Ponsot, Marie

Marie Ponsot, née Marie Birmingham, (born April 6, 1921, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died July 5, 2019, New York, New York), American poet, essayist, literary critic, teacher, and translator who has been described as a love poet, a metaphysician, and a formalist. Although she periodically published individual poems, her collections were few, and she released only one—True Minds (1957)—before 1981.

Her first published poem appeared in the Brooklyn Eagle (a then popular afternoon newspaper) when she was still a child. She graduated with a B.A. from St. Joseph’s College for Women, in Brooklyn, and earned a master’s degree from Columbia University. She was 35 and the mother of five when her first poetry collection was published, and that same year she released a translation of Fables and Tales of La Fontaine (1957). Over the decades, she held a variety of jobs and raised seven children, by herself after her divorce in 1970. She was a freelance writer of radio and television scripts, and in addition to La Fontaine she translated more than 35 children’s books from French to English. Ponsot taught poetry at Columbia University, New York University, Beijing United University, and the Poetry Center of New York’s 92nd Street Y and taught English at Queens College, New York City.

Her second collection of poetry, Admit Impediment, was published in 1981. With Rosemary Deen she coauthored two books on writing—Beat Not the Poor Desk: Writing: What to Teach, How to Teach It, and Why (1982) and The Common Sense: What to Write, How to Write It, and Why (1985). These were followed by more volumes of poetry: The Green Dark (1988), The Bird Catcher (1998; National Book Critics Circle Award), Springing: New and Selected Poems (2002), and Collected Poems (2016).

Ponsot took as her subject such topics as domestic life, friendship, marriage, and sometimes swimming. Her style is marked by verbal precision and syntactical complexity, and she made much use of difficult poetic forms such as villanelles, sestinas, and tritinas. Ponsot was the recipient of various honours, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2013).