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The Bird Catcher
Poetry by Marie Ponsot
Reviewed by Benjamin Ivry
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First, a word about the career trajectory of this American poet unlike any other, whose achievement Richard Howard properly terms "miraculous." Born in 1922 in Jamaica, Queens, Marie Ponsot's first book of poems was True Minds (1957), published in the legendary City Lights poetry series, which also included titles like Allen Ginsberg's
Howl and Frank O'Hara's
Lunch Poems. For all that, Ponsot was never a "beat" poet, nor indeed did she belong to any school. Marie Ponsot's father worked importing champagne and caviar to the rich of New York, and her gimlet-eyed observation of human foibles is a little like that of a totally masterful headwaiter at the best restaurant in the world, observing the way people eat and behave with their companions. She is often wrongly compared to Amy Clampitt, perhaps because both were old ladies "discovered" late, and published by the same house, Knopf. In fact, in terms of street smarts and life experience, Clampitt is an ancient sorority sister compared to Ponsot. Her real literary allies, and among the writers who fascinate her most, are thorny individualists like Muriel Rukeyser, Hilda Dolittle (H.D.), Bryher, and Djuna Barnes. Tough, combattive, sometimes unpopular women, some of them had independent means; by contrast, Marie Ponsot has struggled most of her life to feed her family. Even today, better off, she recalls vividly what it meant to go to sleep hungry, drinking hot water for lack of food, or to pass a fragrant pizza store in the 1940s without the necessary fifteen cents to buy a slice. |
 The Bird Catcher Poetry by Marie Ponsot Hardcover - $ 15.40 Published February 1998 Knopf |
So it might have gone, except that as she was reaching sixty, a poet friend, Marilyn Hacker, urged her repeatedly to assemble another collection: the result was Admit Impediment (1982, Knopf), appearing after a twenty-five year silence and considerably stronger in every way than her first book. Dedicated to the women in the Ponsot family, the book begins with a devastating poem, "To a Divorce," which unlike much of today's confessional poetry, retains its autobiographical force while achieving the purity of line of great poetry:
The state we made of loveSome of the poems are brilliantly epigrammatic, like the two-stanza "About My Birthday":
that you fled out of,
empty-handed,
I have enlarged
into a new mainland geography
where I move as if unburdened where
my burdens bear me
You said once I had
taught you human speech.
I am glad
I never taught you to dance.
I'd like to assume.Whereas many of the poems in True Minds are influenced by Shakespeare (a nice influence if you have to choose one), the new collection reflected another perennial favorite of this writer, John Donne. Indeed, if you must categorize Marie Ponsot, you might call her a metaphysical poet, whose work improves after being reread four or five times. As a careful reader of James Joyce, she offers discreet typographical innovations (she has a mean way with an ampersand) word coinages, and a certain gift for puns. She has also studied with profit the thorny Anglo-Saxon and medieval poets who are her true love – whether reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for the umpteenth time, or essaying a translation of the Lais of Marie de France (a project abandoned when she lost the manuscript in a lower Manhattan kosher dairy restaurant). Homer and Petrarch are among her other favorites.
from my April birthday,
I quickened the womb
on the 4th of July.
If you suffered as I
a sternly fought tendency
to endless dependency
you'd know why.
Among contemporary writers, Marie Ponsot stands on her own, but she might be most fruitfully compared to some Irish poets like Eileen Ni Cullainin, Nualla ni Dombhnaill, or Seamus Heaney, who are strongly connected with the earth and were made erudite by a lifelong attachment to intense reading. She greatly admires a group of American women poets, themselves often underrated, like Josephine Jacobsen, Jane Cooper, Jean Valentine, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Kizer. She likes men writers too: Richard Howard and Alfred Corn, to name only two, but the real inspiration in The Birdcatcher seems to come from obstreperous overachieving women like the 19th century American activist Margaret Fuller, a dedicatee of a poem, who paid the price for their courage and daring. A tiny tower of feistiness, Marie Ponsot reacts strongly to other people's courage in the face of adversity. She dislikes much in the current literary scene, but keeps a civil tongue in her head. She divulges one method for getting through faculty parties with some impossible colleagues:
You just keep thanking everyone. Thank them for things they didn't even know they did, and they will be disarmed by your gratitude!"To a friend who suffered a career disappointment, she advised, "Take a hot bath and read Montaigne!" Clearly Marie Ponsot is a woman and writer with rare skills at getting through life, despite obstacles – all readers can learn much from her example. And teachers too: she wrote two manuals explaining just how she managed to find English Composition classes such fun: Beat Not the Poor Desk, and The Common Sense, both written in collaboration with friend and fellow Queens College teacher, Rosemary Deen, and published by Boynton/Cook-Heinemann. Both books have become modern classics in the teaching field. Her collaboration with Rosemary Deen points to another facet of this remarkable writer and teacher – her gift for appreciating quality in writers most people have never heard of. Rosemary Deen's fine and totally overlooked book of essays, Naming the Light: a Week of Years, was published last year by the University of Illinois Press.
After Admit Impediment, a grandiose 144 pages, her next book, The Green Dark (1988), also from Knopf, was shorter by a third, as was her new volume, The Bird Catcher. In the latter, she recalls problems in dealing with family – her father, children, ex-husband – as well as the liberating power of old age with its independence from chores like child-rearing or full-time wage-earning. Although she is certainly not "retired" – she still teaches at NYU and the 92nd street Y – Ms. Ponsot clearly relishes being old, as evidenced by the amusing poem, "Pourriture noble," with its witty final quatrain:
Age is notAnd indeed, despite some recent health fillips, Marie Ponsot is clearly soldiering on with this latest collection, writing poetry as strong as ever in her own feisty and indomitable style. The success of this new book, its nomination for a National Book Critics Circle Award, has meant that her longtime editor, the venerable Harry Ford at Knopf, has asked her to assemble a Selected Poems, for the greater pleasure of her growing group of fans. A recent sold-out reading at the 92nd Street Y suggested that Richard Howard was right when he exclaimed that all Marie Ponsot has to do is live long enough, and she will finally achieve the recognition she deserves.
all dry rot.
It's never too late.
Sweet is your real estate.
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Benjamin Ivry is author of the poetry collection, Paradise for the Portuguese Queen (Orchises Press), a new short study of Rimbaud (Absolute Press/ Stewart Tabori and Chang), and biographies of Poulenc (Phaidon Press) and Ravel (Welcome Rain, forthcoming). He is currently preparing a second poetry collection, Six Pillows by Durer.