from the above, pp60-61 in the book, she's lost not one step in her grande-dame-hood. I loved the clear, refreshing dip I took into the 52 poems in "Easy: Poems".
I am always delighted by poets whose impulse is to communicate not obfuscate; I love Wallace Stevens and WH Auden and Sharon Olds, and of course Mrs. Ponsot, for their sharp eyes and their stiletto-thin pencils. These lines are so well crafted that you can cut yourself on them:
"...From its baseboard stares
the head of a boar made
by someone who had seen a boar.
Cornered, caved, tarnishing
regardless in the dark at the back
edge of a royal burial, it sucked
the dust of three skulls
of three young women
whose heads it crushed
as it was planted there.
...
two singers and a lutanist, untarnished,
breakable, intentional, faithful
servants and instruments of song.
..."
--from "What Speaks Out", pp44-45
May I, and all I love, be able to create such wonderful, bright, unsparing beauty as we close in on our centenaries. This is how to do Getting Old. Brava, Marie Ponsot, and many many thanks for paying forward your dark-adapted eye.
November 18, 2009
The poems I remember from Springing: The Bird Catcher, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, are intricate timepieces. They exude a Swiss luxury. These kinds of poems reappear in Easy, poems like "Walking Home from the Museum," an inverted sonnet, and "Thank Gerard," a prayer of thanksgiving for Hopkins. But there are many more poems that are relaxed, carefree and even mischievous. The diction in them is simple. The rhyme scheme, if they have one, is playful. They are spoken in the voice of a cocky Head Turkey, a self-effacing middle sister of Peter Rabbit or one Grimm Brother to the Other. At a reading at the New School, Marie read a blues poem that she said she would not have put in a collection earlier because she would have thought it lacked gravitas. It was liberating to see a poet breaking free of poetic decorum.
The new poems are not just fun, but their freedom captures, paradoxically, something of the world's ineffability. One of the strongest poems in this collection is "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo." It is a response to Blake who proclaims in the poem's epigraph, "In a time of dearth bring forth number, weight & measure." A stirring line, but Marie would have none of it. She looks to cloud, instead, for a bridge, for "This dawns on me: no cloud is measurable."
"Each instant of edge" is very fine, the lines themselves illustrating through linked sounds what they say. The poem ends with an invocation:
The religious strain is strong in the new book, as in the others. It is governed by a consideration for others, and stimulated by an awareness that there is something bigger out there than us. Call it language, as Marie so often does.
The new poems are not just fun, but their freedom captures, paradoxically, something of the world's ineffability. One of the strongest poems in this collection is "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo." It is a response to Blake who proclaims in the poem's epigraph, "In a time of dearth bring forth number, weight & measure." A stirring line, but Marie would have none of it. She looks to cloud, instead, for a bridge, for "This dawns on me: no cloud is measurable."
The clarity of cloud is in its edgelessness,
its each instant of edge involving
in formal invention, always
at liberty, at it, incessantly altering.
"Each instant of edge" is very fine, the lines themselves illustrating through linked sounds what they say. The poem ends with an invocation:
Come to mind, cloud.
Come to cloud, mind.
The religious strain is strong in the new book, as in the others. It is governed by a consideration for others, and stimulated by an awareness that there is something bigger out there than us. Call it language, as Marie so often does.
April 13, 2020
I loved these late-in-life poems.
May 17, 2011
It had been a while since I read a poetry book, so I thought I'd pick one up. I have to say, I was drawn to this book because the title is "Easy." At the mid/bottom of the cover is the word, "poems"... I couldn't help but wonder if the poems were meant to be easy, or just the title. I didn't want to be trudging through lines of complex symbolism, so I hoped for "Easy Poems," checked it out and went to town.
I wasn't disappointed. While I don't want to imply that the poems were shallow or lacked meaning, they were rather simplistic and unassuming.
As with all poetry collections, there were some I liked and some I didn't care for.
"Head Turkey Muses: A Soliloquy" was hilarious and spot on.
"September in New York, Public and Elementary, 1927" spoke to the teacher in me.
My favorite may have been the easiest though. The one stripped most bare. Just six words, like the famed Hemingway story. Her poem is called:
" Bliss and Grief
No one
is here
right now."
Poignant.
I wasn't disappointed. While I don't want to imply that the poems were shallow or lacked meaning, they were rather simplistic and unassuming.
As with all poetry collections, there were some I liked and some I didn't care for.
"Head Turkey Muses: A Soliloquy" was hilarious and spot on.
"September in New York, Public and Elementary, 1927" spoke to the teacher in me.
My favorite may have been the easiest though. The one stripped most bare. Just six words, like the famed Hemingway story. Her poem is called:
" Bliss and Grief
No one
is here
right now."
Poignant.
March 18, 2018
Gets better as you go.
Read
July 2, 2019After reading a hand full of poems, I ended up skimming through the poems. Her poems hadn’t resonated with me. For that reason I felt rating her book would be unfair.
April 29, 2020
The author was described by her publisher as "graceful", and I would describe her poetry the same way. It was the perfect volume for staying at home and reading during the time of coronavirus. I found these poems both beautiful and accessible, especially this brilliant one entitled "Magnanimous, Magnificent", which ends with these lines:
Say you like it. Admit you've had some good luck.
Thank your friends for arriving on time. To the others,
the ones you dream of as enemies,
smile and say Thank you., and then try to mean it.
As the music stops you'll miss its lilt.
Keep dancing, keep listening. Speak up.
Ask for more music, more. In case you don't know,
what you want is magnificent, yours for the asking,
the rhythm of magnanimous exchange.
Say you like it. Admit you've had some good luck.
Thank your friends for arriving on time. To the others,
the ones you dream of as enemies,
smile and say Thank you., and then try to mean it.
As the music stops you'll miss its lilt.
Keep dancing, keep listening. Speak up.
Ask for more music, more. In case you don't know,
what you want is magnificent, yours for the asking,
the rhythm of magnanimous exchange.
February 21, 2024
A signed copy, left for me as a gift.
Mature and wise, just as all the other reviewers will say of it. But as with any poetry, the message you decipher from its lines must be your own interpretation in the end.
And her words were a gift.
Mature and wise, just as all the other reviewers will say of it. But as with any poetry, the message you decipher from its lines must be your own interpretation in the end.
And her words were a gift.
April 16, 2020
Walking...
.... then climbing, meditating toward light and dancing absorbing every day that led toward a life pouring out to newness. Yes...
.... then climbing, meditating toward light and dancing absorbing every day that led toward a life pouring out to newness. Yes...
October 14, 2025
Didn't do a whole lot for me personally, but I still quite enjoyed "Recovery" & "Dancing Day I".
March 6, 2010
I'm an awful poetry critic because I don't know enough about the nuances and forms of the genre to properly review it. I judge a poem simply on whether it makes me feel anything, I can relate to it, or it sounds pretty. :) If none of those 3 things are present, I just get bored and skip around in the collection until I find something that catches my eye. Although highly acclaimed by intelligent people who actually know what they're talking about, most of the poems in Easy didn't really do anything for me.
My favorite:
Orphaned Old
I feel less lucky since my parents died.
Father first, then mother, have left me
out in a downpour
roofless in cold wind
no umbrella no hood no hat no warm
native place, nothing
between me and eyeless sky
In the gritty prevailing wind
I think of times I've carelessly lost things:
that white-gold ring when I was eight,
a classmate named Mercedes Williams
my passport in Gibraltar
my maiden name.
My favorite:
Orphaned Old
I feel less lucky since my parents died.
Father first, then mother, have left me
out in a downpour
roofless in cold wind
no umbrella no hood no hat no warm
native place, nothing
between me and eyeless sky
In the gritty prevailing wind
I think of times I've carelessly lost things:
that white-gold ring when I was eight,
a classmate named Mercedes Williams
my passport in Gibraltar
my maiden name.
May 6, 2010
Exquisite. Easy on the heart. Rich in sound and rhyme (a la Gerard Manley Hopkins), but ready to be simple when that's what's best. I swooned and hurrahed to many of these, and will keep for an anthem, "Magnanimous, Magnificent" with its last stanza:
Ask for more music, more. In case you don't know,
what you want is magnificent, yours for the asking,
the rhythm of magnanimous exchange.
September 10, 2013
Not her best, but maybe it's because she's been influenced too much by the "spare" poetry that's being valued these days, or she's playing a trick. Some gems here though, like Orphaned Old's funny tribute to Bishop:
In the gritty prevailing wind
I think of the times I've carelessly lost things:
that white-gold ring when I was eight,
a classmate named Mercedes Williams,
my passport in Gibraltar,
my maiden name.
In the gritty prevailing wind
I think of the times I've carelessly lost things:
that white-gold ring when I was eight,
a classmate named Mercedes Williams,
my passport in Gibraltar,
my maiden name.
February 11, 2011
Another mixed review: 5 stars for the first half, -2 stars for the second. The poems in Section I and the first few of Section II were enchanting and deserve my highest praise, but it took all my strength of will to even finish the rest. It's a shame. I deeply admire Ms. Ponsot's gift for form, parody and response. I wanted very much to love all her work.
May 23, 2010
Requested this book because I got "Imagining Starry", which I liked, via Poem-A-Day on May 12, 2010 via email. See: http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID...
Ended up not thinking too much of the rest of them.
Ended up not thinking too much of the rest of them.
Read
August 24, 2010Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Ponsot's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!
January 5, 2011
Graceful as usual.
June 3, 2012
The results of a life's attention to the "stuff" that makes humans human.
March 19, 2018
I wanted to like these poems, but they just didn't work for me. I didn't connect with them. Poetry for me is about the images an to feel o the language used and these just didn't speak to me.
July 10, 2019
still did not like as much - probably disliked it more the second time around.
Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews