The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

Marie Ponsot

Marie Ponsot A new book of poems by Marie Ponsot is an event: Its readers can expect that each poem in it will be its own brilliant world of language—a language that encompasses what makes us human—made accordingly to every possible measure of perfection . Ponsot has always written at the top of her talent, which is at the top of the art. From the outset, she has imagined the making of a poem in its fullest sense. A poem for Ponsot is an object of sight and of sound, of thoughts and of feelings, a created field of interacting language and themes, composed of various voices and tones of voice. Ponsot requires that we pay the closest attention to every level of language in a poem: syllables , words, lines, sentences, spacing on the page, punctuation , meter, rhyme, syntax. The payoffs—depths of meaning that endlessly surprise, instruct, and delight—are stunning. Easy is Ponsot’s sixth book of poems. Born in New York City in 1921, Ponsot graduated from St. Joseph’s College for Women in Brooklyn and Columbia University, where she received a master of arts degree in seventeenth-century literature. After World War II, she lived for three years in Paris, where she married the French painter Claude Ponsot. Returning to New York, she worked as a translator from the French (including thirty-seven children’s books and The Fables of La Fontaine), and freelance writer of radio and television scripts, while raising seven children on her own. She taught until she was seventy-two at Queens College , where she is now professor emerita of English. Ponsot’s first book, True Minds, was published in 1957 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in the City Lights Pocket Poets Series, which, a year earlier, had published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. Her second book, Admit Impediment, was published more than two decades later in 1981 by Knopf. Much was made in the poetry 115 world at the time about the fact that Ponsot hadn’t published a second book until she was almost sixty, but Ponsot had never stopped writing poems. During the late fifties and through the sixties and seventies, personal circumstances demanded that she take herself out of a post–World War II poetry business established by her peers, in which the norm for visibility and success was not only full-time self-promotion, but also the publication of a book of poems every two or three years. Admit Impediment was followed seven years later in 1988 by The Green Book, and, then, ten years after that, by The Bird Catcher—which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—in 1998. Springing: New and Selected Poems was published in 2002 to great acclaim, when Ponsot was eighty-one. By the second poem in Easy, “If I Live, Stones Hear,” Ponsot has brought us to her new book’s vision: “Between silence and sound / we are balancing darkness, / making light of it . . .” she writes, releasing through her language (within three lines!) several meanings. “We,” of course, includes every one of us, living as we do between being silent and speaking, between realities both good and bad. But, of course, “we” also includes the poet, who, now in her eighties, has spent well over fifty years “making light” of her and our darkness (whatever its source) by making poems. The theme is picked up forcefully again in “This Bridge, Like Poetry, is Vertigo.” William Blake is quoted in an epigram: “In a time of death bring forth number, weight & measure.” A cloud is described, driven by wind, “between earth and space. Cloud / shields earth from sun-scorch. Cloud / bursts to cure earth’s thirst.” The cloud, “airy, wet, photogenic,” is “a bridge or go-between,” as is poetry, which “does as it is done by.” Or, as Ponsot writes in “Skeptic,” changing her metaphor from a cloud to the sea: Language thinks us. Myth or mouth we migrants are its mystery. It’s our tension floats these halcyons we want to say are safe riding the wave-swell, on the surface of the same sea. 116 Within the “tension that floats these halcyons,” is, Ponsot tells us in “Language Acquisition,” “a moving speaker, an ‘I’ the air whirls.” In “Alongside the Pond,” this moving speaker, at “the edge of vision,” feels “just short of sight / pond air” that “shimmers pearly / unbroken ungated.” “Bright / mist engages me...