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Springing: New and Selected Poems
From the award-winning author of The Bird Catcher , this life-spanning volume offers the delight of both discovery and re-discovery, as Ponsot tends the unruly garden of her mind with her customary care and passion. The book opens with a group of new poems, including “What Would You Like to Be When You Grow Up?”—a question that has kept Ponsot’s work vital for more than five decades. Throughout the selections from her four earlier books and a trove of previously unpublished work covering the years 1946 to 1971, she offers us a “lost haven in a springing world.� Sometimes sharp in her self-perception, but always listing toward pleasure and elegance, unafraid of grief and the passage of time, Ponsot continually refreshes her language and the spirited self from which it emerges.
- GenresPoetry
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
5 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
About the author
Marie Ponsot
40books15followersMarie 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 21, 2023
�Language thinks us. Myth or mouth
we migrants are its mystery.�
Marie Ponsot was �one of the major poets of her generation,� wrote fellow poet , and though she didn’t write many volumes of work, Ponsot’s was highly decorated in awards and have left quite a lasting impression on me. Springing: New and Selected Poems is a perfect window into her wondrous words (only missing the poems from her last collection, from 2009). Ponsot is a master at form, often writing luminous sestinas that pull the reader into surprising territory as the poem progresses. 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. This is a great collection that I have practically dogeared half the pages, returning again and again to Ponsot’s words which always seem to hit best in the springtime weather such as I am sitting right now.
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.
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. I always found it fascinating that she was friends and mentor to sci-fi writer . She published five volumes of poetry through her life, as well as this selected work and, later, a collected poems, and received many awards such as a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Poetry Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize among others. I enjoy that 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. She can even write very short poems with grace:
Bliss and Grief
No one
Is here
Right now
Ponsot wrote often about the use of form in poetry and how it can be a tool to guide you, like a blank map for you to fill in as you go along. � What you’re doing is trying to discover,� she writes, �[forms] are not restrictive. They pull things out of you. They help you remember.� I love the notion that poetry is an act of remembering, that the process of creation is actually on of drawing the poem out of you, where it has always been, and trying to contain the fragile thing in words that will allow it to be held and examined for years to come.
Roundstone Cove
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.
Marie Ponsot is a lovely poet that has left us with stunning words to remember her by. �There’s a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief,� Ponsot wrote about poetry, �that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us.� There is a dreamlike quality to her writing that prove this true, and her poems often carry the scent of the breeze, the rush of the seas, and the warmth of sun in her words. Springing is a lovely book, one worth having in any collection of poetry.
4/5
A Visit
Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch
The sly very old woman wile away from her pious
And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.
She pours big drinks. We think of what
Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in
And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young,
Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower,
Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite,
Collapsed to this keen dame moving among
Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright
Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here
My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger
Shows how hot the oven is.
(Also she is alive with hate.
Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wish
We might, illiberal, uncompassionate,
Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.)
Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still
Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles.
We manage to mean well. We endure, and more.
We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure.
We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin
To any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us,
Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure.
we migrants are its mystery.�
Marie Ponsot was �one of the major poets of her generation,� wrote fellow poet , and though she didn’t write many volumes of work, Ponsot’s was highly decorated in awards and have left quite a lasting impression on me. Springing: New and Selected Poems is a perfect window into her wondrous words (only missing the poems from her last collection, from 2009). Ponsot is a master at form, often writing luminous sestinas that pull the reader into surprising territory as the poem progresses. 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. This is a great collection that I have practically dogeared half the pages, returning again and again to Ponsot’s words which always seem to hit best in the springtime weather such as I am sitting right now.
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.
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. I always found it fascinating that she was friends and mentor to sci-fi writer . She published five volumes of poetry through her life, as well as this selected work and, later, a collected poems, and received many awards such as a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert Frost Poetry Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize among others. I enjoy that 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. She can even write very short poems with grace:
Bliss and Grief
No one
Is here
Right now
Ponsot wrote often about the use of form in poetry and how it can be a tool to guide you, like a blank map for you to fill in as you go along. � What you’re doing is trying to discover,� she writes, �[forms] are not restrictive. They pull things out of you. They help you remember.� I love the notion that poetry is an act of remembering, that the process of creation is actually on of drawing the poem out of you, where it has always been, and trying to contain the fragile thing in words that will allow it to be held and examined for years to come.
Roundstone Cove
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.
Marie Ponsot is a lovely poet that has left us with stunning words to remember her by. �There’s a primitive need for language that works as an instrument of discovery and relief,� Ponsot wrote about poetry, �that can make rich the cold places of our inner worlds with the memorable tunes and dreams poems hold for us.� There is a dreamlike quality to her writing that prove this true, and her poems often carry the scent of the breeze, the rush of the seas, and the warmth of sun in her words. Springing is a lovely book, one worth having in any collection of poetry.
4/5
A Visit
Come for duty’s sake (as girls do) we watch
The sly very old woman wile away from her pious
And stagger-blind friend, their daily split of gin.
She pours big drinks. We think of what
Has crumpled, folded, slumped her flesh in
And muddied her once tumbling blood that, young,
Sped her, threaded with brave power: a Tower,
Now Babel, then of ivory, of the Shulamite,
Collapsed to this keen dame moving among
Herself. She hums, she plays with used bright
Ghosts, makes real dolls, and drinking sings Come here
My child, and feeling it, dear. A crooking finger
Shows how hot the oven is.
(Also she is alive with hate.
Also she is afraid of hell. Also, we wish
We might, illiberal, uncompassionate,
Run from her smell, her teeth in the dish.)
Even dying, her life riots in her. We stand stock still
Though aswarm with itches under her disreputable smiles.
We manage to mean well. We endure, and more.
We learn time’s pleasure, catch our future and its cure.
We’re dear blood daughters to this every hag, and near kin
To any after this of those our mirrors tell us foolishly envy us,
Presuming us, who are young, to be beautiful, kind, and sure.
August 31, 2014
Springing: New and Selected Poems was published when Ponsot was 80. The longevity of this wiry, wily Queens native is one attribute that sets her apart from the bulk of her fellow poets. (I, for one, am used to thinking of poets as an alcohol-swilling, pill-popping, self-destructive, maladaptive tribe who revel in their unhealthy lifestyles and have a tendency to die young.) Another distinguishing trait is Ponsot's polyphiloprogenitiveness: after enduring a bitter divorce from her French artist husband Claude, this unflappable poet retreated to the United States to raise their brood of seven children on her own.
Ponsot's warm maternal personality shines in this generous selection of her work, brimming with both celebration and cerebration. Through these poems, we become acquainted with a down-to-earth woman who is unembarrassed by her lack of wealth, a neighborly woman who knows the local Italian grocer and Hispanic "bodega lady" by name, a motherly woman who has empathy to spare for the teenage gang members who loiter in front of the bodega:
"I have nothing to fear from them
Being I guess afraid only of the loss of love
And of hurting children. And so here
I have nothing to fear." (from "Pleasant Avenue")
These poems allow us to spend time with a wide-eyed, open-hearted soul who enjoys reading, birdwatching, gardening, and travel. Ponsot's "Ville Indigene: Afrique du Nord" is a lovely travel poem, one of those rare travel poems that succeeds in not being condescending toward the natives it describes.
Ponsot's first published collection was the optimistically titled True Minds (City Lights, 1956). These early poems, like many a writer's apprentice work, are highly ornate, almost turgid expressions of the ecstasy of youthful passion. A successful poem from this period is the very pretty "Ritournelle, for Paris 1948." Ponsot's second collection, the wryly named Admit Impediment, was not published until 1981. These more mature poems are Ponsot's best: they chronicle the poet's growth in wisdom as she witnesses the dissolution of her marriage (see the tour-de-force poem "For a Divorce": if your interest in divorce-themed poetry was whetted by Sharon Olds's "Stag's Leap," Ponsot's verse blows everything else out of the water), the death of her mother, and the departure of her grown children from the nest. These poems espouse a sassy, humor-laced brand of feminism that is appealing rather than off-putting ("Among Women" and "Live Model" exemplify this).
I was not as deeply enamored of Ponsot's post-1981 poems, which struck me as rather less formally taut than her earlier work. When she is showing off her formalist chops, though, Ponsot is a force to be reckoned with. If you admire, say, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, the contemporary female formalist poet that Ponsot most resembles, reading just a few of Ponsot's brilliant villanelles ("Northampton Style") and masterful sonnets ("Winter") will ensure Ponsot joins (or supplants) her in your regard.
Ponsot's warm maternal personality shines in this generous selection of her work, brimming with both celebration and cerebration. Through these poems, we become acquainted with a down-to-earth woman who is unembarrassed by her lack of wealth, a neighborly woman who knows the local Italian grocer and Hispanic "bodega lady" by name, a motherly woman who has empathy to spare for the teenage gang members who loiter in front of the bodega:
"I have nothing to fear from them
Being I guess afraid only of the loss of love
And of hurting children. And so here
I have nothing to fear." (from "Pleasant Avenue")
These poems allow us to spend time with a wide-eyed, open-hearted soul who enjoys reading, birdwatching, gardening, and travel. Ponsot's "Ville Indigene: Afrique du Nord" is a lovely travel poem, one of those rare travel poems that succeeds in not being condescending toward the natives it describes.
Ponsot's first published collection was the optimistically titled True Minds (City Lights, 1956). These early poems, like many a writer's apprentice work, are highly ornate, almost turgid expressions of the ecstasy of youthful passion. A successful poem from this period is the very pretty "Ritournelle, for Paris 1948." Ponsot's second collection, the wryly named Admit Impediment, was not published until 1981. These more mature poems are Ponsot's best: they chronicle the poet's growth in wisdom as she witnesses the dissolution of her marriage (see the tour-de-force poem "For a Divorce": if your interest in divorce-themed poetry was whetted by Sharon Olds's "Stag's Leap," Ponsot's verse blows everything else out of the water), the death of her mother, and the departure of her grown children from the nest. These poems espouse a sassy, humor-laced brand of feminism that is appealing rather than off-putting ("Among Women" and "Live Model" exemplify this).
I was not as deeply enamored of Ponsot's post-1981 poems, which struck me as rather less formally taut than her earlier work. When she is showing off her formalist chops, though, Ponsot is a force to be reckoned with. If you admire, say, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, the contemporary female formalist poet that Ponsot most resembles, reading just a few of Ponsot's brilliant villanelles ("Northampton Style") and masterful sonnets ("Winter") will ensure Ponsot joins (or supplants) her in your regard.
October 10, 2017
OUT OF WATER
A new embroidery of flowers, canary color,
dots the grass already dotty
with aster-white and clover.
I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.�
The children pick some anyway.
In or out of water
children don’t last either.
I watch them as they pick.
Still free of what’s next
and what was yesterday
they pick today.
(2002)
ANNIVERSARY
The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall
all scattered by my shoes, not crying
I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled
opens out in my hands a purse of golden
salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled.
The dancing doll split in an anguish and all
the cords of its elegant limbs unstrung; I
stumble whistling; the bones of my skull
marvelously start to sing, the whole shell
of myself invents without peril and contains a court
aubade.
I hid the dovesmall doll but something found it. Fright
ened
I gave the fire what was left. Surrounding, it mulled
dulcet over the melting jeweled two blue eyes.
That night our hearth was desolate, but then its stones
sprung flowered and the soaring rafters arched.
Now all the house laughs, the sun shouts out clearly:
dawn!
the sea owes us all its treasures; under the soft the riotous
explosion of our waking kiss or gift, a stone plucked or
shorn
free of gravity falls upward for us, slow, and lies there,
quietly.
(1951)
*
A new embroidery of flowers, canary color,
dots the grass already dotty
with aster-white and clover.
I warn, “They won’t last, out of water.�
The children pick some anyway.
In or out of water
children don’t last either.
I watch them as they pick.
Still free of what’s next
and what was yesterday
they pick today.
(2002)
ANNIVERSARY
The big doll being broken and the sawdust fall
all scattered by my shoes, not crying
I sit in my dark to discover o failure annulled
opens out in my hands a purse of golden
salvaged sovereigns, from floors of seas culled.
The dancing doll split in an anguish and all
the cords of its elegant limbs unstrung; I
stumble whistling; the bones of my skull
marvelously start to sing, the whole shell
of myself invents without peril and contains a court
aubade.
I hid the dovesmall doll but something found it. Fright
ened
I gave the fire what was left. Surrounding, it mulled
dulcet over the melting jeweled two blue eyes.
That night our hearth was desolate, but then its stones
sprung flowered and the soaring rafters arched.
Now all the house laughs, the sun shouts out clearly:
dawn!
the sea owes us all its treasures; under the soft the riotous
explosion of our waking kiss or gift, a stone plucked or
shorn
free of gravity falls upward for us, slow, and lies there,
quietly.
(1951)
*
May 15, 2007
she writes a sestina like no other. the later poems are quite interesting as well. this is genius.
December 25, 2011
Ponsot is a master of the sestina.
August 31, 2020
Some lovely poems here! There were at least a dozen of them that I transcribed in the hopes of introducing them to my students. Such music! Notice her word association. Her second book of poems came out 25 years after her first (1956). I had the pleasure of seeing this author at the AWP conference in 2009.
October 5, 2009
I just have to add that I love Ponsot's work. She is so intelligent, and her work is so beautiful. Poets and non-poets can enjoy her poetry and learn from it.
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February 22, 2013811.54 P799s 2002
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