Marie Ponsot to Receive 29th Aiken Taylor Award

Marie Ponsot is the recipient of this year’s Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, announced the Sewanee Review. Known for her poetry and her translation, Marie Ponsot is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and in 2013 won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in American poetry.

Sewanee Vice-Chancellor John McCardell will present the award to Ponsot at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 25, in Convocation Hall; after the presentation, Ponsot will give a reading, and there will be a reception in her honor. 

On Tuesday, March 24, David Yezzi, poet and critic of Johns Hopkins University and the New Criterion, will give a lecture on Ponsot’s career at 4:30 p.m., in the McGriff Alumni House, also followed by a reception. At both events there will be opportunities to purchase books. 

Twenty-nine years ago, through the generosity of Dr. K. P. A. Taylor, the Sewanee Review established an annual award honoring a distinguished American poet for the work of a career. Howard Nemerov was the first poet honored and was followed by Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht and W. S. Merwin. The other recipients of this important prize include Maxine Kumin, Wendell Berry, Donald Hall, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, William Logan, Debora Greger and  last year, Dana Gioia.

A native New Yorker, Ponsot moved to Paris for three years at the end of World War II—a decision that altered the course of her life. On her Atlantic crossing she became friends with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who later published her first book of poems, “True Minds” (1957), on his City Lights Books press. In Paris she met the man who would be her husband for a time and father to seven of her children. While raising her children as a single mother, she never gave up on poetry.  “I did learn one great, crucial thing that I think every writer should be taught; that you can always find 10 minutes in the day to write,” Ponsot said. 

And write she did: six collections of poetry; more than 35 translations of fairy tales and fables from the French to English; and two books on the fundamentals of writings, still used in classrooms today. Ponsot taught in the graduate programs at Queens College for 30 years, as well as at Beijing United University, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, New York University, and, most recently, Columbia University. Her honors include the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Prize, a creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shaughnessy Medal of the Modern Language Association and the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Society of America. 

Ponsot is a formalist—saying that forms “create an almost bodily pleasure in the poet. ... The forms are not restrictive. They pull things out of you. They help you remember.” She also thinks poetry should be deeply pleasurable, even fun: “We need to get back to the joy of being a poet—not have it always be written in anguish, or have to be mean spirited or edgy and black-browed and ominous. ... Poetry should just be a great joy, and we should have perfect freedom to enjoy it in that simpleminded way.”

For more information go to <re​view.sewanee.edu/about/aikentaylor>.