Tuesday, March 16, 2010, 7pm, Music Building, $20

M a r i e   P o n s o t  

Marie Ponsot is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement. She is the author of the volumes of poetry True Minds, Admit Impediment, The Bird Catcher, Springing: New and Selected Poems, and, most recently, Easy, which is forthcoming in the fall of 2009. The American Academy of Arts and Letters, in awarding Ms. Ponsot the Academy Award in Literature, has said: “…Marie Ponsot invented her own forms and gave us a poetry like no other. A writer of powerful feelings and razor-sharp wit, she is that totally American phenomenon, the self-invented genius…. A writer of tough, available, elegant poetry, she has created over the decades her own school of New York poetry.” The New York Times Book Review has said of the work of Ms. Ponsot: “Accomplishments like this, carried over eight decades…are what American art is all about.” The New Yorker has said: “Ponsot attends to elegant forms without losing sight of what they are there to express: the cadences of a life passionately considered.” Marilyn Hacker has said: “Marie Ponsot’s poems are brave and wise, the work of a writer as knowledgeable in human secrets and human history as she is in her craft. Here is a poet whose passion is intelligence, whose wisdom informs and fuels passion; here language and knowledge reveal their intricate and intimate connections.” Time Out New York has described Ms. Ponsot as “one of America’s strongest poets.”

photo of Marie Ponsot: Nicholas Latimer