One Is One
Marie Ponsot 1998

Introduction
Author Biography
Poem Text
Poem Summary
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
Further Reading

Introduction

The poem "One Is One" was published in Marie Ponsot's fifth collection of poetry in her more than fifty-year-long career of writing. Long spans of time seem to pass between her publications, but this does not dampen the public's interest in her work. Ponsot's fan base has been growing. A possible reason is that Ponsot's poems are very accessible, and "One Is One" is a prime example. Her themes are universal, and her language is simple and clear. As she grapples with her emotions in an attempt to control them, she reveals her vulnerability, something to which most readers can relate. The poem's uncluttered lines etch a path, leading to a destination that is not revealed until the very last phrases in the final stanza. The poem takes readers on a quiet journey that they do not even realize they are on until the poet forces them to look at themselves. "One Is One" is collected in the book The Bird Catcher (1998), which won one of the most prestigious poetry awards in the United States, the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Author Biography

Marie Ponsot was born in Queens, a borough of New York City, in 1921. She has said that she never thought she would be a teacher because there were so many of them already in her family. She also never thought she would be a mother. But Ponsot has spent most of her life teaching, and she is the mother of seven children. One thing that has been consistent in her life, however, is her love of poetry. When she was a child, her mother would scoot her outside to play with the other children. Ponsot has confessed that although she obeyed her mother, her real desire was to return, as soon as possible, to the many books of poetry that lay about the family home. Her love of poetry was encouraged by her grandmother, who kept scrapbooks filled with poems and often recited them for every special occasion, including the setting of the sun each day.

Ponsot published her first book of poems, True Minds, in 1956. She was already the mother of five. Thirteen years later, her husband, the French painter Claude Ponsot, abandoned the poet and her children. Although Ponsot continued to write poetry, her main focus during that time was on raising her children, which also meant providing the money to buy their food. She worked as a translator for many years, having learned to speak and read French from her years of living in that country as a newlywed. Then, despite the fact that she thought she would never want to teach, Ponsot landed a job teaching composition at Queens College. These were by no means poetry classes that she taught. They were more like remedial writing classes, but she loved them. It would not be until many years later that she would teach poetry at Columbia University, where she maintains her adjunct professor status in the early twenty-first century.

After Ponsot turned sixty, a friend urged her to collect her poems and find a publisher. The result was the book Admit Impediment (1981). A few years later, in 1988, she published another collection, The Green Dark. The Bird Catcher (1998), in which the poem "One Is One" was published, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. In 2002, she published the collection Springing, which contains poems that represent all Ponsot's years of writing. Ponsot has taught writing at the Beijing United University in China, at the Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y in New York, and at New York University. She has won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize as well as the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association. In 2005, she was awarded the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Poem Text

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions.]

Poem Summary

Stanza 1

In the first line of Ponsot's poem "One Is One," the speaker identifies her subject. The first word in the poem is "heart." She refers to her heart throughout the poem in two different ways: the physical heart that lives in her chest, the organ that is so vital in keeping her alive, and the symbolic heart that represents her emotions.

In the first line, the heart that she speaks to is clearly related more to her emotions, because she is, in essence, cursing it. "You bully, you punk," she yells at it. This is an emotional response, possibly stemming from the speaker's own frustrations between her emotions and her rational thoughts. The speaker feels "wrecked" and "shocked / stiff." She is shocked, but not as she might have been in any other dispute. This one has shocked her stiff. This image of a stiff body conjures up someone close to death, possibly holding her breath, her body locked as if lifeless.

In the second line, the speaker questions the heart: "You?" Of course, this could also be directed at more than just her heart. It is difficult to determine that. She could be referring to the person or thing that has caused her emotions to flare. Either way, the speaker is obviously angry at this "you." "You still try to rule the world." Her emotions sound as if they are out of control, and it is she—the rational part of her—who wants to be the ruler or, at the least, to share the rule.

At the end of the second line, the last word "though," together with a dash, promises a surprise in the next line, which the speaker is very eager to supply. "I've got you," she declares. She has identified her adversary, and she has it (her heart) "starving, locked / in a cage you will not leave alive." The cage, on a physical level, represents the ribs. The heart, of course, is encaged inside the speaker's body. But the word "starving" implies a more emotional stance. The speaker suggests that she will starve her emotions, not allowing any more circumstances that will arouse feeling.

In the fifth and sixth lines, the image is that of a prisoner who is fighting against his captors. But it is also the image of the heart beating inside a body, as the "you" in the poem pounds on the walls and thrills "its corridors with messages."

Stanza 2

The poet begins the second stanza yelling: "Brute. Spy. I trusted you." In the middle of the third line of the second stanza, she accuses her heart of wanting "to go solo." She is also aware of "threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do." In other words, the speaker knows that even though she has the heart encaged, she is still not really in control. She is vulnerable to her heart. She relies on it. On a physical level, she relies on her heart for life. On a psychological or emotional level, she relies on her emotions to bring meaning and color to her life. This vulnerability can be frightening. "You scare me," the speaker says in line 11.

The last phrase in the second stanza, "a double agent," leaves the reader hanging, as exemplified by the lack of punctuation at the end of the line and the space that is placed between it and the remaining part of the sentence that begins the third stanza. The reader is left to ponder what the speaker means by "double agent."

Stanza 3

The answer to the puzzle that the speaker presents at the end of stanza 2 is quickly supplied in the first line of stanza 3: "since jailers are prisoner's prisoners too." Jailers must all but live in the prisons they run, and they are forced to deal with criminals all through the day and night. The two elements, prisoner and jailer, are brought together as a tightly connected unit. They are at the same time separate and tied together. The speaker continues, in the second line of stanza 3, with the commands: "Think! Reform! Make us one." What is not clear, however, is to whom the speaker is referring. Is she still addressing the heart? Whomever she is talking to (possibly even to herself), the essence of the message is that two seemingly opposing sides must learn to work together.

"Join the rest of us," the speaker says at the end of the second line of stanza 3. Then she concludes the poem on the next line with "make its test of us." This test is to be administered by happiness, or "joy."

Themes

Love

If there is a theme of love in "One Is One," it is not obvious. Readers have to dig for it. Once the digging begins, readers probably will conclude that there is no other emotion that could arouse a person as much as the speaker of this poem is aroused. What other emotion could wreck and shock a person stiff? What other feeling would make the speaker of this poem want to starve her heart and lock it in a cage?

The closest the speaker comes to expressing love is when she uses the word "joy" in the last line of the poem. She challenges her heart at this point to be one with her and to be strong enough to take on the test that joy will bring. It is very likely that the speaker is reflecting, in these last words of the poem, on the trials that love can put one through. In order for two people to be successful in love, they must become one, as the speaker points out in the poem's phrase "make us one." Whether the speaker is referring to two people (lovers) or two functions (emotion and rationality), becoming one requires a surrendering of going "solo."

Emotions

Love may not be explicitly mentioned in this poem, but almost every other kind of emotion is suggested throughout Ponsot's poem. The poem begins with angry emotions, as the speaker berates her heart. Her emotions, as embodied by her heart, have wrecked her, and she is out to get revenge. Her heart, in retaliation, will "pound" the walls of the cage in which the speaker has imprisoned it, expressing its own anger and frustration. "You reel & brawl," the speaker explains, speaking directly to her heart. But she is "deaf" to her heart's "rages." These are all very strong emotions: anger, rage, frustration, despondency. There is also mention of threats being made and fear being experienced in response.

These emotions are wild and unruly, and the poem suggests that they must be controlled. The speaker can no longer stand being ruled by her emotions. It is her emotions that have wrecked her. She must do something to regain her balance, even if it means that she must lock her emotions away and stop listening to them.

There is one option left short of imprisonment. If her emotions can manage to share the rule rather than going "solo," then instead of the negative emotions of fear, anger, and frustration, maybe the emotion of joy will emerge. The speaker shouts to her emotions in the second to the last line in the poem: "Think!" This is, of course, ludicrous, as emotions do not have the capacity for thought. Emotions are the opposite of rationality. But the word "think" implies the concept of control or discipline. Wild emotions may find no peace and may wreak havoc, but disciplined emotions may actually bring happiness and the experience of peace.

Imprisonment

The theme of imprisonment is stood on its head in this poem. There is the image of locking something up in a cage, which would indeed be a form of imprisonment. However, the speaker points out how this fails. She brings up the idea of the "double agent," and then she immediately explains that "jailers are prisoners' prisoners too." In other words, it is not just the captive who is imprisoned but also the one who must guard the captive. Captor and captive, they are a pair, and they depend on each other. They are equally locked away.

Topics for Further Study

• Research the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and write a paper about who they were, how their poetry differed from the more traditional poets of their day, and what their poetry was about. Then memorize one of their poems and recite it for your class.
• The twentieth century was a time of significant change for women in the United States. Choose a poem by a female poet from each twenty-year period (1900–1920, 1920–1940, and so on) for the entire century, so that you end up with five poems. Select your poems carefully to reflect the development of women over the course of the century. Then read each of the poems to the class, without telling your classmates when the poems were written. Let them guess from which of the time periods each poem was taken.
• Research the different styles of contemporary poetry, such as free verse, concrete verse, lyric poetry, or any other type of poetry in which you might be interested. Define each form and provide an example of a poem to illustrate the style. Then present your findings to your class.
• Find the various technical tools that poets use to create their works, such as metaphors, alliteration, caesura, synecdoche, and enjambment. Provide definitions for ten of them and examples of each term and invite your classmates to join you in an exercise, creating examples of your own.

The speaker threatens to lock away her emotions and refuse to pay any attention to them because she has grown weary of the effect they have on her. However, she also realizes that in doing so, she will destroy the element that colors her life. If she ignores her emotions, she might not have to deal with the anguish they bring her, but she also will not enjoy the pleasure they provide. So she becomes a prisoner too. Looked at in another way, she cannot stop her heart from beating and continue to go on living. So in the conclusion to this poem, imprisonment is used only as a threat, since what the speaker really wants is for the unruly emotions to reform. Just as a thief may change his or her ways and be returned to society, if the speaker's emotions reform, they, too, can be set free. Therefore imprisonment would not be necessary.

Unification

The title of the poem expresses the theme of unification. Ponsot could have titled the poem simply "One," but she is making a different kind of statement here. The word one does represent unity, but the poet, in her choice of title, is emphasizing that she is talking about two things becoming one. The phrase "one is one" feels more like a process than a result. In other words, there is the sense in the title of two things moving toward this goal. "Make us one," the speaker demands. It is not completely clear whether she is referring to her emotions or to a wayward lover. It is clear that she is suggesting that the anger and anguish will subside when unification is successfully completed, because that is when "joy may come."

Of course, there is irony here. When the speaker addresses her heart, she is talking about something that is already a part of her. She can no more separate herself from her heart (or her emotions) than she can separate herself from her mind or her soul. She points this out very clearly when she talks about the "prisoner's prisoners." There is this feeling of being dependent and independent simultaneously. So the division is actually artificial. There is no real need for the "reform" that the speaker requests. Unification is already present and unavoidable. Possibly all that is needed in order to have unification, therefore, is the awareness that it already exists. And since it is already there—since the two elements must work together—why not make the most of it? Instead of living together in mistrust and frustration, why not live together in joy?

Control

Another theme that is portrayed with some element of irony is that of control. The speaker first accuses the heart of wanting to "rule the world." This is the ultimate control, is it not? But with the heart in control, the speaker feels completely out of control. In order to regain her control, she must lock her heart away. If she does this, she first believes, she will be in better shape. However, upon thinking about it further, she realizes that even this may not save her. She is fearful of worse things happening than being out of control: "You scare me," she states, "bragging you're a double agent."

The concept of a double agent embodies the irony of control. The speaker seems to be asking, who is really in control? And what is control? Can the rational mind controlling the emotions produce any better results than the emotions controlling the rational mind? Is there a point at which control makes no sense? Or, to look at it in another way, are not the rational mind and the emotions under the control of something beyond them both? For example, are they not both under the influence of life's experiences? This is what the speaker suggests when she states "joy may come, and make its test of us." Joy is coming from somewhere outside her heart and her head. In addition, it will come with its own set of challenges that neither can control.

Style

Personification

In "One Is One," the speaker talks to her heart. The technique that Ponsot uses is called personification. She gives human qualities to an object. In "One Is One," the personified object is the heart, which, in this poem, is also symbolic of the speaker's emotions.

The speaker talks to her heart as if it were an acquaintance, a lover perhaps. She yells at it, curses it, and blames it for trying to defeat her. She even grapples with her heart and threatens to lock it away. If it were not for the first word of the poem (which is "heart"), readers would conclude that the speaker is talking to another person. In other words, the speaker talks to her heart as if it were separate from her, something outside her. She even accuses her heart of trying to leave her, wanting to go "solo." But the speaker is not the only one who talks. The speaker suggests that the heart is capable of using language too. She speaks of her heart's "eloquent / threats," its "bragging," and its "rages" to which the speaker attempts to turn a deaf ear.

In personifying the heart, Ponsot provides a strong image of how the speaker feels. Her heart is so much out of her control that she believes that it is no longer a part of her. Her heart feels to her as if it has a mind and a life of its own. By using personification, Ponsot invites readers inside the speaker, so that they can look out of her eyes, can feel what she is feeling by imagining what it must be like when emotions are so powerful that they seem to exist somewhere outside the person they belong to. Words alone could explain these feelings to a certain extent, but by using personification, the poet provides an image that says it all so much more clearly and more powerfully.

Symbolic Language

Symbolic language makes use of images to portray feelings. The most obvious example in Ponsot's poem is the use of the heart, which symbolizes the speaker's emotions, from love to rage or anger. Although emotions are really reflective of chemical changes throughout the whole body, the heart centralizes them. And unlike the more popular symbolic heart, such as the ones used to suggest Valentine's Day, Ponsot uses the heart to symbolize all the speaker's emotions.

Other symbolic language is presented when the speaker refers to how the heart hates being imprisoned in the speaker's rib cage. This is, of course, absurd. The heart feels quite at home and protected inside the rib cage. But when the speaker's emotions are enraged and her heart pounds in reaction to these strong emotions, it is as if the heart is pounding in an attempt to get out. Likewise, the speaker's reference to the heart's wanting to go solo is also absurd. She mentions this to symbolize the feeling she gets when her emotions take over her rational thoughts. In other words, it is as if the emotions want to be independent of her. It is not an actual truth. At the end of the poem, when she requests that the heart "join the rest of us," she is symbolically asking the heart to come back home. Of course, the heart never really left home and could not exist if it did not join the "rest of us," which is assumed to be the rest of the speaker—her other organs, on one level, and her other functions, on another. By using symbolic language, Ponsot is able to take abstract and intangible elements and create more solid images that make her message easier to understand.

Rhyme and Near Rhyme

Overall, Ponsot's poem does not follow any structured rhyming pattern. However, rhymes and near rhymes do appear in her poem. The poem is not dependent on the rhymes, but when they occur, they tend to tie certain elements together. For example, in the first stanza, the first and the third lines rhyme, as do the second and the fourth lines. This looks like a pattern, but it occurs only in the first stanza. There are no more end-line rhymes in any other part of the poem. In the first stanza, "shocked" and "locked" are paired, as are "though" and "no." Each of these words has something else in common. They are all enhanced by the line that follows them. For example, the word "shocked" in the first line is followed by "stiff" in the second line, which emphasizes the degree of the shock. The word "though" in line 2 provides a sort of turning point that is explained in the line that follows it. So the rhyming of these words may have been purposefully done to emphasize these turning points of the poem.

In the fourth line of the first stanza is the word "cage," which provides a near rhyme with the word "rages" that appears in the second stanza, line 2. The heart, it is said, rages in its cage. Another near rhyme occurs in the second stanza in lines 3 and 5 with the words "eloquent" and "agent." These near rhymes may merely enhance the sound of the poem, without attempting to affect the meaning. After all, the sound of a poem, the way the words flow, is an important element. One more rhyme occurs between stanzas 2 and 3. The word "do" ends the fourth line of stanza 2, while the word "too" ends the first line of stanza 3. Again, this rhyme may merely be present for the sound of it.

At the end of the poem, there are two rhyming phrases, "rest of us" and "test of us." This rhyming pattern, because it comes at the end of the poem, lingers with the reader. It is rather catchy phrasing, almost like something that might be done in a commercial jingle, so the message sticks in the head. This rhyming is probably done for emphasis. It is somewhere in these rhyming phrases and around them that the real message of the poem is hidden.

Historical Context

Metaphysical Poets

When writing about Ponsot and her poetry, reviewers and literary critics tend to label her work as being closely related to that of the metaphysical poets, whom Ponsot has admitted are a great influence on her writing. Metaphysical poetry was once described by the poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) as bringing together reason and passion. Writers who are often classified as the metaphysical poets wrote in the seventeenth century and include John Donne (1572–1631), Andrew Marvell (1621–1628), Henry Vaughn (1621–1695), and George Herbert (1593–1633). Their poetry tends to appeal to the intellect rather than to the emotions and incorporates energetic imagery, which in the case of the metaphysical poets is called "metaphysical conceit." This is a figure of speech through which the poet creates a long, elaborate comparison between two dissimilar objects. It is used by these poets to enhance their poetry and to exhibit their wide range of knowledge of everything from commonly found objects to concepts that are more esoteric or obscure. For instance, in John Donne's poem "The Flea" (1633), the poet compares a flea bite to the act of making love.

Another characteristic of metaphysical poetry is the attention put on trying to catch readers off guard. Other poets of the same time period as the metaphysical poets follow a rather predictable path. They state what their poems are going to be about and then elaborate on those points. The metaphysical poets, however, want to surprise their readers. Also in contrast to some of the poets who came before them, the metaphysical poets do not believe in the worship of the lover as a topic for their poetry. They look at love and sex through the lens of reality. Their poetry does not place women on some unreachable pedestal. The metaphysical poets are also interested in the deeper aspects of love, such as the psychological analysis of the emotions. John Donne, one of the more important of the metaphysical poets, often sets the pattern of his poems in the form of an argument. These arguments could be with anyone, from a mistress to God. The metaphysical poets went out of fashion for a hundred years or so, but thanks, in part, to the interest of T. S. Eliot, the work of the metaphysical poets regained popularity and influenced poets of the twentieth century.

The Beat Writers

Ponsot was friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the beat writers, who also would go on to publish Ponsot's first collection of poetry. Ponsot's collection was overshadowed by another of Ferlinghetti's publications, Howl (1956), by the beat poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). Although Ponsot's collection did not reap the popular support that Ginsberg's book received, her friendship with Ferlinghetti and her connection to Ginsberg often causes her to be considered one of the lesser known of the beat poets.

The beat poets and fiction writers are a small group of American authors that include, besides Ginsberg, such well-known characters as Jack Kerouac (1922–1969), Neal Cassady (1926–1968), and William S. Burroughs (1919–1997). Most of the beats came from New York, but they shifted their focus to San Francisco in the early 1950s. There they started to gain the public's awareness through poetry readings, in particular, those held at San Francisco's Six Gallery.

The beats are known for their total disregard or rejection of academic verse. They wanted to transform writing as well as change their assumed roles in American culture. They sought illumination through means as diverse as drugs, sex, and Buddhism. Kerouac is best remembered for his fiction writing, especially On the Road (1957). Cassady's collection of autobiographical stories and essays is called The First Third (1971). Burroughs's classic work is Naked Lunch (1959), a trip through the seedier side of life, from New York to Tangiers. This book has been said to be hard to read because of its brutal honesty about American culture.

Several musicians became fascinated with William S. Burroughs's work, including the London psychedelic-scene band The Soft Machine and the 1970s rock band Steely Dan. Then, in 1992, Kurt Cobain made an album with Burroughs, The Priest They Called Him, in which Burroughs reads some of his writing over Cobain's music.

Short History of Free Verse

Free verse (sometimes referred to in its French form, ers libre) is an informally structured style of writing poetry. There are no set rules of rhyming patterns or cadence. "One Is One" is an example of free verse. Free verse was made popular in the early part of the twentieth century by such poets as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (1885–1972). Since then, free verse has become even more in style in contemporary writing, although it does have its critics. More traditional poets find the lack of structure somewhat degrading to the poetic form. However, Walt Whitman (1819–1892) wrote poetry that is considered the model of American free verse and that is hardly considered unpoetic. Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) is a collection of poetry whose form was probably ahead of its time.

Critical Overview

Ponsot, who is enjoying something of a reawakening of interest in her poetry, after writing for more than fifty years, was praised in a New York Times article, "Recognition at Last for a Poet of Elegant Complexity," written by Dinitia Smith. "A Marie Ponsot poem," Smith writes, "is a little like a jeweled bracelet, carefully carved, with small, firm stones embedded in it." Smith wrote this article after Ponsot had been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for the collection The Bird Catcher. Smith goes on to say that Ponsot's poems are "full of carefully thought-out rhetorical strategies," pointing out, for example, Ponsot's tendency to use ampersands (&) instead of the word "and" in order to maintain the rhythm of the words in her poems. Smith then quotes Ponsot, who says her poems "are meant to be beautiful" and adds that this is "a very unfashionable thing to say."

In a Publishers Weekly article about Ponsot's work, Dulcy Brainard describes Ponsot's poems as "intellectually rigorous and full of language play" and says that they "nourish the spirit." In Commonweal, Suzanne Keen states her fondness for the endings of Ponsot's poetry. In particular, she likes the ending of "One Is One," which, she says, points out "how accessible, how aphoristic, and even quotable Ponsot's poems can be." Keen continues: "Yet there is never anything pat about the thinking or phrasing even in the most rigorously formal of the verses" in The Bird Catcher collection.

Lee Oser, writing for World Literature Today, describes the poems in this collection as having "an exasperating brilliance." Oser says of Ponsot that she is one who "drives her poetics by adapting to people, times, and landscapes, by changing hats and sometimes—it would seem—faces as well."

Barbara Hoffert, writing for the Library Journal, states that Ponsot's poems "should be sampled every day" because of their "gorgeous simplicity." Another Library Journal reviewer, Louis McKee, remarks that Ponsot's poems are "personal but charged with science and the natural world, with history and myth." In the Women's Review of Books, Marilyn Hacker describes Ponsot's poetry in this way: "Her work is comprehensible as part of the ongoing enterprise of poetry as she understands it, not limited to national borders or even to the English language, but an irreplaceable part of what defines the human mind and the human community." Donna Seaman, writing for Booklist, finds that because so much time elapses between the published collections, Ponsot's poems are "aged to perfection: complex and concentrated." She also characterizes Ponsot's poetry as "fluid and efficient."

Criticism

Joyce Hart

Joyce Hart is a published author and former writing instructor. In this essay, she looks at the narrative behind the lines of Ponsot's poem to find just what the poet is saying about emotions.

In Ponsot's poem "One Is One," it is obvious that the speaker of the poem is upset about her emotions. She does not speak very kindly about them from the first words of the first stanza all the way through to the end of the poem, yet she does not want to completely rid herself of them. Even though she is disgusted with them, she does not want to banish them forever. Just exactly what does she want? Why does she want this? And how does she go about trying to solve the problem of her runaway emotions?

The speaker lets it be known from the first words of the poem that she considers her heart (and thus, her emotions) to be a bully. What is a bully? Is it someone who pushes another person around? Is it someone who makes another person do not what that person wants, but rather what the bully wants? If this is what the speaker means, she is saying that her emotions are beyond her control. The speaker next calls her heart a punk. The word "punk" has several different meanings, ranging from "prostitute" to an "inexperienced young man." However, in the speaker's frame of mind, readers can assume the meaning to be closer to "gangster," which again implies that her heart is forcing her do things that she does not want to do.

As a result of her heart's brutish activities, the speaker is a total wreck, but she is something more, too. She is shocked, which implies that she is surprised by her emotions. She has been caught off guard by them. Whether she is shocked by the essence of her emotions or by the strength of them is not completely clear. However, her next statement is that her heart is arrogant enough to believe that it can rule the world. What is the story behind this statement?

The speaker could be saying that she had thought her emotions could rule the world and was surprised to find out that this is not so. Or she could be saying that her emotions are stronger than she had rationally considered them to be and is therefore surprised by their strength (or by their arrogance, depending on how she looks at the situation). Since the speaker uses the word "still," as in "you still try to rule the world," the second choice seems the more likely. In other words, the speaker has seen this performance or attitude before. She has experienced these emotions in the past, so the surprise is that she thought her emotions had learned some kind of lesson from past experience. It sounds as if the speaker, who in this poem tends to represent the rational side of things, has reprimanded her heart before. How could you be so stupid, the speaker seems to be saying, to think that you could get away with this again? Or, looked at in another way, the speaker might be reprimanding herself for having allowed herself to be consumed or carried away with her emotions. She might be saying to herself, How could you be so stupid as to fall in that trap once again?

What exactly does it mean for one's emotions to "try to rule the world?" It is clear that the speaker does not really mean the whole wide world. She is more than likely referring to her own private world. If her emotions are trying to rule her world, then she is saying that she has been experiencing everything through her emotions, to the exclusion of any rational thought. This could suggest that she had, for example, fallen in love with someone who was deceitful but that she chose to ignore the facts that were staring her in the face, to disregard the data that her rational mind had collected. Another possibility is that someone had hurt her emotionally and she had allowed her emotions to depress her and had wallowed in her sorrow, losing all desire to clean the slate and move on with her life.

What do I Read Next?

• Ponsot's publication Springing (2002) is a good place to find an overview of the poet's career. Poems from all of her previous collections, along with some that were never published before, are in this book. The evolution in her writing, as well as in her life, is evident.
• Reportedly, one of Ponsot's favorite poets is the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who has published a collection of poems called Open Ground: Selected Poems, 1966–1996 (1999). His poetry is not light reading, so it is best taken in small doses, which gives it time to sink in. It is well worth the effort.
• Josephine Jacobsen, another of Ponsot's favorite poets, is not a well-known poet, except by those who are serious about poetry. Jacobsen's 2000 collection, In the Crevice of Time, is a good place to start getting to know her.
• Jane Cooper, a poet of Ponsot's generation, published The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed in 1999. In this collection, she writes about her eighty years of life, from nursing ailing children to pondering the lives of women artists.
• Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1965 for her first collection of poems. Those earlier poems have been likened to the work of the poet Sylvia Plath (author of The Bell Jar [1963]), who committed suicide. In later years, Valentine gave up her focus on the more depressing side of life and went on to write about political protest and mysticism. Her 2004 collection, Door in the Mountain, covers feminist topics, digging into the emotions of women in prison and the nature of the soul.

Then the speaker says, "I've got you." This is the gotcha statement. For whatever reason the speaker has allowed her emotions to bully her, to wreck her, to try to rule her world, she is on to them now. She has caught and fingerprinted them and slammed them into jail. That is what you do with bullies and gangsters, after all. She is going to keep her emotions locked up no matter how much they "hate it." Hate is a very powerful emotion, in direct opposition to love, another potent emotion. The speaker is not really imprisoning her emotions, but what is she doing? If she hates locking her emotions away, why is she doing this? She must, readers can assume, love to allow her emotions to run free. She must love living her life through her emotions, in other words. But she just cannot stand to do so anymore. Remember that she is "shocked / stiff." She cannot afford to allow her emotions to remain undisciplined; she must confine them for her own good. Although allowing one's emotions free rein could make life exciting, it could also make life miserable. There are two sides to every emotion: one positive and healthy and the other morose. Happiness, for instance, can infuse a person with almost boundless energy, but depressive emotions can weigh so heavily that the spirit of life is all but extinguished.

In the second stanza, the speaker confirms these observations. "I trusted you," she says to her heart. She thought that she could fly on the positive emotions, but it sounds as if they took her too high, and she did not notice the flaw in the wings of her emotions until it was too late. She must have been hurt, because she refers to her heart as "brute," someone who is cruel or savage. Howl as her heart may, she will not listen to it anymore. It must be calling to her, which means that she is yearning to give in to her emotions once again. The pain reminds her not to do so, to become "deaf" to her heart's calls. She has heard those calls before and remembers the threat of "worse things you (knowing me) could do." Although she remembers how high her emotions can take her, she also knows how low she can go. Her emotions know her. In other words, the speaker understands her own vulnerability, her weakness for the highs and the blindness they can cause. When she is high on emotion, she does not want to think. When she is depressed, she cannot think. Now that she has imprisoned her emotions, however, thinking is exactly what she wants to do.

"Think! Reform!" With these words, she commands new behavior from herself. Here, she is not talking to her heart anymore. Hearts are not made to think. By the time the speaker reaches the last two lines of the poem, it appears that she is talking directly to herself—the self that she wants to become "one." "Make us one," she says. Who else could she be talking to but herself? She is realizing that she is made up of two parts: the heart and the mind, the emotions and the rational self. She wants these two parts to come together, to take her through life via both her emotions and her thoughts. She wants to find a balance. She does not want to give up her emotions; she loves them. She just does not want ever to be blinded by them again. Neither does she want to go through life merely as a rational observer, gathering data but not feeling anything. She wants to enjoy life: "joy may come," she says. Joy is the emotion that she wants. It is peace that she craves. Still, she has learned something by the end of the poem. She knows that despite the fact that joy is a positive emotion, one that can make her feel good, joy can be demanding. It can "make its test of us." Whether the "us" in this statement is directed at the two sides of her—heart and mind—or refers to the speaker and some other person is not clear. It is clear, however, that the speaker knows that it is through the rational mind, which is the disciplinarian, that she will experience the best of her emotions. She mentions the coming of joy only after she demands reform.

Source: Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on "One Is One," in Poetry for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.

Allan M. Jalon

In the following essay, Jalon provides background on Ponsot's life and career, noting the critical attention her "second arrival" has received.

Right after making history by publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956, Lawrence Ferlinghetti introduced the first book of another young poet. Her name was Marie Ponsot, and she was so different from Ginsberg that they seemed like opposites.

He was male, gay, Jewish (and increasingly Buddhist). She examined marital love and her Catholic faith. His chanting, long-lined rhythms and jazzed images hurtled across the page. She made short, lyrical poems, often in rhyme—songs more than howls. He beatified anti-conformity. Her title, True Minds, came from a Shakespearean sonnet about ideal commitment. He treasured Walt Whitman; she, Emily Dickinson. He became the poet-prophet of the Beats. She raised seven children and didn't publish again for 25 years.

She kept on writing, however, seemingly indifferent to whether anyone but the muse noticed. At 81, she's enjoying a second arrival that has erupted with all the fanfare the first one lacked. It started with the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 1998. A few weeks ago, the Poetry Society of America made her co-winner of its Shelley Memorial Award, honoring a whole career. She arrives at Beyond Baroque in Venice on Saturday to read from her fifth volume, Springing (Knopf), which the New York Times Book Review—featuring a large picture of her on its cover, rare for a poet—recently called "a great book." It offers a selection of new poems, previously published ones and uncollected early work that illuminates the buried progress of her writing life.

One outcome of her blossoming status is that she's taken on a somewhat Ginsberg-like role as a public poet. She's been sought after as one of New York's senior poets after the attacks of Sept. 11. On Sept. 22, writer-broadcaster Kurt Andersen invited her to his nationally distributed Studio 360 program to discuss the cultural impact of what had happened 11 days before. "What is good will endure with all the treacheries of what is dreadful," Ponsot assured listeners in the still-reeling city, her crackling voice both tough and refined. She spoke of "the subset of strength that we all have in us." Giving echoes of Winston Churchill's resolve a pacifist twist, she added that "violence begets violence begets violence. It will take us perhaps another million years to get past this. But I believe we will."

Then, she somberly read a poem called "Oceans," which starts:

   Death is breath-taking. We all die young,
   our lives defined by failure of the heart,
   our fire drowned in failure of the lungs.
   Still planning on pouring the best ripe part
   of wines our need or grasp has sucked or wrung
   from fruit & sun, we're stopped before we start.

Ponsot is a petite bird of a woman whose gray-white hair was wound into a bun on a recent day as she stood in the kitchen of her small, bright apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side and prepared lunch for a visitor. She has a daughter and six sons, one of whom started to renovate her kitchen but hasn't finished. Drawers function but lack final facings. A blank wall waits for cabinets. "He's busy and had to stop, but I'm sure he'll get around to it when he can," Ponsot says, sounding certain.

It could be a scene in a Ponsot poem. She might compare the kitchen ceiling to the sky, contrast internal light with sunlight, refer to Dante's Paradiso, tie it to an illuminated manuscript in a museum (maybe about Dante's war-plagued era), summon a phrase or two from Latin and end with a bit of dialogue between her and her son or—since she tends to see men over women's shoulders—her son's wife.

All this would occur in the 14 lines of a sonnet or another of the many traditional forms she's mastered ("Oceans" is a sonnet), plus two utterly untraditional lines just because she felt like it.

When this imitation Ponsot is suggested to her, she laughs, something her witty poems make others do quite often. She says the make-believe poem reflects the focus she puts on the importance of "a governing intention to live a perfect life in an imperfect world."

Even when she describes a New York wildlife sanctuary or a small rooftop garden (she's the enthusiastic keeper of one) her work poses the contrast between an ethical tenderness and the brutal ways human beings betray their "tremendous interconnectedness" with each other and nature.

Invited the other day to speak to honor graduates at Queens College, where she taught for many years, she read "Jamaica Wildlife Center, Queens, New York," about a beautiful but endangered corner of the borough where she was born.

Describing the "sea air off the flats and inlets of Jamaica Bay," she never makes an explicit case against developers and politicians, but it's clear what she's talking about. She notes how even a poet exploits these details, turning them into "bite-sized images" that "intelligence eats & eats eagerly."

"You can't change the major rule that death is the price of life," Ponsot says, chewing on a grape. "But there is a particularly human capacity to make choices about how to use that life. You can keep making water filthy until the water dies, or you can decide not to."

She was born Marie Birmingham, to a family that derived its relative affluence from a business supplying imported gourmet food and fine wines on a private basis to very wealthy New Yorkers. Her late stature disguises an early bloomer. She says she can't remember not writing, and found her mature poetic voice quite young. "I didn't know you were supposed to find a voice. I just wrote the poems and let them do that."

She discovered James Joyce's short story, "Ivy Day in the Committee Room," at 13, and became devoted to Joyce's work. She excelled at Latin and French by the time she graduated from public school in Queens at 15, entering a small Catholic college there called St. Joseph's. Joyce taught her to trust the power of a single creative moment to embody the whole of human consciousness. Dante's Divine Comedy thrilled her when she read it as an assignment as a college freshman—the last part, the Paradiso, most of all.

As a child, she had experienced an exultant pleasure in the most basic sensation of being alive but couldn't quite find images and words to describe the all-encompassing sensation. As she read Dante's long poem, "it was clear that the 'Inferno' was intolerable if it wasn't going somewhere pretty quickly. And it was. Beatrice leads him to the ultimate vision, and then she disappears. And, in the text, he disappears, too. And there is just this visionary moment.

"It's a sky vision," says this poet whose work brims with skies that suggest both internal and universal infinities. "It's an out-of-your-own-body, out-of-your-own-mind, out-of-your-own-sky vision. And when you see that somebody has found a story that leads to it, a kind of showing forth of that in words …"

She stops talking, and her clear blue eyes roll upward with an awestruck savoring of the experience. "It is the great sense of the great value of everything," she says.

In 1941, at 19, she got a master's in 17th century poetry at Columbia. The war years, during which she worked in Manhattan bookstores, seeped into her. She found a way to think about them in the Catholic Worker, the Pacifist newspaper co-founded by the activist Dorothy Day. Around the war's end, a relationship with a Navy man who suffered deafness and depression from shellshock gave her insight into men who'd returned from the war.

On Studio 360, she read a poem about a young, World War II flier she knew who had "burned, that boy, my age, Lt. Little, / prayed for in my parish monthly thirty years …"

In 1947, Ponsot made her first trip to Europe, to Paris. On the ship, she first met Ferlinghetti, who'd served as an officer in the Navy. In a cafe, she met a painter named Claude Ponsot. They soon married and returned together about a year later to the United States. The marriage came apart in the 1960s, and she increasingly raised their children on her own.

Though she came from a well-off family, her marriage and subsequent life gave way to financial difficulties. She taught writing and translated French literature to support her family. Though too busy to worry about getting published, "while children slept and popovers popped," she wrote at every opportunity. "You just do it," she says. "You do it because you've got to get your focus, even if it is for only half an hour or 20 minutes."

In 1981, a poet friend urged Ponsot to submit a manuscript to Knopf, which was planning a new series of poetry books. The result, an unusually thick volume, just started to catch up with the years of unseen writing.

Her next book took eight years; the one after that, 10. She says she's a slow, painstaking writer.

Springing, with 26 new poems, took only four years to produce—an instant in Ponsot time.

Ferlinghetti, speaking from San Francisco recently, says he's not surprised at her growing impact, that he'd never met anyone with her "very acute sensibility, before or since." Ginsberg, he says, "transformed the poetry world of his time, but she is not a poet of her time. That is not one of her attributes. She is a poet out of time, in the way that is true of the best poetry." Softly, he speculated: "She may last longer than Ginsberg. Who knows? It just shows how right I was to publish her all along."

Source: Allan M. Jalon, "A Poet's Progress," in Los Angeles Times, May 29, 2002, Section E, p. 1.

Marie Ponsot with Meghan Cleary

In the following interview conducted by Meghan Cleary of Failbetter.com, Ponsot discusses poetry form and process and literary influences.

Native New Yorker Marie Ponsot is one of the most venerated poets writing in America today. Her collection of new and selected poems, Springing, just released, is already in its second printing, a mark rarely achieved by poets publishing in today's literary marketplace.

Her verse is elegant, refined, and packs a punch with a frequent twist of phrase or an unexpected revelation. She makes us feel poetry is the necessary antidote to our media-strewn culture, filled as it is, with sound bites and fragmented images. But then again, maybe it is just her poetry that is a cleanser and balm to our modern minds. failbetter editorial consultant Meghan Cleary had a chance to sit down with Marie at a tiny Italian restaurant and linger well into the espresso course….

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[failbetter]: Do you think forms live naturally in language or do you think you have to summon them out somehow?

[Ponsot]: I think there are the forms of syntax which give you part of the mental light of the poem. It is the way the mind takes in the relation of an actor or a subject acting, you know.

The subject and the verb together link up in some grasping way that grabs meaning for us—and that's a poem. That link between subject and predicate is a formal leap. And then there are other ways in which language is formal. Even the most colloquial truck driver cursing out a cab driver will have a structure. Usually when someone is enraged, it will have a rhetorical structure. Yes, I think language generates forms because language conveys meaning, and if there is no form holding anything together, how are you going to hand somebody the soup?

The great surviving forms of the Old Testament for example will turn up over and over again in American literature. Whitman writes in that form. Doesn't look like a form to us because we have sort of a narrow view of a form, like a quatrain, "its got to have four lines and the second and fourth line have to rhyme", and stuff like that…. And that kind of form is great fun to play with. It's really fun to play with because it's got to contain these other levels of formality that are here in human language and it's got to do all of that at once. And thank god for our mother's knee where we learned all the hard stuff without pain, you know.

Who do you like to read?

I love the Cavalier poets, the Renaissance poets, I love Dante. Not so much the Inferno but the way the Inferno produces the Purgatoriam—and then together the Inferno and the Purgatoriam produces the Paradiso which is one of the great works of literature. Very concrete images of the Inferno, extremely concrete, and the effect on the speaker of the poem and the guide and the effect among the characters of the punishment that they are undergoing and their history are all very, very concrete. Then in the Purgatoriam, the level of concreteness is also very sharp but it's kind of spread out through air—they keep walking, they can breathe easier, and Beatrice arrives and that makes it all still lighter, more open and then the Paradiso which is just this explosion of light and beautifulness. So I read that. I just finished reading it about two weeks ago.

What did you like to read as a child, what were you drawn to?

Anything in print. I was a desperate omnilect…. My mother was always, in her own adorable way, trying to send me out to play, and I did that, because I was good child, God help me, but what I was really looking forward to was getting back in there and backing into a corner with my book, and I read it all. I read sort of grown-up things, childish things. I read them over and over sitting in the corner.

I read a lot of modern poetry too. I don't read very much fiction. At the moment I'm reading a remarkable woman called Elaine Scarry, who has three books that I know of, and all three of them truly refreshing and the latest one I think every poet should read, they would really like it, they would just delectate in it. One of the words that has dropped out of writing program writing, is imagination. People don't know what it means anymore. They think that it is something Paul McCartney wrote about, and she is trying in a really meticulous way to look at the events the whole phenomenology of imagining something and writing it. She has a whole hypothesis about why some things are present when we are writing—not only do we get that out of our own head onto the page, but then how does the reader get it back and pick it up?

I've been reading philosophy all my life because it is so interesting to me and I never saw anybody write about imagination the way Scarry does as—as an act. Theories of the imagination in classical philosophy are interesting, they're wonderful, but they don't do this at all, they would think that is un-philosophical, but we don't think that anymore. And she is a philosopher, it's just wonderful. It's called Dreaming by the Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999) and it's not dreaming, it's better than dreaming! It's imagining.

I believe it's the life of language in our heads, the preconscious life of language because all the language we have is in our heads. Put your hands on your head and all the language you've possibly got is in there.

Do you ever feel like you don't have enough language?

What I feel is that there are times when my access to my own language is somehow impaired, I can't get at it—"there is something there, something there"—the trickle is so thin I can't get it and that's frustrating. You just have to be unbearably patient and keep pressing. And wait.

When you sit down to write a poem, generally, do you find the poem comes out because you are writing, or do you have something in your head and it comes out then?

Occasionally, I have something in my head that's on its way. When the weather is friendly I like to go for long walks and I'm not sure but I think the rhythms of walking gives me some sort of language access. Somehow the purposeless of walking, not going somewhere, just going. And looking around and seeing this and seeing that, sometimes a phrase will come to my mind out of the morass of stuff that interests me enough for my mind to keep going with it, to keep thinking it, and I might come home with five or six lines and the rest of it, you know, comes out of that.

You can start anyplace and language will be your friend if you really want to work on it. You can say to yourself, "all right, the first thing I see when I open my eyes I am going use that as a subject." Ordinarily, writing about a subject is lethal. Most of the really dull stuff you get is because someone decided to write a poem ABOUT, and it comes out really wrong because every cliché in your head clusters around it and the subject attracts the cliché long before it attracts real language, and you have to work it out, you have to sweat it out, and it takes strong exercise for your sweat to cleanse you of that so that you are approaching the subject or event in itself, and can say something about it that is not a cliché and advances the theory you have about it, into some kind of light.

Writing is so weird….

It is. It really is. Language itself does the writing. We know that we have language. That is one of the things memory is packed with, everything we know is remembered verbally, the conversation of language, is what we store, and I think the that's not very tightly compartmented back there [gesturing to the back of her head]. I think it's all swimming around back there, you know, I think it's all swimming around, all the time.

Language itself is weird and it does some amazing things.

We don't have perfect access to all that stuff. That's why rewriting is vital. If you had to get it perfect the first time you'd die. You'd shoot yourself. You are going to have stuff coming and coming …

Source: Meghan Cleary, "Marie Ponsot: Interview," in Failbetter.com, No. 7, Summer-Fall 2002, pp. 1-3.

Sandra M. Gilbert

In the following review, Gilbert profiles the well-aged poets Ponsot and Rajzel Zychlinsky, noting the "pleasure in time's gifts of ripeness and sweetness" in "One Is One" and other Ponsot poems.

Age is not all do rot. It's never too late. Sweet is your real estate.

So declares Marie Ponsot at the end of her exuberantly witty "Pourriture Noble" ("Noble Rot"), subtitled "a moral tale, for Sauternes, the fungus ceneria, and the wild old." And indeed this contemporary fabliau tells a charming story' of the origin of the famed Chateau d'Eyquem sauternes. The grapes seemed to have grown "too old, I too soon squeezed dry" because while the lord of the manor was off carousing "rot wrapped (them) like lace"; but (for, Ponsot counsels, the "meanest mistake / has a point to make") the astonished "vintner d'Eyquem" reports that the wine issuing from these grapes has

the best bouquet you can remember of sundown summer & someone coming to you smiling. The taste has odor like a new country, so fine at first you can't take it in it's so strange.

And for people as for grapes, the poet implies, the "new country" of age can make a wine that's "thick, gold-colored" and "pours like honey"—except it doesn't taste like honey, it's more "punchy, / you've never drank anything like it."

Though they were born a little more than a decade apart, have had dramatically divergent life-experiences, write in different languages and have significantly different views of the world, Marie Ponsot and Rajzel Zychlinsky have in common a poetic intensity that seems, like the bouquet of the vintner d'Eyquem's sauternes, to have been so sharpened and refined by age that it has what Ponsot's poem defines as a special punchiness, a kind of unprecedented zing.

Now in her seventies, Ponsot is the New York-born and -bred author of three previous collections—True Minds (1957), Admit Impediment (1981) and The Green Dark (1988)—who has had a long, distinguished career as a teacher of English literature and creative writing at Queens College and elsewhere. In her eighties, Zychlinsky is a Holocaust refugee who has published seven volumes of poetry in Yiddish (between 1936 and 1993, in Poland, the United States, France and Israel), but although in 1981 a collection was translated into German, until now few of her poems have appeared in English. Beyond the almost visionary fascination with what Carolyn Heilbrun has called "the last gift of time" that animates the work of both these writers, however, each has plainly spent many years honing her art to a fierce clarity as moving in its confrontation of the pain and loss associated with aging as it is illuminating in its revelation of age's unexpected pleasures.

Of the two, Ponsot is (not surprisingly) the more affirmative. Besides praising such unexpected intoxications of the quotidian as the bouquet of "Pourriture Noble," she abandons herself with warmth, indeed with a sort of comic glee, to the vagaries of sheer feeling. In the dazzlingly colloquial "One Is One," she plays with cardiology and literary history to produce an elegant sonnet that is Petrarchan in theme as well as form. Beginning with mock outrage—"Heart, you bully, you punk, I'm wrecked, I'm shocked / stiff. You? You still try to rule the world—though / I've got you: identified, starving, locked / in a cage you will not leave alive"—this witty lyric ends with a prophetic flourish of delight that concisely captures the hopefulness with which Ponsot yearns to approach change:

Brute. Spy. I trusted you. Now you reel & brawl in your cell but I'm deaf to your rages, your greed to go solo, your eloquent threats of worse things you (knowing me) could do. You scare me, bragging you're a double agent since jailers are prisoners' prisoners too. Think! Reform! Make us one. Join the rest of us, and joy may come and make its test of us.

Similarly, in "Restoring My House" she describes the salutary purification—the release from spiritual clutter—bestowed by a voluntary bonfire of words and images. Burning old papers, longing to "clear out / the debris of keeping," she insists that the "leaves I have torn up / turn into the hum of a / budding comfort disclosing / along a tree of transforming," because, tellingly, she is "hungry / to open up images / into the presence of absence / of images, and change."

For Ponsot, absence is a presence, and necessary losses can be cherished if they bring restoration and renewal. When in "Trois Petits Tours et Puis …" a son sets out on the road of life, as in a fairytale, "She gives him paper and a fine-nibbed pen; / he discovers the world and makes a map. / She gives him boots and a Havaheart trap, / Peterson guides, tent, backpack, fish-hooks, then / rehearses the uses of the North Star." But eventually "His map omits her. His snapshots go to friends"—at which a "fresh music fills her house, a fresh air." And when "Against the Dark, New Poets Rise" (in a poem of that title) she marvels, with characteristic generosity, "Look up, / there's burning going on, / exploding old stuff into new."

Perhaps Ponsot's gravest, most musical affirmation of the "sundown summer" of age and its "new country" shapes the beautiful sestina "For My Old Self, at Notre-Dame." Here, as she contemplates the "dark madonna cut from a knot of wood" who has presided for centuries over the great cathedral of Paris, the poet prepares, also, for a confrontation with the sequential selves that slot her, too, into history. Or, rather, catching sight of a girl walking away on the Ile de la Cite she imagines this young woman as her earlier self interrogating the person she has now become, and interprets "her Who are you?" as a wild "question raised / by seeing me, an old woman, in plain view." And the serenity with which this person she has become now names the difference between these selves—"Time is a tree in me; in her it's a grain / ready to plant"—contrasts strikingly with the fear of age and aging that she knows the person she was once felt: "She dreads clocks, she says. Such dry rot warps the grain." But Ponsot wants to teach that earlier self, along with the rest of her audience, that "age is not / all dry rot," and in a resonant gesture toward the magic of matrilineage, she turns to "Notre Dame" for assistance, praying

Magic dame, cut knot, your ancient wood would reach back to teach her if it could. Spring rain. Through it I call to thank her, loud above the joy she raised me for, this softfall. Sweet time.

In a rather different way, the equally lovely "Pre-Text," apparently dedicated to a grandchild, captures a one-year-old baby's first steps ("a step a step a rush // and he walks") and places him with tender precision into the puzzles and paradoxes of time:

Firm in time he is out of date—like a cellarer for altar wines tasting many summers in one glass. or like a grandmother in whose womb her granddaughter once slept in egg inside grandma's unborn daughter's folded ovaries.

For finally, as in the eloquent sonnet "Explorers Cry Out Unheard," Ponsot wants to argue that "What I have in mind"—the mysteries of time, age, growth, transformation—constitutes "the last wilderness," a new country in which simply to be is to explore:

I sweat to learn its heights of sun, scrub, ants, its gashes full of shadows and odd plants, as inch by inch it yields to my hard press. And the way behind me changes as I advance. If interdependence shapes the biomass, though I plot my next step by pure chance I can't go wrong. Even willful deviance connects me to all the rest. The changing past includes and can't excerpt me.

The tone of acceptance in which Ponsot articulates her view of the "changing past" is hard-won ("I sweat to learn"), but it also suggests the pleasure in time's gifts of ripeness and sweetness out of which such poems as "Pourriture Noble" and "One Is One" seem to have emerged. That "joy may come, and make its test of us" is one of Ponsot's central tenets, an axiom infusing The Bird Catcher with much the same delight the "vintner d'Eyquem" must have felt when he tasted the surprisingly "thick, gold-colored" drops of his first sauternes.

The special bouquet of age that brings sweetness to Ponsot has a bitterer and often more contradictory flavor for Rajzel Zychlinsky, who writes in one poem that

The red brick home for the aged smiled to me early this morning with one bright, sunny wall—an old smile—that can only be smiled by old people, when one eye laughs and the other cries. The other walls of the home, with their curtained windows in shadows, closed, grieved ancient griefs deeply hidden amid the bricks.

Because she composes her poetry in Yiddish, non-speakers of Yiddish (including myself) will never, of course, grasp all its verbal and prosodic nuances. Emanuel S. Goldsmith, a professor of Yiddish Language and Literature at Queens College, notes in his incisive introduction to God Hid His Face that as "the horizons of Zychlinsky's world broadened [she] abandoned her sometime reliance on rhyme to adorn and buttress the power of her poems and committed herself to the more difficult but more rewarding paths of free verse, to the fires of poetic imagery, dream and hallucination. The moral stance of her poetry became clearer and the purity of her voice among the poets unmistakable." This aspect of Zychlinsky's evolution cannot easily be traced by English readers. Yet the powerful understatement and fierce imagery marking the verse collated in this extraordinarily impressive volume do indeed give her voice a "purity" that is "unmistakable," even through the scrim of translation.

Born in Poland in 1910, Zychlinsky fled to Russia in 1939, then to the United States in 1951, but her mother and all her siblings died in the gas chambers of Chelmno; as Goldsmith puts it, for more than half her life she has "lived with the Holocaust in her house and in her heart." Thus even the America of her later years is a country far more sorrowful than sweet, more rueful than ripe. "What swims there in the Hudson / in the red light?" she asks in the poem that opens God Hid His Face:

Who is crying there: Save us, we are sinking? They are my dead, the cremated, who are sinking again in my memory.

Haunted not just by the ghosts of those who died but also by the guilt of the survivor, Zychlinsky returns over and over again to such swimmers in the river of memory, ghosts who bring with them the responsibility to seek out the truth of loss, to carry its burden everywhere, to testify about the weight of that burden and thereby to seek some measure of healing or at least atonement. In poem after poem she almost ritually re-calls—that is, invokes as well as remembers—the "severed lives" she wanders among. In "My Mother Looks at Me," her dead confront her with their helpless woe:

   My mother looks at me with bloodied eyes out of a cloud: Daughter, bind up my wounds. Her gray head is bowed.
   Amid the leaves of each green tree my sister moans. My little daughter, where is she? Rajzel, gather her bones.
   My brother swims in the waters—days, weeks, years—dragged forward by the rivers, flung back by the seas.
   My neighbor wakes me in the night; he makes a woeful sound: Take me down from the gallows—put me in the ground.

It is perhaps this sense of haunting that gives Zychlinsky's voice such testimonial purity, an intensity of perception that verges at times on the surreal, or at any rate the uncanny. One senses, reading her verse, that the experience of war and flight along with the trauma of the Holocaust itself have so radically defamiliarized the quotidian that even the most ordinary objects she encounters must inevitably take on strange, often frightening meanings. "At night my shoes look at me / with my mother's tired eyes—/the same goals unachieved / and happiness missed," she writes in "My Mother's Shoes"; while elsewhere she observes "the elevator operator / drowning in his cage," sorrows for "the wooden leg / that walked around all day in the rain, / and no one said to the wooden leg: / Go home, go home, / enough walking in the rain" and hears "the clocks in Times square / ring[ing] the message of death."

In material settings of such fearful resonance, the human world too takes on a terrifying cast:

He who has not felt a knife in his back does not know what a knife is—says the taxi driver who takes me to the train.

In one of the most remarkable moments in this remarkable collection, even "The Unborn Are Feverish" with terrible knowledge:

The unborn are feverish in the branches of September—do not wake us, let us rest in our blue, transparent shirts. Between the ashes of yesterday and the smoke of tomorrow let us sleep here, concealed, hidden, without hands, without eyes, without lips, without years, sinking, drowning in no one's memory.

As it does for Ponsot, then—but very differently—age brings Zychlinsky into a "new country" where she funds herself, as Wallace Stevens once put it, "more truly and more strange." On the one hand, the "dresses you have seen me wear—/they never get old," but on the other hand, what might have been her "real" self has been severely fragmented and fantastically transformed:

I looked on a street into a mirror—was it me I saw in the mirror? Or was it a woman I had seen somewhere and don't remember where? When? Do you know her? I turned my head—a woman was standing near me and pointed a finger at the mirror. She asked again—do you know her? Before I could answer a word, she disappeared. I stood a long time before the mirror, which looked at me—empty.

This tension between the familiar dress and the unfamiliar image is one that has traditionally shaped much poetry of old age. But what gives special force to God Hid His Face is a further tension, a tension between the particular and the universal. Zychlinsky speaks for and of the overwhelming pain of a specific historical moment that has been ineradicably fixed in her memory. Yet at the same time, as a survivor who has aged in predictable human ways, she speaks for and of a common (if uncommonly moving) experience. "The Grass Has Grown Pale" dramatizes her relationship to the terrible history of our century:

   The grass has grown pale, the sky is cold my brother, Duvid, I am no longer looking for you on the earth.
   I will now follow the clouds a long time with my eyes. I will look for you, my brother, in the autumn silence.
   I walk with my son over the clay field, on the Polish roads—O let them come, the autumn nights, over the bloody roads.

There is, quite rightly of course, no acceptance here—though there is ironic resignation to what has long since, and calamitously, happened.

More serene in its recording of the inexorable transformations inherent in the human condition, the monitory and Whitmanesque "My Story Is Your Story" moves (as many of Ponsot's poems do) from the particular to the general:

My story is your story, neighbor across from me in the subway. What you are thinking about I have long since forgotten. What will happen to you happened to me long ago. What you hope for I smile about with closed lips. My fate is shown in the blue veins on your hand, yours, you can read in the deep wrinkles on my face.

Source: Sandra M. Gilbert, Review of The Bird Catcher: Poems, in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 16, No. 1, October 1998, pp. 11-12.

Suzanne Keen

In the following review of The Bird Catcher, Keen praises the meaningfulness of the last lines of Ponsot's poems, describing how Ponsot "uses demanding forms without making the reader feel the strain of artfulness."

Read over time, a journal like Commonweal begins to feel like a friend, known well enough to be praised and abused, missed when it goes away over the summer vacation, relied upon to recommend its favorite books. Marie Ponsot's The Bird Catcher begs to be pressed into the hands of a friend. I know I will not be alone among Commonweal readers to recognize Marie Ponsot's name and poems from these pages, and I hope I will be forgiven for quoting at length, in case anyone out there has missed her. Take a gulp of this poem,

   "Underbutter"
   This house has three entrance-ways. Water flushes its hidden places.

   Sun-flush slides rosily off the wall. Dusk dawns.
   Cats want out. Deer nose out of the woodlot. Bats scour the near air as it cools.
   Wheel-house: the house rides a cooling land-mass.
   Oceans hiding desirable continents flank it. The round earth turns as it rides.
   Its flank turned to the flank of the hill, the dog turns off the vista and sniffs at fresh grass.
   Angels fly into the fresh vat of cream & suddenly it's butter.
   Sudden awe sudden dread: the visible fontanelle just under the scalp of the delicate new-born head.
   The delicate tip of the window geranium broke off. The root-threads pop out a strong bud, lower down.

Let me begin by commenting on the end. Marie Ponsot writes wonderful ends of poems. This final pair of lines tells a story of loss and recovery, set in the vital miniature world of the window box. It suggests not only the burgeoning that can be induced by pruning, but the adjusted point of view that enables us to see the "strong bud, lower down." The poem has already carried its reader through a dizzying variety of perspectives—in the house, hearing the water somewhere—looking out at various times of day—suddenly spinning and dwarfed by the scale of landmass, oceans, and planet—shuffled down from earth flank, hill flank, dog flank, to the dog's nose—whisked from the ether with the angels into the interior of the churn. What could the "underbutter" be? (I don't know, but I want some!)—perhaps some of it lies through the fontanelle "just under the scalp / of the delicate new-born head." Though the poem's speaker tacitly urges adjustments in consciousness, it scarcely reveals the mind of the human person inside the container of the house. "Underbutter" is mysterious: "Sudden awe sudden dread" pulses a rare inward interruption in the searching outward gaze, in the terse descriptions.

Close to the kennings of Anglo-Saxon verse, Ponsot's evocative word pairs comprise a bright thread running through the poem's fabric: "entrance-ways," "sun-flush," "woodlot," "wheel-house," "land-mass," "new-born," and "root-threads" evoke an archetypal pattern of arrival, dissolution, cycling back. This tale, embedded in the nouns, does not contradict the top layer of implicit story: a person (woman?) in a house considers its structure, notes both times of day and woodland neighbors, carries out ordinary tasks without dulling to their mysteries, considers two kinds of delicacy, human and vegetable. Along the way the earth gets older, cream turns to butter, and the sight or memory of an infant's skull swerves into the sublime emotions of awe and dread. The causes of these disorientingly different actions remain obscure, except for the angels who make the butter come. This gives the poem the feel of riddling, as in the first stanza: 'This house has three entrance-ways. / Water flushes its hidden places." Answer: the body? Question: Is then the underbutter the soul or the life force inside?

Marie Ponsot's poems both invite and disarm this kind of readerly questioning. Some poems are so direct that a collection of their last lines can reasonably evoke the power of their themes. From "One is One," a command addressed to a wayward heart: "Join the rest of us, / and joy may come, and make its test of us." From "Pourriture Noble," a moral: "Age is not / all dry rot. It's never too late. / Sweet is your real estate." From "The Border": "Getting married is like that. / Getting married is not like that." And from "Festival of Bread": "The widow shoves her night-time self aside, / kneads silence down into dough, and lets it rise." This sampler of conclusions suggests how accessible, how aphoristic, and even quotable Ponsot's poems can be. Yet there is never anything pat about the thinking or phrasing even in the most rigorously formal of the verses.

Ponsot risks losing some readers when she returns again and again to elaborate Provencal verse forms, sestinas and villanelles, and she ups the ante when she adds (arcanely) two "tritinas," one of which I quote below. A tritina goes the troubadours one better, evidently requiring the recycling, in decasyllabic lines, of three end words in one-two-three, three-one-two, two-three-one order, with a concluding line that employs each end word in one- two-three order. (There may be other rules I have not discerned.)

   "Living room"
   The window's old & paint-stuck in its frame. If we force it open the glass may break. Broken windows cut, and let in the cold
   to sharpen house-warm air with outside cold that aches to buckle every saving frame & let the wind drive ice in through the break
   till chair cupboard walls stormhit all goods break.
   The family picture, wrecked, soaked in cold, would slip wet & dangling out of its frame.
   Framed, it's a wind-break. It averts the worst cold.

What makes a poem in so tight and elaborate a form transcend the sense of exercise? The resolute plainness of the language helps to justify the densely packed repetitions. Perhaps also the intimation that a lapse in the performance, like the imagined crack in the pane, would "buckle every saving frame," adds to the urgency of the wordsmith's work. With anti-Romantic sentiment, this poem casually props no wind harp (Aeolian lyre) to await inspiration and let in the destructive wet. Far better, the poem suggests, to stick with a tight container, a form that acts as a windbreak and preserves home and family, averting "the worst cold." Like Elizabeth Bishop, another poet who conjured up the elemental from the homeliest of subjects, Marie Ponsot uses demanding forms without making the reader feel the strain of artfulness.

Source: Suzanne Keen, Review of The Bird Catcher: Poems, in Commonweal, Vol. 125, No. 16, September 25, 1998, pp. 23-24.

Sources

Brainard, Dulcy, Review of The Bird Catcher, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 245, No. 4, January 26, 1998, p. 88.

Hacker, Marilyn, "The Poet at 80: A Tribute to the Aging Poet Marie Ponsot Is Full of the Imagery of Vigor and Growth," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 20, No. 10-11, July 2003, pp. 12-13.

Hoffert, Barbara, Review of The Bird Catcher, in Library Journal, Vol. 124, No. 6, April 1, 1999, p. 96.

Keen, Suzanne, "Words Take Flight," in Commonweal, Vol. 125, No. 16, September 25, 1998, pp. 23-24.

McKee, Louis, Review of The Bird Catcher, in Library Journal, Vol. 123, No. 2, February 1, 1998, p. 89.

Oser, Lee, Review of The Bird Catcher, in World Literature Today, Vol. 73, No. 1, Winter 1999, pp. 155-56.

Seaman, Donna, Review of The Bird Catcher, in Booklist, Vol. 94, No. 11, February 1, 1998, p. 894.

Smith, Dinitia, "Recognition at Last for a Poet of Elegant Complexity," in the New York Times, April 13, 1999, Section E, p. 1.

Further Reading

Ciuraru, Carmela, ed., Beat Poets, Everyman's Library, 2002.

Ponsot published her first book of poems in the same year and through the same small publishing house (City Lights) that Allen Ginsberg's book Howl(1956) was published. The publishing house fostered many of the beat poets; for this reason, Ponsot is often considered one of the beat poets herself. To find out about these poets, this collection is a good place to start. The poems of Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Diane di Prima are featured in this collection.

Gardner, Helen, ed., The Metaphysical Poets, Penguin Classics, 1960.

Ponsot is often referred to as a metaphysical poet. This book is a good introduction to some of the metaphysical poets. There is an excellent introduction as well as copious footnotes to help readers gain insight into this form of poetry.

Hirsch, Edward, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, Harvest Books, 2000.

This book is a journey into poetry, including not only the poems of famous poets but also a glimpse into the poets' lives. Although he is a scholar, Hirsch makes his material very accessible as he describes his own love of poetry.

Knorr, Jeff, An Introduction to Poetry: The River Sings, Prentice Hall, 2003.

Knorr not only teaches his readers how to love poetry, he also breaks down the basic elements of the poetic form and thus informs his readers how a poem is put together, what devices poets employ, and how literary theory is used to understand poetry. This introduction to poetic literature is easy to read and understand.

Schneider, Pat, Writing Alone and with Others, Oxford University Press, 2003.

Schneider has taught people to write from the elementary school level to the college level. In this book, she describes some of the challenges writers must face, including the loneliness of having to work alone. In other parts of the book, she portrays the joys of encouraging one's creativity and learning to express it.