Marie Ponsot & Thought Popping

Marie Ponsot

What's that called when you mention someone or think of someone you haven't in a while and all the sudden they pop up in several places?

I was going through my RSS feeds at lunch yesterday and I read on Nomadics (Pierre Joris's blog) about Alice Notley winning the Lenore Marshall Prize. One of the judges for the prize was Marie Ponsot, who also wrote an article about Notley in the Nation.

I think the last time I had thought about Ponsot was when I found out Sylvester (Pollet, my creative writing teacher at UMaine) died. I was so resistant to writing in the poetry forms required for our Writing Poetry class. What did I call it? Something ridiculous and pretentious and embarrassing. Like "the poetry of the oppressive white male". Groan groan groan. What an effing dork.

Anyway, then Sylvester brought in this article featuring Marie Ponsot and she said some really swell things about writing in an established poetic form. I have the article saved somewhere but can't find it. It just said something about how the parameters of form can actually open things up for a writer and make her think in way she wouldn't have if she weren't writing in a set form. Then there was a tritina of hers (a form she made up that's a spin off of the sestina) and it was like "Eureka!" From there, I ended up writing a bunch of poetry in the forms assigned and I have never hated doing it since. (I can't say the same about the resulting poems I've written in form; I definitely hate lots of them...)

Then, just last Thursday, I was going through my poetry book shelves and reorganizing them, much like the nerds in High Fidelity would reorganize their music collection in some dorky way, and reopened "The Bird Catcher" (which I purchased at City Lights when I went to SanFran in 03). And I remembered how much I like Marie Ponsot & I talked about that on Saturday. Then - boom- there she was, mentioned by someone else just three days later. How very weird.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/ponsot

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080407/ponsot_poem

UPDATE

I found the article online. (Magical Maine MARVEL database thingy). Here is Marie Ponsot's quote from the NYTimes article that busted the door for me:

Difficult, but it's worth it, said Ms. Ponsot, because ''in the process of turning your brain around, you find something you didn't know.''

Poetic forms like the tritina are ''instruments of discovery,'' she said. ''The forms create an almost bodily pleasure in the poet. What you're doing is trying to discover. They are not restrictive. They pull things out of you. They help you remember.''

from

Recognition at Last for a Poet of Elegant Complexity; [Biography]

Dinitia Smith. New York Times. (Late Edition (East Coast)). New York, N.Y.: Apr 13, 1999. pg. E.1