Contemplating Marie Ponsot and Teaching Writing Again

Marie Ponsot, just as I remember her, quiet and gentle. She is 96 now.

When I was in college, I taught writing.  I was supposed to be a team teacher with a professor, but both of her parents tragically passed away, so I taught the entire semester on my own.  I loved it.  The professor in charge of the team teachers was Marie Ponsot.  She was a wonderful teacher.  She was a teacher, a writer, and a poet.  I read her teacher's handbook and used the text.  It was a great way to teach writing because it gave the students the freedom to write without fear of failure.  By the time it was time to hand in an essay to be graded, they had already worked and reworked it in class, and really learned how to write an essay, so they did very well.
My daughter is in a home school co-op, and I'm going to be teaching some writing classes there.  I repurchased those books from a used book store since I couldn't find my own.  It's been so nice to revisit Professor Ponsot's writing again.  I've been going through the exercises myself as well to be sure I remember how to do everything.  Then I have to modify the program from a college level course to a middle school/high school level.  I'm also going to be working with the younger kids on creative writing.  I think what I'll do is have them compose the story with each child taking turns for each sentence.  I'll write them all down and have the children illustrate their sentences and then make it into a book that they wrote themselves.  For the middle schoolers, we'll work on a few different types of poetry so they have some structure to follow and then see that they can all write a poem.  We can go through an exercise to describe in word pictures where they are right then...what they see, feel, hear, and maybe I'll bring in something so they can describe a scent too.  If the weather is nice, we will do this outside.  The older kids will learn how to write and compose an essay.  I think I'll teach them how to write a sonnet as well since they will be able to understand rhythm and rhyme schemes.
I'd love to give them some passion for writing and the confidence that they can do it.

Marie Ponsot's "The Green Dark" contains a poem about a place where she just sat and noticed what was around her like I do with my daughter when sketching/writing.  It is a place that was meaningful for me while growing up in Queens.  "Jamaica Wild Life Center, Queens, NY" is where I went for many walks with my father and grandmother and later took my nephews...I still have yet to take my children there.  The other poems are wonderful too...raw and honest describing her experience at her mother's grave, the truth that God's plan of sex is tender, nothing like the distorted view presented in pornography, and in fact, common speech, and experiencing strained relationships between parents and children. She chose some of these poems, purposely I think, to present to her college level poetry class, to have us reevaluate ideas presented to us in the present age and in the arena of a liberal college.  What a joy it was to be taught poetry by its author, and someone so honest and good.

Jamaica Wild Life Center, Queens, NY

Marie Ponsot 

On a south wind the sea air off

the flats and inlets of Jamaica Bay

mirrors as they do,

almost wavelessly, space recast as

flatness, long

diminishings of blue

borne lightly in toward earth colors, steel-lit ochres,

rose-mucky brown, greens.

I am a window that takes this in

like a door, or mouth.

I spit nothing out. 

I wait --like the egrets, 

egrets spread on distant trees

like a wash of table-linen

for the sun to dry.

Were I a room I'd be stuffed

by what windows admit

I transfigure

to the bite-sized images

intelligence eats & eats

eagerly.

Splotches of white

contract, lift

into springing figures; bird.

One by one, one is a leader, up

off the green dark

they go into sun.

They are coming this way 

to lunch in the shallows.

I too am good at hunger;

it never deserts me.

I admit as I am able

frank delight

in the deaths and decisions 

of visible appetite.

Deep delight;

it is for--not of--myslelf,

it is for you

I write

of the storage and freshness

of keepers

of the lfe

of appetite. 

Copyrite 1988 by Marie Ponsot