Best Selling Books by Marie Ponsot

Marie Ponsot’s Collected Poems is the stunning lifework of the prizewinning poet, gathered in one volume: the world she has made of life’s fire for sixty years. The present celebratory volume covers nearly all of her published work, from True Minds (1956), which was number five in the famous City Lights Pocket Poets series, through the 2009 Easy, her most recent collection; it also includes some new work, written in the years since. Here is the lyrical joy, the full range of Ponsot’s gift for constructing the pleasures and pains of a riddle that the music and wit of her language solve just in the nick of time, in the “hand-span skill” that is the poem. In examining the powerful life of women, her poetry is as practical as it is profound. “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral,” she advises us. “Bury the loss.” (And adds: “Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.”) Notable in this collection is the astonishing accomplishment of Ponsot’s sonnets: the traditional form in varieties we’ve never seen in one book before. Open these pages anywhere to experience “language as the primitive dialect of our human race,” as she has described it—to gradually enter a state that is “what poetry hopes of us and for us: enraptured attention.”

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 Throughout the selections from her four earlier books and a trove of previously unpublished work covering the years 1946 to 1971, she offers us a “lost haven in a springing world.”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.

In 1998, Marie Ponsot was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, confirming the praise that has been bestowed on her by critics and peers--among them Eavan Boland and Carolyn Kizer (who are quoted on the back of the book jacket) and Amy Clampitt, who had this to say of Ponsot''s last book: "She is marvelously attuned to the visual and to the audible. She is no less precisely a geographer of the interior life, above all the experience of being a woman."

Leave it to the graceful Marie Ponsot, now in her late eighties, to view her life in poetry as easeful. As she tells us, pondering what stones can hear, “Between silence and sound / we are balancing darkness, / making light of it.” In this celebratory collection, Ponsot makes light, in both senses, of all she touches, and her pleasure in offering these late poems is infectious. After more than a half century at her craft, she describes her poetic preferences unpretentiously thus: “no fruity phrases, just unspun / words trued right toward a nice / idea, for chaser. True’s a risk. / Take it I say. Do true for fun.” Ponsot is accepting of what has come, whether it’s a joyous memory of her second-grade teacher in a New York public school or the feeling of being “Orphaned Old,” less lucky in life since her parents died. She holds herself to the highest standard: to see clearly, to think, to deal openhandedly and openheartedly with the world, to “Go to a wedding / as to a funeral: / bury the loss” and also to “Go to a funeral / as to a wedding: / marry the loss.” She confides that she meets works of great art “expectant and thirsty.” Indeed, Ponsot’s thirst for life and its best expression, for the sprightly phrase and the deeper understanding running beneath, makes this book a transformative experience. The wisdom and music ofEasy,like all of Ponsot’s poetry, will remain with her readers for decades to come.

This book offers a revolutionary inductive approach to teaching composition, in particular the essay.

The sixth volume of Still Against War compiles more poetry in honor of Marie Ponsot. Contributing poets include Helen Barnard, Janine Beichman, Margo Berdeshevsky, Patricia Brody, Stephanie Bulger, Michelle Y. Burke, Laura A. Ciraolo, Howard Clyman, Tom Cocotos, Elizabeth J. Coleman, Melody Compo, David Corcoran, Rosemary Deen, Katherine Korth Dehais, Alan Felsenthal, Jean Gallagher, Beatrix Gates, Rochelle Goldstein, David Groff, Scott Hightower, Rose Horowitz, Hettie Jones, Katrina Kostro, Laurence Loeb, Marcia Loughran, Meg McGuire Jane McKinley, Michael Morical, Constance Norgren, Sarah Paley, Michael Petshaft, Sapphire, Timothy Small, Susan Soriano, Karen Steinmetz, Jamie Stern, Katherine Barrett Swett, L. Sze, Carolyn Tacey, Jackson Taylor, Marjorie Tesser, LB Thompson, Clyde Tressler, Jonathan Wells, and Catherine Woodard.

The Common Sense is elemental and beautifully succinct. It focuses on the expository essay, which, despite its association with abominable teaching techniques and vapid results, is at its best the one form that reveals to students and teachers the power of writing. "It is not second-rate writing," Deen and Ponsot state, "nor is teaching it second-rate work." This is a commonsensical text that puts its principles directly at the service of upper secondary and college students of all abilities. It perceives the composing class as an active community of writers, stresses the uses of listening and reading aloud, and lays out a core of work that can''t be done wrong.

This broadside was letterpress-printed in an edition of 150 copies at the Center for Book Arts, New York City, in honor of the poet''s reading on June 13, 2002. From Springing (2002), it was printed by permission of Alfred A. Knopf. --Center for Book Arts.

Correspondence, writings (poems, stories, essays, etc.), diaries, artwork, small-press books, and photographs. Includes manuscripts by Helen Adam, James Alexander, Robin Blaser, Paul Blackburn, Richard Buckle, Victor Coleman, Robert Creeley, Wesley Day, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, Harold Dull, Lewis Ellingham, Carol Emschwiller, Dora FitzGerald, David Franks, Marilyn Hacker, William Harris, Noah Joseph Howard, Bob Kaufman, Joanne Kyger, William McNeill, Marie Ponsot, Gilbert Sorrentino, George Stanley, Colin Stuart, Raymon(d) Taylor, Diane Wakoski, Anne Waldman, and Lewis Warsh. Also includes writings (including an original poem) by Jack Spicer and sample issues of early poetry zines containing his works. Correspondents include Harold Dull, Lewis Ellingham, Tom Field, Dora FitzGerald, Nemi Frost, Marilyn Hacker, Steve Jonas, Bob Kaufman, Joanne Kyger, Denise Levertov, William McNeill, Joel Oppenheimer, Stan Persky, Gary Snyder, Russell Snyder, George Stanley, and Irene Taverner. FitzGerald''s diaries present day-by-day accounts of several years of life in San Francisco''s North Beach during the 1950s and 1960s.