Award-winning poet Marie Ponsot, who published seven volumes of poetry and translated dozens of books, died June 5. She was 98. The New York Times reported that after a promising start as a published poet in the 1950s, Ponsot "put her career aside. She was a single mother in New York City, with seven children to raise. But she did not stop writing. She filled notebooks with her poems--and then stashed much of her work in a drawer, showing it strictly to friends. It would be almost a quarter-century before her poetry began to re-emerge, and when it did, she found wide acclaim."
Ponsot's first book, True Minds, was published in the 1950s as the fifth title in Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Pocket Poets series. It would be her only book for nearly 25 years until she resumed publishing in 1981 with Admit Impediment. The collection "had come together with the help of a friend and professor, Marilyn Hacker, who took the manuscript in a battered interoffice envelope to the Knopf offices in Manhattan, where it found its way to the poetry editor Alice Quinn. She immediately accepted it for publication."
Her other books include The Green Dark (1988), NBCC award winner The Bird Catcher (1998), Easy (2009) and Collected Poems (2016). She also translated more than 30 books into English from French. Ponsot was honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2013, from the Poetry Foundation, and served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014.
When Knopf editor Deborah Garrison began planning a collected works in the late 1990s, she was overwhelmed by Ponsot's unpublished poems. "They'd been in a drawer, but were sparklingly fresh," Garrison said.
From her poem "Among Women":
She warned me, "Have nothing to lose."
She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner's ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.