A
Marie Ponsot poem is a little like a jeweled bracelet, carefully carved, with
small, firm stones embedded in it. Her subjects are domestic life, friendship,
marriage and sometimes swimming...
Her
poems "are meant to be beautiful," Ms. Ponsot said last week in her small
apartment in Manhattan. "That's a very unfashionable thing to say. So
unfashionable. Transgressive."
MO: Does writing poetry get any easier over the years?
MP: No, it’s still the same excitement to get something down and take it as far
as you can. And then the real pleasure comes after that, in the work of
rewriting. But what I notice about age is that, as you go along, you find more
and more of the world you observe lends itself to that stasis. Actually, for me,
and I think for everybody, though it’s my secret—they just don’t all know it
yet—the subject does not matter. It’s absolutely not what the poem is. It’s what
the poet makes of it that makes it a poem—what the poet’s language does with it.
