Marie Ponsot Wins 2013 Ruth Lilly Prize

Marie Ponsot (Photo: Michael Lionstar)

Dara writes:

This week, eminent New York-based poet Marie Ponsot won the 2013 $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. What a well deserved honor for a masterly writer and supremely kind person. Since the 1980s, when Marie was into her sixties, she has published multiple award-winning books of poetry. At 91 she is a true role model.

About ten years ago, when I was getting an MFA in poetry at Columbia, I was fortunate enough to take a workshop with Marie. I remember that her rule for students was simple: say something positive. Ponsot’s point was that every piece of writing has something good in it. If you identify it, you help the writer build from a place of strength. Marie is an unflinching critic, but she wanted us to find the things that shine in a poem.

Looking back at Marie’s philosophy, I can see that it comes from someone who genuinely likes young people and teaching. Rather than knocking aspiring writers down, Ponsot builds them up. As a teacher myself who aims to be both critical and encouraging, I appreciate Ponsot's method.

It is not well known that, in addition to her poetry, Marie has written a book for teachers. Beat Not the Poor Desk is for those of us who teach writing. Ponsot offers great advice in it, including how to instruct argumentation. I use her technique quite a bit, particularly regarding the shape of an argument. Marie and her co-author Rosemary Deen believe that most arguments form certain basic shapes, such as: “You may think X, but my experience tells me Y.” I have told many students this and it helps demystify the process for them.

Marie shows such respect for students and teachers. She was advocating student-centered teaching long before it was in vogue, urging teachers to meet students where they are and use their own experience as material for writing practice.

Marie’s poetry highlights this humanism. Here is an excerpt from the poem "Pathetic Fallacies Are Bad Science But" from her 2003 collection Springing: 

To see clear, resist the drag of images.

Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.

Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor

easy obverts of natural metaphor.

Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges

from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.

Seventh Annual Young Poets' Evening at the National Arts Club

 

Dara writes:

On Tuesday, April 9, 2013 at 8pm, I am delighted to host the seventh annual evening of young poets at the National Arts Club. This year's event features Brooklyn-based writers Mika Gellman, Andrew Hurst, Jennifer L. Knox, and Jason Koo. The reading is free and open to the public and takes place in one of New York's coolest clubs. I hope you will join us for this special evening.

Be sure to RSVP here. 

Poetry is everywhere you look in Bushwick. One day this winter, after February's big snow storm, I was walking around near Flushing Avenue on my way to Storefront Bushwick. I passed streets and streets of industrial buildings. It was Sunday-quiet: snow melting off rooftops, water gleaming in afternoon sunlight. Suddenly around the corner strides a tall guy with a beard carrying a white hula hoop festooned with black ribbons. I thought, That is so Bushwick. Sure, you can see things that pop out at you in any corner of the city. But one thing that's neat about Bushwick is that the guy with the hula hoop seems to come out of nowhere. The surprise delights.

The best poetry also seems to pop out of nothing: that is, seeing the beauty and interest in the everyday. These Brooklyn poets do that in spades.  

Jason Andrew's celebration of John Cage last fall at Bushwick's English Kills gallery inspired me to connect this seventh annual Young Poets event to Brooklyn. On the John Cage evening, Jason gathered poets, dancers, performance artists, and musicians to contribute their work simultaneously for 45 minutes. The result was noisy and exhilarating. During that evening some of tonight's readers blew me away with their work. 

Mika Gellman is a recent graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School, where she studied Postmodern and Contemporary Poetics. Her work has been published in Jellyroll magazine and her first chapbook "jack." is forthcoming from Norte Maar.

Andrew Hurst works in a variety of media. His collage and assemblage work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn galleries Storefront and English Kills. Hurst has self-published two chapbooks of poetry, Poltergeist Directory in 2004 and Moonlight Predictions in 2010.

Jennifer L. Knox is the author of three books of poems, The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway, Drunk by Noon, and A Gringo Like Me, all available from Bloof Books. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review and four times in the Best American Poetry series. She is at work on her first novel.

Jason Koo is the author of America’s Favorite Poem (forthcoming 2013) and Man on Extremely Small Island (2009), both from C&R Press. His first book won the De Novo Poetry Prize and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award for the best Asian American book of 2009. His recent work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Octopus and elsewhere. He is an Assistant Professor of English at Quinnipiac University and Founder and Executive Director of Brooklyn Poets.

Thank you Jason Andrew of Norte Maar, and thank you Cherry Provost of the literary committee of the National Arts Club for supporting poetry and particularly this event for seven years running.

Studio visit: Brece Honeycutt

Dara and James write:

The history of modern art features many groundbreaking collaborations between artists and poets. "Inventing Abstraction," the exhibition now on view at the Museum of Modern Art, includes several examples of such collaborations. One favorite is La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France, by the poet Blaise Cendrars and the painter Sonia Delaunay. More recently there was Breath, a collaboration in the early 1980s between the sculptor Christopher Wilmarth and the poet Frederick Morgan, who had translated seven poems by Mallarmé. Poets House maintains a collection of many additional examples. 

The Bushwick nonprofit Norte Maar, which is dedicated to "collaborative projects in the arts," has now underwritten a number of publications bringing artists and poets together. When the artist Brece Honeycutt was selected for an upcoming project, she approached Dara to contribute original poetry (Brece had heard Dara read at Norte Maar's celebration of John Cage.) Their book is slated for publication this spring. 

As Brece works through ideas for the book, she welcomed us at her studio in Sheffield, Massachusetts. 

Brece works in an antique barn that was transported from Vermont and recently reclad in a new timber facade. The light above was repurposed from a nearby train station. (All photographs by James Panero.)

The light-filled workspace overlooks a small pond that used to be the town's skating rink.

Brece works in a variety of media. Spools of yarn, vintage washboards, books on flowers, and papery wasps nests are all integrated into her diverse practice.  

Brece has many projects going on in her studio. Here she is at her loom creating a rag rug.

Brece spins and knits her own fiber sculptures. 

For our collaboration, Brece is using various plants, vegetables, and objects to hand dye paper. 

Brece makes her own dyes from leaves and plants she has collected in the area. Here the leaves are soaking in water, which will be used to stain the pages. 

Goldenrod, drying in the attic, will be used for additional dyes. 

Once Brece has the stains, she adds additional objects as resists and presses the pages together overnight. When she opens them up, she discovers how the foliage and other elements have left their marks on the paper. 

On one wall Brece has pinned prototypes for the book. Here Brece has written out one of Dara's poems on hand-made paper (above) and hand-stitched the binding of some pages (below). Dara and Brece are experimenting with different page formats and working through ideas of how best to translate Brece's handmade book art to multiple production. 

Brece and Dara look over pages in production. Brece's stand-along paper sculptures hang on the back wall.

A panorama of Brece's studio.