Craft: Marie Ponsot

Marie Ponsot (1921–2019) was a major American poet, but she deserves a wider readership. Her first book, True Minds, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights in 1956, but she was not part of the Beat Generation or San Francisco Renaissance they typically published.

True Minds is exceedingly rare

Ponsot began writing as a child, and some of her poems were published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when she was only eight or nine years old. After completing her master’s degree in seventeenth-century literature, she married and formed a family, but when the marriage dissolved, she was left to raise seven children as a single mother¹. Her career was delayed. Perhaps delayed is the wrong word. Her second book, humorously titled after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, Admit Impediment, wasn’t published until 1981, 25 years after her first.