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Collected Poems
Marie Ponsot’s Collected Poems is the stunning lifework of the prizewinning poet, gathered in one the world she has made of life’s fire for sixty years. The present celebratory volume covers nearly all of her published work, from True Minds (1956), which was number five in the famous City Lights Pocket Poets series, through the 2009 Easy, her most recent collection; it also includes some new work, written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot’s gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the “hand-span skill” that is the poem. In examining the powerful life of women, her poetry is as practical as it is profound. “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral,” she advises us. “Bury the loss.” (And “Go to a funeral / as to a / marry the loss.”) Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot’s the traditional form in varieties we’ve never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience “language as the primitive dialect of our human race,” as she has described it—to gradually enter a state that is “what poetry hopes of us and for enraptured attention.”
- GenresPoetry
496 pages, Hardcover
Published August 2, 2016
About the author
Marie Ponsot
41 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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August 3, 2024
Poetry is a window through which we can better see the world–poetry is the act of pointing to the world, to meaning, to ideas, and thus discovering that this act of pointing is a meaningful art unto itself. It is like an artistic, linguistic version of calculus, not measuring the arc of meaning but the second derivative, the arc of the arc of meaning. ‘There’s a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief,’ wrote poet Marie Ponsot, ‘that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us.’ These tunes and dreams come alive in this incredible Collected Poems that traces the arc of her career, from True Minds, her first collection of poetry in 1956, through her National Book Critics Circle Award winning collection The Bird Catcher and up to her passing in 2019. Ponsot is a master at form, writing in luminous sestinas and the tritina—a form Ponsot invented— that pull the reader into surprising territories as each line builds upon the last. Her wordplay and imagery are always crisp and driving, with many poems that examine philosophical musings, looks at married life, and often focus on women who are otherwise overlooked in society. A marvelous poet and this is a wonderful tome as testament to her greatness.
Imagining Starry
The place of language is the place between me
and the world of presences I have lost
—complex country, not flat. Its elements free-
float, coherent for luck to come across;
its lines curve as in a mental orrery
implicit with stars in active orbit,
only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.
The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite
air of imagination that stirs immense
among losses and leaves me less desolate.
Breathing it I spot a sentence or a name,
a rescuer, charted for recovery,
to speak against the daily sinking flame
& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.
Ponsot published her first collection in 1956 while in Paris though wouldn’t return to poetry until 1981. She spent these years translating childrens books—many of them fairy tales—from French, which I feel reflects well in the way her poetry is rather succinct in imagery. There is a dreamlike quality to her works that are able to dredge up a lot of emotional resonance and dance through the mind of the readers. I always love a good love poem and she can deliver those quite handily:
Analogue
I watch me until I disappear and we
Enter the danced dimension of the good
True beautiful, whose claims may be
Ignored by not withstood.
Join me because forever perfected
Love’s one moment emerges here
Forever alive. Time undermines us
But our made love stands clear.
Ponsot is often remembered for the tritina, a form she herself invented consisting of three stanzas, each with three lines which she describes as the square root of the sestina. It has three repeated words, each at the end of each lines in the sequence 123, 312, 231 with a final line as conclusion to the three tercets including all three words. Her poem Roundstone Cove is often used as an example, watch for the words “fog,” “hood,” and “sun”:
The wind rises. The sea snarls in the fog
far from the attentive beaches of childhood --
no picnic, no striped chairs, no sand, no sun.
Here even by day cliffs obstruct the sun;
moonlight miles out mocks this abyss of fog.
I walk big-bellied, lost in motherhood,
hunched in a shell of coat, a blindered hood.
Alone a long time, I remember sun --
poor magic effort to undo the fog.
Fog hoods me. But the hood of fog is sun.
Ponsot wrote that poetic forms like the tritina are ‘instruments of discovery,’ and she uses her words to open up the world in fresh and wondrous ways.
Imagination, discovery and memory are at the heart of her works. As she describes the night sky, so too can we see her own poetry: ‘it becomes the infinite / air of imagination that stirs immense / among losses and leaves me less desolate.’ I’m frequently impressed at how Ponsot is able to say a lot in a short amount of space, keeping to a tight form with short lines that flow slow and smooth like a calm river, her imagery catching the sunlight and dazzling you. While she does have some longer poems, I’m often delighted by her succinctness, such as the poem Bliss and Grief which reads in its entirety: ‘No one / Is here / Right now.’ Just six words can make a large effect under her pen.
Among Women
What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.
She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”
She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.
A decorated poet with a long legacy of imaginative works and forms, Marie Ponsot is a wonderful writer. Collected Poems has been a great way to watch the entirety of her career, to see how she shifts and experiments and discovers new methods that ultimately lead to that very purpose: discovery. This is a marvelous collection.
4.5/5
Take My Disportionate Desire
Enough of expressionist flowers lions and wheat,
Let us consider our separate needs
Here in this beautiful city of delicate surfaces
That a touch makes bleed.
Bring me that truth love-ridden whose black blaze makes
A comfort in the ice-bitten ghettos of cities, that wise
Love whose intemperate told truth thrusts into the aching
Arms of old men old women's lonely bodies with a cry.
All lovers, even lucky, need such intransigence as stays
Wrecked harborers who together cough, drink, spit
Gay blood into the gutter. I need that passion, miracle,
Incautious faith. To only you I offer it.
Imagining Starry
The place of language is the place between me
and the world of presences I have lost
—complex country, not flat. Its elements free-
float, coherent for luck to come across;
its lines curve as in a mental orrery
implicit with stars in active orbit,
only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.
The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite
air of imagination that stirs immense
among losses and leaves me less desolate.
Breathing it I spot a sentence or a name,
a rescuer, charted for recovery,
to speak against the daily sinking flame
& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.
Ponsot published her first collection in 1956 while in Paris though wouldn’t return to poetry until 1981. She spent these years translating childrens books—many of them fairy tales—from French, which I feel reflects well in the way her poetry is rather succinct in imagery. There is a dreamlike quality to her works that are able to dredge up a lot of emotional resonance and dance through the mind of the readers. I always love a good love poem and she can deliver those quite handily:
Analogue
I watch me until I disappear and we
Enter the danced dimension of the good
True beautiful, whose claims may be
Ignored by not withstood.
Join me because forever perfected
Love’s one moment emerges here
Forever alive. Time undermines us
But our made love stands clear.
Ponsot is often remembered for the tritina, a form she herself invented consisting of three stanzas, each with three lines which she describes as the square root of the sestina. It has three repeated words, each at the end of each lines in the sequence 123, 312, 231 with a final line as conclusion to the three tercets including all three words. Her poem Roundstone Cove is often used as an example, watch for the words “fog,” “hood,” and “sun”:
The wind rises. The sea snarls in the fog
far from the attentive beaches of childhood --
no picnic, no striped chairs, no sand, no sun.
Here even by day cliffs obstruct the sun;
moonlight miles out mocks this abyss of fog.
I walk big-bellied, lost in motherhood,
hunched in a shell of coat, a blindered hood.
Alone a long time, I remember sun --
poor magic effort to undo the fog.
Fog hoods me. But the hood of fog is sun.
Ponsot wrote that poetic forms like the tritina are ‘instruments of discovery,’ and she uses her words to open up the world in fresh and wondrous ways.
‘The forms create an almost bodily pleasure in the poet. What you’re doing is trying to discover. They are not restrictive. They pull things out of you. They help you remember.’
Imagination, discovery and memory are at the heart of her works. As she describes the night sky, so too can we see her own poetry: ‘it becomes the infinite / air of imagination that stirs immense / among losses and leaves me less desolate.’ I’m frequently impressed at how Ponsot is able to say a lot in a short amount of space, keeping to a tight form with short lines that flow slow and smooth like a calm river, her imagery catching the sunlight and dazzling you. While she does have some longer poems, I’m often delighted by her succinctness, such as the poem Bliss and Grief which reads in its entirety: ‘No one / Is here / Right now.’ Just six words can make a large effect under her pen.
Among Women
What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.
She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”
She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.
A decorated poet with a long legacy of imaginative works and forms, Marie Ponsot is a wonderful writer. Collected Poems has been a great way to watch the entirety of her career, to see how she shifts and experiments and discovers new methods that ultimately lead to that very purpose: discovery. This is a marvelous collection.
4.5/5
Take My Disportionate Desire
Enough of expressionist flowers lions and wheat,
Let us consider our separate needs
Here in this beautiful city of delicate surfaces
That a touch makes bleed.
Bring me that truth love-ridden whose black blaze makes
A comfort in the ice-bitten ghettos of cities, that wise
Love whose intemperate told truth thrusts into the aching
Arms of old men old women's lonely bodies with a cry.
All lovers, even lucky, need such intransigence as stays
Wrecked harborers who together cough, drink, spit
Gay blood into the gutter. I need that passion, miracle,
Incautious faith. To only you I offer it.
November 12, 2017
Marie Ponsot is someone I've only recently begun reading. I'd not known of her a year ago. But I'm terribly impressed with her poetry. I find it both robust and delicate, illustrated by the span of her work which runs from the 1957 volume True Minds published by the famous publisher of Beat work, City Lights, to the exquisite present acceptance of everything written as late as 8 years ago. It's all strong poetry, sexually edgy at times and humorous or elegant at others--in the middle of this volume are some of the loveliest villanelles I've come across lately. I've become a fan of Ponsot.
August 14, 2023
Marie Ponsot was a name that I ran across as a "major influence" on a variety of writers, but I'd never read a thing. A review of this volume convinced me to correct that error, and I am glad that I did, despite the grimace on page 209. (Inside joke.)
Looking over the table of contents, I see that when it comes to whole poems, I liked her earlier stuff more. Nine poems singled out before 1988, only two after. A key reason for this is that while the poems feel convincing, they constantly adopt a certain opacity. I understand why one writes poems the reader can't fully parse, but such works rarely satisfy. To a large degree, reading Ponsot mostly consisted of enjoying the music and not understanding the lyrics.
"Multipara: Gravida 5" and "Toward a New Dispensation" from her first collection are both powerful and impressive. The first deals with images of childbirth, the second with staking out Prometheus. Love these.
From the same collection there's the sly "Rockefeller the Center" which picks apart the symbolism and iconography, including
...the copy cathedral; a Prometheus
Aeschylus did not intend submits to sparrows...
I tend to grow bored of long poems, but "For a Divorce" kept reeling me back in. Most excellent, and scorching.
She did it again with "De Religione Humanitis Vera" which contains the merciless stanza
Let the killer priests of our killer race
Go forth like justice blind to the kill
According to your will.
And then the series of three poems that made the whole book worth reading: "From the Fountain at Vaucluse" then "Ghost Writer" then "Overheard". Three long poems that kept my attention. For me, they would justify a whole career.
I laughed at "Antennae" and admired "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo" and "Testing Gardening".
The high points of this collection are really, really effective. I will be studying them carefully.
Looking over the table of contents, I see that when it comes to whole poems, I liked her earlier stuff more. Nine poems singled out before 1988, only two after. A key reason for this is that while the poems feel convincing, they constantly adopt a certain opacity. I understand why one writes poems the reader can't fully parse, but such works rarely satisfy. To a large degree, reading Ponsot mostly consisted of enjoying the music and not understanding the lyrics.
"Multipara: Gravida 5" and "Toward a New Dispensation" from her first collection are both powerful and impressive. The first deals with images of childbirth, the second with staking out Prometheus. Love these.
From the same collection there's the sly "Rockefeller the Center" which picks apart the symbolism and iconography, including
...the copy cathedral; a Prometheus
Aeschylus did not intend submits to sparrows...
I tend to grow bored of long poems, but "For a Divorce" kept reeling me back in. Most excellent, and scorching.
She did it again with "De Religione Humanitis Vera" which contains the merciless stanza
Let the killer priests of our killer race
Go forth like justice blind to the kill
According to your will.
And then the series of three poems that made the whole book worth reading: "From the Fountain at Vaucluse" then "Ghost Writer" then "Overheard". Three long poems that kept my attention. For me, they would justify a whole career.
I laughed at "Antennae" and admired "This Bridge, Like Poetry, Is Vertigo" and "Testing Gardening".
The high points of this collection are really, really effective. I will be studying them carefully.
February 3, 2021
"Language thinks us. Myth or mouth
we migrants are its mystery."
we migrants are its mystery."
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews