A Poet’s Progress

Right after making history by publishing Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl and Other Poems” in 1956, Lawrence Ferlinghetti introduced the first book of another young poet. Her name was Marie Ponsot, and she was so different from Ginsberg that they seemed like opposites.

He was male, gay, Jewish (and increasingly Buddhist). She examined marital love and her Catholic faith. His chanting, long-lined rhythms and jazzed images hurtled across the page. She made short, lyrical poems, often in rhyme--songs more than howls. He beatified anti-conformity. Her title, “True Minds,” came from a Shakespearean sonnet about ideal commitment. He treasured Walt Whitman; she, Emily Dickinson. He became the poet-prophet of the Beats. She raised seven children and didn’t publish again for 25 years.

She kept on writing, however, seemingly indifferent to whether anyone but the muse noticed. At 81, she’s enjoying a second arrival that has erupted with all the fanfare the first one lacked. It started with the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1998. A few weeks ago, the Poetry Society of America made her co-winner of its Shelley Memorial Award, honoring a whole career. She arrives at Beyond Baroque in Venice on Saturday to read from her fifth volume, “Springing” (Knopf), which the New York Times Book Review--featuring a large picture of her on its cover, rare for a poet--recently called “a great book.” It offers a selection of new poems, previously published ones and uncollected early work that illuminates the buried progress of her writing life.

One outcome of her blossoming status is that she’s taken on a somewhat Ginsberg-like role as a public poet. She’s been sought after as one of New York’s senior poets after the attacks of Sept. 11. On Sept. 22, writer-broadcaster Kurt Andersen invited her to his nationally distributed “Studio 360” program to discuss the cultural impact of what had happened 11 days before. “What is good will endure with all the treacheries of what is dreadful,” Ponsot assured listeners in the still-reeling city, her crackling voice both tough and refined. She spoke of “the subset of strength that we all have in us.” Giving echoes of Winston Churchill’s resolve a pacifist twist, she added that “violence begets violence begets violence. It will take us perhaps another million years to get past this. But I believe we will.”

Then, she somberly read a poem called “Oceans,” which starts:

Death is breath-taking. We all die

young,

our lives defined by failure of the

heart,

our fire drowned in failure of the

lungs.

Still planning on pouring the best

ripe part

of wines our need or grasp has

sucked or wrung

from fruit & sun, we’re stopped

before we start.

Ponsot is a petite bird of a woman whose gray-white hair was wound into a bun on a recent day as she stood in the kitchen of her small, bright apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and prepared lunch for a visitor. She has a daughter and six sons, one of whom started to renovate her kitchen but hasn’t finished. Drawers function but lack final facings. A blank wall waits for cabinets. “He’s busy and had to stop, but I’m sure he’ll get around to it when he can,” Ponsot says, sounding certain.

It could be a scene in a Ponsot poem. She might compare the kitchen ceiling to the sky, contrast internal light with sunlight, refer to Dante’s “Paradiso,” tie it to an illuminated manuscript in a museum (maybe about Dante’s war-plagued era), summon a phrase or two from Latin and end with a bit of dialogue between her and her son or--since she tends to see men over women’s shoulders--her son’s wife.

All this would occur in the 14 lines of a sonnet or another of the many traditional forms she’s mastered (“Oceans” is a sonnet), plus two utterly untraditional lines just because she felt like it.

When this imitation Ponsot is suggested to her, she laughs, something her witty poems make others do quite often. She says the make-believe poem reflects the focus she puts on the importance of “a governing intention to live a perfect life in an imperfect world.”

Even when she describes a New York wildlife sanctuary or a small rooftop garden (she’s the enthusiastic keeper of one) her work poses the contrast between an ethical tenderness and the brutal ways human beings betray their “tremendous interconnectedness” with each other and nature.

Invited the other day to speak to honor graduates at Queens College, where she taught for many years, she read “Jamaica Wildlife Center, Queens, New York,” about a beautiful but endangered corner of the borough where she was born.

Describing the “sea air off the flats and inlets of Jamaica Bay,” she never makes an explicit case 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 Comedy” thrilled 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 pleasure 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 intolerable 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 universal infinities. “It’s an out-of-your-own-body, out-of-your-own-mind, out-of-your-own-sky vision. 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 experience. “It is the great sense of the great value of everything,” she says.

In 1941, at 19, she got a master’s in 17th century 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 suffered 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 children 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 recently, says he’s not surprised at her growing impact, 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 attributes. 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.”

Marie Ponsot will read Saturday evening at 7:30 at Beyond Baroque in Venice. For information, call (310) 822-3006.