Miami Book Fair: Poet Marie Ponsot
Leading up to Miami Book Fair International, Riptide 2.0 will be publishing profiles of visiting authors. Check back often as two to three will going up per day until Sunday, November 15.
| Photo by Michael Lionstar |
Her first book, True Minds, was published in 1957 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights Pocket Poets Series, but it took until 1981 and some nudging by her friend and fellow poet Marilyn Hacker to put out her second volume, Admit Impediment. Why? Because while her male contemporaries were jockeying for awards and professorships, Ponsot, 88, was rasing seven children, sixteen grandchildren, and nine great grandchildren, all the while writing poems for the simple reason that she loved doing it.
"When things were very intense, I had a rule that I had to write for at least ten minutes before bed every night," she says. "Sometimes I'd be dead asleep at the end of the ten minutes, but sometimes I'd get caught up [in the poem]." She's awake now, and the world has awoken to her finely-crafted verse.





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