Marie Ponsot
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Marie Ponsot is a distinguished American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator.
Marie Birmingham was born in 1921 in New York City, the daughter of a wine importer and schoolteacher. She was reared in New York City with her brother. As a child, she wrote and published poems (the "Brooklyn Eagle"). After graduating from St. Joseph's College for Women in Brooklyn, Ponsot earned her master's degree in seventeenth-centry literature from Columbia University. After WW II, Ponsot journeyed to Paris, where she met and married Claude Ponsot, a painter and student of Fernand Leger. Ms. Ponsot lived in Paris for three years. She also had a daughter. Later, after returning to the States there would be six sons. Eventually, the marriage would end.
Upon returning from France, Ponsot worked as a freelance writer of radio and television scripts. She also translated children's books, along with 37 books from the French, including The Fables of La Fontaine. She co-authored with Rosemary Deen two celebrated books about the fundamentals of writing, "Beat Not the Poor Desk" and "Common Sense." There would also be her collections of poetry (below).
Ponsot later taught in graduate programs at the Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y, and at Beijing United, New York, and Columbia Universities, and she served as an English professor at Queens College in New York, from which she retired in 1991.
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, and the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association.
Ms. Ponsot lives in New York City.
[edit] Collections of Poetry
Springing (2002)
The Bird Catcher (1998) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
The Green Dark (1988)
Admit Impediment (1981)
True Minds (1957)
[edit] Quotation
"No two people have language in mind in quite the same way.... With our language to think with and through, with language to bind and loosen memory, we have access to that boundless...world where we are whole because we are on our own and therefore, incomparable." (from her acceptance speech for the 2005 Robert Frost medal, quoted by Patricia L. Duffy, http://www.bluecatsandchartreusekittens.com/Folio-Personal-Coding-Duffy.pdf., viewed 2006.12.12)
[edit] External Link
http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/99 (brief biography and photograph)
http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/ponsot/poetsonpoetry.html (brief interview and photograph)
http://www.pifmagazine.com/vol28/b_Ponsot.shtml (book review with biographical information)
