The timeline project was founded in 2010 by Kim Bridgford, poet and editor of “Mezzo Cammin,” an online journal of formalist poetry by women. The inaugural award was co-sponored by the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University.
“Ponsot's poetry is an amalgam of fierce intelligence and courtly grace,” said Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, poet and Fordham professor, and author of the Ponsot essay, Marie Ponsot & the Difficult Art of Ease.”
Born in 1921 to a family that loved poetry and literature, Ponsot still claims the Catholic identity of her Queens childhood. While raising seven children, Ponsot translated 37 books from French to English, co-authored two books on the pedagogy of writing, wrote numerous radio and television scripts while teaching at Queens College. A beloved mentor, she also taught at Columbia University, the New School and 92St.Y
“Being raised in a household respectful of the power of language and the mysteries of faith clearly provided a strong linguistic and imaginative foundation upon which a young poet could build,” said O’Donnell, who teaches American Catholic studies as well as English and creative writing.
Ponsot has published seven poetry books. Numerous awards include the Lily Prize and Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. She was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.
Ponsot uses poetic forms in her own work and as a teaching tool as “instruments of discovery,” O’Donnell noted. She popularized tritina, a shortened version of a sestina. Discovery is another theme in Ponsot's deep interest in the primal poetry of an infant's babble.
Language Acquisition
by Marie Ponsot
Burn, or speak your mind. For the oak to untruss
its passion it must explode as fire or leaves.
The delicious tongue we speak with speaks us.
A liquor of sweetness where its root cleaves
ripens fluent, as it runs for the desirous
reason, the touching sense. The infant says “I”
like earthquake and wavers as place takes voice.
Earth steadies smiling around her, in reply
to her self-finding pronoun, her focal choice.
We wait: while sun sucks earth juices up from wry
root-runs tangled under dark, while the girl
no longer vegetal, steps into view:
a moving speaker, an “I” the air whirls
toward the green exuberance of “You.”
Ponsot, 96, read two poems celebrating women from Collected Poems (Knopf, 2016): “Aunt Grace Wears Beautiful Clothes” and “Among Women.”
Catherine Woodard is the author of Opening the Mouth of the Dead, a story in poems recently published by lone goose press in two editions: paperback and limited-edition book art. She helped return Poetry in Motion to the New York City subways and is a vice president of the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies and CNN online. A former journalist, Woodard chairs an advisory committee for the News Literacy Project.