RIP Marie Ponsot (1921–2019)

We are deeply saddened to hear of the death of Marie Ponsot, at the age of 98. The New York Times's Tess Taylor remembers Ponsot, writing:

After a promising start as a published poet in the 1950s, Marie Ponsot put her career aside. She was a single mother in New York City, with seven children to raise. But she did not stop writing. She filled notebooks with her poems — and then stashed much of her work in a drawer, showing it strictly to friends.

It would be almost a quarter-century before her poetry began to re-emerge, and when it did, she found wide acclaim.

By the end of her long life — she died on Friday at 98 — Ms. Ponsot had translated dozens of books, published seven volumes of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, taught at Queens College and, served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2014. She died at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital in Manhattan, her daughter, Monique Ponsot, said.

Ms. Ponsot was first published in the 1950s by Lawrence Ferlinghetti — the Yonkers-born poet who championed the Beat poets from his celebrated San Francisco bookstore, City Lights — in the same series as Allen Ginsberg.

The two had become friends in Paris, where Ms. Ponsot met her future husband, Claude Ponsot, a painter, while she was studying at the Sorbonne.

Though Ms. Ponsot (pronounced pon-SO) came under Mr. Ferlinghetti’s wing, she hardly wrote in the freewheeling personal style of Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and other Beats.

Ponsot was a long-time contributor to Poetry. Her relationship with the magazine began in the 1950s and culminated with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry, in 2013. Celebrate Ponsot's life by heading here to read one of her many poems.