After Stroke, a Poet Hunts for the Language Lost
Published: June 25, 2010
By Jim DwyerMarie Ponsot is trying to figure out what it is that she no longer knows.
The Wonder Years
Published: December 20, 2009
By Stephen BurtMarie Ponsot’s sixth poetry collection is propelled by playful lines and mature perspective.
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By Joseph Milosch
Here are the sound-bytes: there has never been an Irish Catholic President. Vietnam is still a French Province. Vicksburg, Missouri has yet to celebrate the Fourth of July. Nobody speaks about racism. Black teenagers have not integrated Missouri schools.
Here are the poems: Sonnets about women with pearl teeth and spearmint breathe. Villanelles about Davy Crockett begin with the line, “Be sure you’re right….” Similes about roses and doves spin like a whirl wind. Metaphors about beavers, bears, lions, and lambs are rusted like old wire fences. Words paint pictures of abandoned farms and rusting rails.
Here is the film of flashing fire: People surround a bonfire.
They are laughing. One woman wears a hat with a white lace rim. She is wearing a white dress and laughing. Next to her, a man wears a hat in the style of Dick Tracy. It is pushed back on his head. Laughing, he points at the bonfire.
In this film the scene could be of a high-school pep-rally.
Everybody is laughing except the black man swinging by his neck above the bonfire like a pendulum. Here is a looking glass: Night comes. Crickets chirp. Urine stains a dirt road. Fresh sweat on foreheads marks the appearance of hatred, bitterness, and somewhere the agony of being the mirror as well as the face in it passes from generation to generation.
Published: April 29, 2010
We love stories as much as we need them, but a funny thing has happened to departments of literature. The study of literature as an art form, of its techniques for delighting and instructing, has been replaced by an amalgam of bad epistemology and worse prose that goes by many names but can be summed up as Theory. The situation seems to call for a story, and one written in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, the grand chronicler of the tragicomic struggle between humans and logic.