The acclaimed poet Marie Ponsot began writing poetry for America in the 1950s. Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill writes about  the poet's love of language in the February 14 issue. Here we offer a few of Ponsot's compositions for the magazine:

Conception

Rejoice rejoice that the taken seed

It is time someone said a good word for our cities. With unmentionable slum conditions, snarled traffic, architectural anarchy and mounting air pollution, they are incontrovertibly appalling. Living in a city block that can hold its own with almost any for visual disarray and stylelessness, and within a city area where the air-pollution index is reckoned the highest in the nation, we editors are unlikely to indulge in fantasies of urban eulogy. But on sober reflection, we wonder if things are really so much worse than they used to be.

Sighing for the good, clean, prewar days, our oldish friends affirm that things are really much worse. Yet, as we look over stacks of impartial photographs, we see evidence that such days were neither specially good nor at all clean. True, while city smells may be less nauseating than not so long ago, noise and noxious gases are surely at an all-time peak. Statistics show, however, that today's slums are less crowded and are probably less inhuman than they were two generations ago.

A good deal of demythologizing about our cities is gathered in the lead article of the January 22 New York Times Magazine by Irving Kristol, co-editor of the quarterly The Public Interest. In the past 50 years, for example, the percentage of Americans living in large cities has remained just about stationary. As in 1910, roughly one-tenth of our population inhabit cities of over one million, while less than a third live in what are cities by any definition. The great growth is in suburbs, where, more than ever in the past, people now work as well as live. Further, New York, often thought of as the typical city, is really the least typical. For even in as large a city as Philadelphia, 70 per cent of the homes are owner-occupied. Moreover, traffic congestion, claims Mr. Kristol, is no worse than it was in 1900 or 1850. We do have more vehicles, but (save for poor, untypical New York) we also have a corresponding improvement in thoroughfares.

Meanwhile, while most of the rich live in suburbs, as they always did, thus avoiding many city taxes, the cost of keeping up our cities mounts steadily. Thus, the central city continues to be inhabited by the poor, especially the newly arrived poor, who haven't yet managed to escape to the suburbs. The problem today, however, is not simply the same old problem. It is exacerbated by the "revolution of rising expectations."

This phrase is, of course, anathema to those who prefer to believe romantically that the "good old days" were just about the best of all possible worlds. Today, instead, the poor are no longer reconciled (if indeed they ever were) to living in subhuman squalor. Thanks to the mass media, which make the advantages of American standards so obviously desirable and apparently accessible, no housewife can be satisfied to cook, clean or wash in the same old way. Needs that were

According to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's recent instruction on my calling, we theologians are not to be seen or heard in the public media. We are to carry out our squabbles in code, in the pages of esoteric journals. If we have any complaints with official doctrine, we are to communicate them to the proper authorities behind closed doors, in secret. That's the theory. But on Dec. 13, for the second time this past year (see AM., 8/18/90, pp. 76-77), members of my professional group, the Catholic Theological Society of America (C.T.S.A.), spoke out, inevitably on the airwaves, criticizing Vatican actions and procedures in four areas of concern—the collegiality of bishops, the relation between the magisterium and theologians, women in the church and ecumenism. Provoked by Rome's treatment of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen and the Curran case among other incidents, the C.T.S.A. censure had been brewing for some time—but the incentive to go public came from the other side of the Atlantic.

The helicopter that lifted Richard Nixon from the White House lawn nearly three years ago seemed an angel of mercy, rescuing the nation from the long, painful nightmare of Watergate. As it turned out, however, the bad dream had its afterglow, and books and articles by the dozen promised the inside story of the final days and a psychological profile of the man at the center of the scandals. The former President has till now maintained a dignified distance from Watergate post-mortems.

The silence could not last. Richard Nixon is a personality both born and destroyed in the media. His series of conversations with David Frost, on reflection, was inevitable. He has always been compelled to bring his case directly to the people, from the time he defended his campaign expenses in the "Checkers" speech in 1952 to his long and tortured explanations of Watergate. Now, once again, he is confronting the cameras in an attempt to salvage his reputation and, perhaps, even begin a retum to public life.

The careful staging of the media event points out once more that tragic lack of a sense of propriety which seems to haunt the man and those he chooses as his associates. In fact, he is allowing his potential confession to be marketed by the show-business entrepreneur, David Frost, in the same way he allowed his Presidency to be marketed by admen, Messrs. Haldeman, Erlichman and Ziegler. None of the networks would air the series, since "checkbook journalism," the competitive bidding for personality news, is generally thought to devalue news departments. When commercial sales lagged, a few leaks hinted at startling new revelations, and the spiciest segment, dealing with Watergate, was moved from the last of the four evenings to the first, to generate press coverage and advertising revenue. It succeeded. Mr. Nixon will earn close to $1 million and Mr. Frost about twice that amount. Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and CBS all gave feature space to the series.

One shaft of sunlight that has illuminated a rather gloomy year for most Americans has been the year-long celebration in honor of George Gershwin. When Gershwin died suddenly at age 38 in 1937, the novelist John O'Hara wrote in his typically hard-boiled-sentimental style: "They tell me George Gershwin is dead, but I don't have to believe it if I don't want to." Corny or not, O'Hara's sentiments seemed to have been shared by many this year, as the many television specials, new recordings and stagings of Gershwin's work attest. In fact, the 50th anniversary appears to be closing with a rush this December as one Gershwin gala crowds another throughout the country.