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Selected Poems
Through translations by two major contemporary poets and a scholar intimate with the Ponge canon, this volume offers selections of mostly earlier poetry —Le parti pris des choses, Pièces, Proêmes, and Nouveau nouveau recueil—as representative of the strongest work of this modern French master.
220 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1994
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About the author
Francis Ponge
82 books92 followersFrancis Jean Gaston Alfred Ponge was a French essayist and poet. Influenced by surrealism, he developed a form of prose poem, minutely examining everyday objects.
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July 10, 2023Defining prose poetry is a lot of fun because not everyone agrees on its definition. In fact, some hard asses still say it's not poetry at all.
To me, it's simply prose with a richer poetic content, kind of like 5% milk-fat yogurt vs. the fat-free junk.
I picked this book up because the French poet Francis Ponge is supposed to be one of the premier masters of the trade (after some garçon or other who also excelled at it called "Baudelaire"). In addition to getting prosey with his poesy, Ponge is into "things." Specifically the William Carlos Williams "no ideas but in things" things.
So a lot of these poems are named after animals, birds, bugs, amphibians, reptiles, and objects. The length varies -- some less than a page, others five pages. I definitely preferred the shorter ones over the longer ones.
Overall, I wish I enjoyed Ponge's stuff more than I did. That said, I kept hitting ones I enjoyed very much, making the ticket to ride worth its price. Here's one I enjoyed, just to give you a sample:
The Pleasures of the Door
Kings never touch doors.
They're not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great, friendly panels, to turn towards it to put in back in place -- to hold a door in your arms.
The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment.
With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in -- of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.
(C.K. Williams, translator)
See how simple? Just a door, but in the hands of Francis Ponge, so much more!
To me, it's simply prose with a richer poetic content, kind of like 5% milk-fat yogurt vs. the fat-free junk.
I picked this book up because the French poet Francis Ponge is supposed to be one of the premier masters of the trade (after some garçon or other who also excelled at it called "Baudelaire"). In addition to getting prosey with his poesy, Ponge is into "things." Specifically the William Carlos Williams "no ideas but in things" things.
So a lot of these poems are named after animals, birds, bugs, amphibians, reptiles, and objects. The length varies -- some less than a page, others five pages. I definitely preferred the shorter ones over the longer ones.
Overall, I wish I enjoyed Ponge's stuff more than I did. That said, I kept hitting ones I enjoyed very much, making the ticket to ride worth its price. Here's one I enjoyed, just to give you a sample:
The Pleasures of the Door
Kings never touch doors.
They're not familiar with this happiness: to push, gently or roughly before you one of these great, friendly panels, to turn towards it to put in back in place -- to hold a door in your arms.
The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; this quick hand-to-hand, during which your progress slows for a moment, your eye opens up and your whole body adapts to its new apartment.
With a friendly hand you hold on a bit longer, before firmly pushing it back and shutting yourself in -- of which you are agreeably assured by the click of the powerful, well-oiled latch.
(C.K. Williams, translator)
See how simple? Just a door, but in the hands of Francis Ponge, so much more!
February 8, 2015
POETRY OF FRANCIS PONGE
I consider it as one of my miraculous reading encounters to have discovered this great poetry book of Francis Ponge. I first read about it in Italo Calvino's book, "Why read Classics?"
Ponge possesses a unique way of seeing. For him, seeing comes before words. Reading him gives us new eyes to see ordinary objects. He is almost ascetic in his approach to things of the external world. He is at once a spectator and participant in the exterior world. He zooms in on things and comes up with a vision that appeases and astonishes us. Ponge wants us to look afresh at all that surrounds us, to respect and love it, so that there can be the proper harmonious relationship between the human and nonhuman. In that way he can be called a renaissance poet who creates a new humanism. Interestingly, the subjects of his fables belong to a lower world than of Gods and heroes of antiquity.
His prose poems prod us to meditate - “Yes, I am a plant, a leaf, a pebble or an oyster”. Through it, like a scientific professor, he creates a new form and a poetic encyclopedia that accounts for man’s universe and justifies the creator.
Let us see two of his poems in this book
THE CRATE (Le Cageot)
"Halfway between cage (Cage) and cachot (Prison cell) the French language has cageot (Crate), a simple openwork container for transporting fruits that is sure to sicken at the slightest hint of suffocation.
Constructed so as to be easily demolished after use, it can’t serve twice. So it doesn’t last even as long as its highly perishable contents.
On all the street corners, near the market it shines with the modest glow of white wood. Still brand new and a bit aghast at the awkward situation, dumped irretrievably on the public thoroughfare, it is, all in all, a thoroughly likeable object-yet one whose fate doesn’t warrant our overlong attention."
THE PLEASURES OF A DOOR
"Kings never touch doors.
It is a joy unknown to them: pushing open whether gently or roughly, one of those great familiar panels, turning to put it back in place-holding a door in one’s embrace.
….the joy of grasping one of those tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; the quick contact in which, with forward motion briefly arrested, the eye opens wide, and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.
With a friendly hand you hold it a bit longer, before giving it a decided shove and closing yourself in, a condition pleasantly confirmed by the click of the strong but well-oiled lock spring."
There is a braveness to efface the artist in his poems and to merge the object and the language into one. He considers the verbal world of language as valid and as the external as the physical world. In Ponge’s world, it is the word , in its singular form, which reveals a life beyond functional existence. For Ponge, word and world are intertwined and there are two ways of understanding our existence: Words illumine the world, and the world illumines the words. This viewpoint I think forms the core of his writings.
In his prose poems, he offers a view of life transcribed into mute symbols around us-Pebbles, trees, flowers, sea, candles, oyster or even cigarettes. He expresses their mute character in moral terms. He recognizes their mortality, vulnerability and bestows on them a heroic vision by projecting more than what they are. His words sculpt them. As a result we see them like figures emerging from stones or as characters from a novel. ‘They are heroes “, Ponge says in ‘Snail’, ‘beings whose existence itself is a work of art.’ This is exactly why I like him so much.
Ponge has rare sensibility and brilliance to dwell on objects without a desire to possess it or to immerse it with his personal disappointments or desires. His objectifying poetic process aims to grasping thing-in-itself. Do not mistake me here. Ponge is no partisan of art for art sake.
Man arbitrarily placed in the world, makes an arbitrary choice by allowing himself to survive in it before being arbitrarily removed from it like the crate, used only once and then tossed on the trash heap. The poet having chosen literature to make his life meaningful, which can only partially convey his meaning like the work of any man, can only partially express man the cosmos.
In his poem ‘Pebble’, he says that the pebble, the final offspring of a race of giants, is of the same stone as its enormous forbears. If life offers no truth, it nonetheless offers possibilities. For trees, there may be no way out of their ‘treehood’, ‘by the means of trees’-leaves wither and fall-but they do not give up. They go on leafing season after season. They are not ‘resigned’. This is the first lesson, ‘the heroic vision’, as I mentioned earlier, and their first weapon against mortality. Snails, Flowers and Pebbles – all express an indomitable will and a striving for perfection by whatever means are unique to them: the tree has leaves, the snail its silver wake, man his words. Man also possesses all the ‘virtues’ of the world he lives in: the fearful fearlessness of the shrimp, the stubbornness of the oyster, the determination of water, the cigarette’s ability to create its own environment and its own destruction. Rather than using things as images of human attributes, he covertly uses human attributes as images of things around us (This is quite interesting) .
Ponge underlines that the ultimate weapon is the work of art, the sublime regenerative possibility, which man carries within himself, like the oyster its pearl, the orange in its pip. His poems are not ‘morals’ in any didactic sense, but they are lessons, models of exemplary virtue to follow.
I am sure that next time when you observe a crate in a busy market or hold the knob of your door, you will pause to ponder and salute its being with a benign smile.
I consider it as one of my miraculous reading encounters to have discovered this great poetry book of Francis Ponge. I first read about it in Italo Calvino's book, "Why read Classics?"
Ponge possesses a unique way of seeing. For him, seeing comes before words. Reading him gives us new eyes to see ordinary objects. He is almost ascetic in his approach to things of the external world. He is at once a spectator and participant in the exterior world. He zooms in on things and comes up with a vision that appeases and astonishes us. Ponge wants us to look afresh at all that surrounds us, to respect and love it, so that there can be the proper harmonious relationship between the human and nonhuman. In that way he can be called a renaissance poet who creates a new humanism. Interestingly, the subjects of his fables belong to a lower world than of Gods and heroes of antiquity.
His prose poems prod us to meditate - “Yes, I am a plant, a leaf, a pebble or an oyster”. Through it, like a scientific professor, he creates a new form and a poetic encyclopedia that accounts for man’s universe and justifies the creator.
Let us see two of his poems in this book
THE CRATE (Le Cageot)
"Halfway between cage (Cage) and cachot (Prison cell) the French language has cageot (Crate), a simple openwork container for transporting fruits that is sure to sicken at the slightest hint of suffocation.
Constructed so as to be easily demolished after use, it can’t serve twice. So it doesn’t last even as long as its highly perishable contents.
On all the street corners, near the market it shines with the modest glow of white wood. Still brand new and a bit aghast at the awkward situation, dumped irretrievably on the public thoroughfare, it is, all in all, a thoroughly likeable object-yet one whose fate doesn’t warrant our overlong attention."
THE PLEASURES OF A DOOR
"Kings never touch doors.
It is a joy unknown to them: pushing open whether gently or roughly, one of those great familiar panels, turning to put it back in place-holding a door in one’s embrace.
….the joy of grasping one of those tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly; the quick contact in which, with forward motion briefly arrested, the eye opens wide, and the whole body adjusts to its new surroundings.
With a friendly hand you hold it a bit longer, before giving it a decided shove and closing yourself in, a condition pleasantly confirmed by the click of the strong but well-oiled lock spring."
There is a braveness to efface the artist in his poems and to merge the object and the language into one. He considers the verbal world of language as valid and as the external as the physical world. In Ponge’s world, it is the word , in its singular form, which reveals a life beyond functional existence. For Ponge, word and world are intertwined and there are two ways of understanding our existence: Words illumine the world, and the world illumines the words. This viewpoint I think forms the core of his writings.
In his prose poems, he offers a view of life transcribed into mute symbols around us-Pebbles, trees, flowers, sea, candles, oyster or even cigarettes. He expresses their mute character in moral terms. He recognizes their mortality, vulnerability and bestows on them a heroic vision by projecting more than what they are. His words sculpt them. As a result we see them like figures emerging from stones or as characters from a novel. ‘They are heroes “, Ponge says in ‘Snail’, ‘beings whose existence itself is a work of art.’ This is exactly why I like him so much.
Ponge has rare sensibility and brilliance to dwell on objects without a desire to possess it or to immerse it with his personal disappointments or desires. His objectifying poetic process aims to grasping thing-in-itself. Do not mistake me here. Ponge is no partisan of art for art sake.
Man arbitrarily placed in the world, makes an arbitrary choice by allowing himself to survive in it before being arbitrarily removed from it like the crate, used only once and then tossed on the trash heap. The poet having chosen literature to make his life meaningful, which can only partially convey his meaning like the work of any man, can only partially express man the cosmos.
In his poem ‘Pebble’, he says that the pebble, the final offspring of a race of giants, is of the same stone as its enormous forbears. If life offers no truth, it nonetheless offers possibilities. For trees, there may be no way out of their ‘treehood’, ‘by the means of trees’-leaves wither and fall-but they do not give up. They go on leafing season after season. They are not ‘resigned’. This is the first lesson, ‘the heroic vision’, as I mentioned earlier, and their first weapon against mortality. Snails, Flowers and Pebbles – all express an indomitable will and a striving for perfection by whatever means are unique to them: the tree has leaves, the snail its silver wake, man his words. Man also possesses all the ‘virtues’ of the world he lives in: the fearful fearlessness of the shrimp, the stubbornness of the oyster, the determination of water, the cigarette’s ability to create its own environment and its own destruction. Rather than using things as images of human attributes, he covertly uses human attributes as images of things around us (This is quite interesting) .
Ponge underlines that the ultimate weapon is the work of art, the sublime regenerative possibility, which man carries within himself, like the oyster its pearl, the orange in its pip. His poems are not ‘morals’ in any didactic sense, but they are lessons, models of exemplary virtue to follow.
I am sure that next time when you observe a crate in a busy market or hold the knob of your door, you will pause to ponder and salute its being with a benign smile.
January 22, 2023
I finished this book of poetry last evening and have been trying to decide what to say about it. Ponge writes some fairly complicated poetic prose and some of it, to me, verges on poetic essays. That's especially true of his longer poems, some of which, go for several pages. I decided, for this review, I would quote a short poem and then a small portion of a longer poem for comparison. The small poem, titled The Pigeon is the following:
Belly full of grain, sail down this way,
Saintly grey belly of pigeon...
As storms pour, strut on widely spaced claws,
Overhang, encroach on the lawn,
Where first you bounced
With charming thundery cooings.
Reveal to us soon your rainbow throat...
Then fly away sideways, in a great flutter
of wings, which stretch, pleat or rip apart
the silken cover of the clouds.
The next quote is a small portion from a longer poem, about 9 pages, that to me reads more like a poetic essay, titled The Pebble:
Should I now wish to examine a particular type of stone more closely, I would choose the pebble, both because of the perfection of its form and because I can pick it up and turn it about in my hand.
Also the pebble is stone at the exact age when personality, individuality, in other words language, emerges.
As compared to the rockbed from which it derives, it is stone already fragmented and polished into a great many almost identical individuals. As compared to small bits of gravel we may consider it, because of the place where it is found and because man does not generally put it to practical use, or at least undomesticated, species of stone.
While it lies there a few days longer, with no practical significance, let us make the most of its virtues.
Belly full of grain, sail down this way,
Saintly grey belly of pigeon...
As storms pour, strut on widely spaced claws,
Overhang, encroach on the lawn,
Where first you bounced
With charming thundery cooings.
Reveal to us soon your rainbow throat...
Then fly away sideways, in a great flutter
of wings, which stretch, pleat or rip apart
the silken cover of the clouds.
The next quote is a small portion from a longer poem, about 9 pages, that to me reads more like a poetic essay, titled The Pebble:
Should I now wish to examine a particular type of stone more closely, I would choose the pebble, both because of the perfection of its form and because I can pick it up and turn it about in my hand.
Also the pebble is stone at the exact age when personality, individuality, in other words language, emerges.
As compared to the rockbed from which it derives, it is stone already fragmented and polished into a great many almost identical individuals. As compared to small bits of gravel we may consider it, because of the place where it is found and because man does not generally put it to practical use, or at least undomesticated, species of stone.
While it lies there a few days longer, with no practical significance, let us make the most of its virtues.
September 12, 2017
Prose poems that reframe everyday objects into strange and cool abstractions. When you put the book down, the world of stuff feels pleasantly unfamiliar. Sometimes in the long pieces I would realize I was reading 10 pages about a pebble and it started to feel tedious. But I'm glad to have met this book and hope I can keep with me just a little bit the playful sense of unlearning how exactly reality fits together.
July 21, 2024
The Oyster
The oyster is about as large as a medium-sized pebble, but rougher looking and less uniform in color, brilliantly whitish. An obstinately closed world, which, however can be opened: grasp it in the hollow of a dishcloth, use a chipped, not too sharp knife, then give it a few tries. Prying fingers cut themselves on it, and break their nails: crude work. Blows mark its envelope with white circles, sorts of halos.
Inside, a whole world, both food and drink: under a firmament (strictly speaking) of mother-of-pearl, the heavens above sinking onto the heavens below form a mere puddle, a viscous, greenish sack fringed with blackish lace that ebbs and flows in your eyes and nostrils.
Sometimes, though rarely, a formula purls from its nacreous throat, which is immediately used as a personal adornment. (27)
The Cycle of Seasons
Tired of holding back all winter long, the trees suddenly feel they've been had. They can't stand it any more: they release their verbiage, a flood, a vomit of green. They try to achieve a complete foliage of verbiage. So what? Let it sort itself out as it can. And, in fact, it does. There's no such thing as random foliation. They unleash, or at least they think they do, all manner of verbiage, plus twigs to hang it on. Our trunks, they think, are there to assume full responsibility. They try to hide, to merge into one another. They think they can say everything, cover the entire world with assorted verbiage: they only say "trees." They can't even hold onto birds, which leave them just as they were rejoicing in their ability to produce such unusual flowers. Always the same leaf, always the same way of unfolding, the same limit, always symmetrical leaves, symmetrically suspended! Try another leaf! - Same thing! And another! Same again! In fact nothing can stop them except, suddenly, this comment: "You can't see the woods for the trees." Another lassitude, another mood-change. "Let it all wither and drop. Now the taciturn phase, the stripping, FALL." (35)
The Mollusk
The mollusk is a being - almost a quality. It doesn't need a skeleton, just a rampart; something like paint in a tube.
Nature has abandoned all hope here of shaping plasma. She merely shows her attachment by carefully sheltering it in a jewel case, more beautiful inside than out.
So it's not just a gob of spit; but a truly precious reality.
The mollusk is endowed with terrific energy for self-closure. Strictly speaking it's nothing but a muscle, a hinge, a door-closer and its door.
A door-closer that has secreted the door. Two slightly concave doors constitute its entire dwelling.
The first and last dwelling. It stays on even after it dies.
No getting it out alive.
The slightest cell in the human body clings just as tightly to language - and vice versa.
But sometimes another being violates the tomb, if it's well made, and takes the place of the deceased builder.
As is the case of the hermit crab. (37)
Moss
Long ago the advance guard of vegetation came to a halt on the rocks, which were dumbfounded. A thousand silken velvet rods then sat down cross-legged.
From then on, ever since moss with its lance-bearers started twitching on bare rock, all nature has been caught in an inextricable predicament and, trapped underneath, panics, stampedes, suffocates.
Worse yet, hairs grew; with time, everything got darker.
Oh obsession with longer and longer hairs! Deep carpets that kneel when you sit on them now lie themselves in muddled aspiration. Hence not only suffocations but drownings.
Well, we could just scalp the old, severe, solid rock of these terry-cloth landscapes, these soggy doormats: it would be feasible, saturated as they are. (49)
from Fauna and Flora
Fauna move whereas flora unfold before our eyes.
A whole category of animate existence is taken over directly by the ground.
They are assured of their position in the world, just as their seniority assures them of their decorations.
They are not, like their vagrant kingsmen, superfluous adjuncts to the world, intruders on the earth. They don't have to wander about looking for a place to die since the earth they stand on meticulously absorbs their remains.
They don't have to worry about food and lodging, they don't devour one another: no mad pursuit, no struggle to escape, no cruelties, laments, cries, words; no fret, no fever, no murders. (69)
[...]
Or rather, which is still worse, there's nothing monstrous about them. For all their efforts to "express" themselves, they merely repeat the same expression, the same leaf, a million times. In spring when, tired of restraining themselves, no longer able to hold back, they emit a flood, a vomit of green, they think they're breaking into a polyphonic canticle, bursting out of themselves, reaching out to, embracing, all of nature; in fact they're merely producing thousands of copies of the same note, the same word, the same leaf.
A tree's reach cannot exceed its grasp. (71)
[...]
Their only means of attracting attention are postures, lines, now and then an exceptional signal, an extraordinary appeal to our eyes and sense of smell in the form of light bulbs and perfume atomizers that are called flowers and are probably wounds.
This modification of their eternal leaves must mean something. (73)
[...]
Vegetable time resolves into vegetable space, the space plants gradually occupy on a canvas forever preordained. When it's over they're stricken with lassitude, and then comes the seasonal drama. (73)
The oyster is about as large as a medium-sized pebble, but rougher looking and less uniform in color, brilliantly whitish. An obstinately closed world, which, however can be opened: grasp it in the hollow of a dishcloth, use a chipped, not too sharp knife, then give it a few tries. Prying fingers cut themselves on it, and break their nails: crude work. Blows mark its envelope with white circles, sorts of halos.
Inside, a whole world, both food and drink: under a firmament (strictly speaking) of mother-of-pearl, the heavens above sinking onto the heavens below form a mere puddle, a viscous, greenish sack fringed with blackish lace that ebbs and flows in your eyes and nostrils.
Sometimes, though rarely, a formula purls from its nacreous throat, which is immediately used as a personal adornment. (27)
The Cycle of Seasons
Tired of holding back all winter long, the trees suddenly feel they've been had. They can't stand it any more: they release their verbiage, a flood, a vomit of green. They try to achieve a complete foliage of verbiage. So what? Let it sort itself out as it can. And, in fact, it does. There's no such thing as random foliation. They unleash, or at least they think they do, all manner of verbiage, plus twigs to hang it on. Our trunks, they think, are there to assume full responsibility. They try to hide, to merge into one another. They think they can say everything, cover the entire world with assorted verbiage: they only say "trees." They can't even hold onto birds, which leave them just as they were rejoicing in their ability to produce such unusual flowers. Always the same leaf, always the same way of unfolding, the same limit, always symmetrical leaves, symmetrically suspended! Try another leaf! - Same thing! And another! Same again! In fact nothing can stop them except, suddenly, this comment: "You can't see the woods for the trees." Another lassitude, another mood-change. "Let it all wither and drop. Now the taciturn phase, the stripping, FALL." (35)
The Mollusk
The mollusk is a being - almost a quality. It doesn't need a skeleton, just a rampart; something like paint in a tube.
Nature has abandoned all hope here of shaping plasma. She merely shows her attachment by carefully sheltering it in a jewel case, more beautiful inside than out.
So it's not just a gob of spit; but a truly precious reality.
The mollusk is endowed with terrific energy for self-closure. Strictly speaking it's nothing but a muscle, a hinge, a door-closer and its door.
A door-closer that has secreted the door. Two slightly concave doors constitute its entire dwelling.
The first and last dwelling. It stays on even after it dies.
No getting it out alive.
The slightest cell in the human body clings just as tightly to language - and vice versa.
But sometimes another being violates the tomb, if it's well made, and takes the place of the deceased builder.
As is the case of the hermit crab. (37)
Moss
Long ago the advance guard of vegetation came to a halt on the rocks, which were dumbfounded. A thousand silken velvet rods then sat down cross-legged.
From then on, ever since moss with its lance-bearers started twitching on bare rock, all nature has been caught in an inextricable predicament and, trapped underneath, panics, stampedes, suffocates.
Worse yet, hairs grew; with time, everything got darker.
Oh obsession with longer and longer hairs! Deep carpets that kneel when you sit on them now lie themselves in muddled aspiration. Hence not only suffocations but drownings.
Well, we could just scalp the old, severe, solid rock of these terry-cloth landscapes, these soggy doormats: it would be feasible, saturated as they are. (49)
from Fauna and Flora
Fauna move whereas flora unfold before our eyes.
A whole category of animate existence is taken over directly by the ground.
They are assured of their position in the world, just as their seniority assures them of their decorations.
They are not, like their vagrant kingsmen, superfluous adjuncts to the world, intruders on the earth. They don't have to wander about looking for a place to die since the earth they stand on meticulously absorbs their remains.
They don't have to worry about food and lodging, they don't devour one another: no mad pursuit, no struggle to escape, no cruelties, laments, cries, words; no fret, no fever, no murders. (69)
[...]
Or rather, which is still worse, there's nothing monstrous about them. For all their efforts to "express" themselves, they merely repeat the same expression, the same leaf, a million times. In spring when, tired of restraining themselves, no longer able to hold back, they emit a flood, a vomit of green, they think they're breaking into a polyphonic canticle, bursting out of themselves, reaching out to, embracing, all of nature; in fact they're merely producing thousands of copies of the same note, the same word, the same leaf.
A tree's reach cannot exceed its grasp. (71)
[...]
Their only means of attracting attention are postures, lines, now and then an exceptional signal, an extraordinary appeal to our eyes and sense of smell in the form of light bulbs and perfume atomizers that are called flowers and are probably wounds.
This modification of their eternal leaves must mean something. (73)
[...]
Vegetable time resolves into vegetable space, the space plants gradually occupy on a canvas forever preordained. When it's over they're stricken with lassitude, and then comes the seasonal drama. (73)
December 24, 2007
the rain, the smoke, the thing itself
January 19, 2009
Pure. Gorgeous. Prose poems about ordinary things that make them deeply, intimately, intricately interesting.
April 2, 2025
For those unfamiliar with Ponge, he is a prose poetry surrealist. The first half of this book should be part of every science program to help future scientists question their assumptions and look at everyday phenomena in new ways.
However, Francis Ponge isn't my favorite surrealist. I can appreciate him but his scientific tone doesn't suit me. That's somewhat of a surprise to me because I've been a science lover and grew up reading the books of Stephen Gould and Scientific American magazines.
I wouldn't turn anyone away from Ponge, whether people fishing in surrealism to see if it suits them or people like myself who already have a decided surrealist leaning. However, I will be turning this book loose to bend minds in rural Alabama. And if I were rich and Ponge where still alive, I would happily pay for him to come to Alabama and write observations on the people he encounters here.
However, Francis Ponge isn't my favorite surrealist. I can appreciate him but his scientific tone doesn't suit me. That's somewhat of a surprise to me because I've been a science lover and grew up reading the books of Stephen Gould and Scientific American magazines.
I wouldn't turn anyone away from Ponge, whether people fishing in surrealism to see if it suits them or people like myself who already have a decided surrealist leaning. However, I will be turning this book loose to bend minds in rural Alabama. And if I were rich and Ponge where still alive, I would happily pay for him to come to Alabama and write observations on the people he encounters here.
December 11, 2024
"Ideas are not my forte. I don't manipulate them easily. Instead they manipulate me. Give me a sort of queasiness or nausea. I don't really like to be thrown among them." Francis Ponge
If you like prose poems, Ponge is your man. If you've not read much in prose poetry, I think Ponge will make you a fan, possibly a devout one. Playful but also serious, contemplative, even. Despite his claim above about "ideas", he does explore ideas, just not with grand abstract pronouncements. Instead, he does so implicitly through close observation of the concrete world, often the smallest and most mundane objects, animate and inanimate.
If you like prose poems, Ponge is your man. If you've not read much in prose poetry, I think Ponge will make you a fan, possibly a devout one. Playful but also serious, contemplative, even. Despite his claim above about "ideas", he does explore ideas, just not with grand abstract pronouncements. Instead, he does so implicitly through close observation of the concrete world, often the smallest and most mundane objects, animate and inanimate.
July 18, 2022
Francis Ponge's poems have been called the most difficult to translate into another language. This French-English volume of Ponge's poems contains excellent translations by editor, Margaret Guiten, and by John Montague and C.K. Williams. Born in 1899, Ponge began writing in Paris at 20 years old but wasn't known until the 1942 publication of "Le parti pris des choses", translated in English as "The nature of things", aptly so as his declared intention was to compose a new "De Rerum Natura". Beloved poet of Sartre and Derrida, Italo Calvino has written the Ponge "may be the Lucretius of our time, reconstructing the physical nature of the world by means of the impalpable, powder-fine dust of words.
July 18, 2010
I read a couple of Ponge's poems online and was struck pretty forcefully that reading him in that format doesn't really work, because the poems are just too dense to really sit with them online, at least if you're me and can only rest your eyes in one place for a second or so before you have to skim forward. So I got this book, which really delivered on the promise of those tight, gnomic paragraphs I saw online.
This collection is in two sections, "Siding with Things" and "Pieces," and I think I preferred the work in "Siding," for the way it felt more focused, more impacted and mysteriously dense. There's a level of cerebral jumpiness and wit that crops up in poems like "The Cigarette," The Crate" and "The Trees Decompose in a Sphere of Fog" that I haven't seen anywhere else, that I take as being the distinguishing mark of Ponge's work.
I like a lot of the work in "Pieces," too, but some poems, especially the longer works, like the two Spider poems, I feel like I've seen elsewhere, in Romantic work like poems by Shelley, Whitman, and even O'Hara. I don't think there's anything wrong with these poems, and I'd certainly lean on them if I was teaching a selection of Ponge because they are lucid and explicit about the goals of these poems. But I feel, too, that they are in their form and their movements, their inclusions and exclusions, less particular, peculiar, and distinct. It feels like a handful of poets could've written them.
Still, a great collection, and one I found deeply rewarding and that I hope to come back to again.
This collection is in two sections, "Siding with Things" and "Pieces," and I think I preferred the work in "Siding," for the way it felt more focused, more impacted and mysteriously dense. There's a level of cerebral jumpiness and wit that crops up in poems like "The Cigarette," The Crate" and "The Trees Decompose in a Sphere of Fog" that I haven't seen anywhere else, that I take as being the distinguishing mark of Ponge's work.
I like a lot of the work in "Pieces," too, but some poems, especially the longer works, like the two Spider poems, I feel like I've seen elsewhere, in Romantic work like poems by Shelley, Whitman, and even O'Hara. I don't think there's anything wrong with these poems, and I'd certainly lean on them if I was teaching a selection of Ponge because they are lucid and explicit about the goals of these poems. But I feel, too, that they are in their form and their movements, their inclusions and exclusions, less particular, peculiar, and distinct. It feels like a handful of poets could've written them.
Still, a great collection, and one I found deeply rewarding and that I hope to come back to again.
February 18, 2017
ackward translations, some of the descriptions are interesting, but none of the topics are particularly charming..probably why Ponge remains obscure
January 27, 2017
At his best, Francis Ponge's poems are delightful reads, full of surprises, turns, and humor. They explore a variety of subjects with apt metaphors and under a closer lens than poets often dare. "The Mollusk," "The Cigarette," "Bread," Snails," and "Notes Toward a Shellfish" are stand-outs, in my mind, examples of the reaches of a subject. Ponge's diction, at its best, succeeds in unencumbering readers to be carried away by words. Though many of Ponge's later poems in this Selected seem to me dense drudgery (maybe a reflection of his personal life which, I believe, at that time was one of a recluse), Siding With Things is a beautiful collection. I certainly will return to Ponge's ugly-beautiful explorations of shells, secretions, and the scale of things.
February 10, 2008
I suspect the problem is the translation, but I'm far from bowled over. A lot of the pieces feel like first-go journal entries that haven't gone through their editing process yet. The repetition of ideas like the horse's long legs being as if on high heels feels like he's trying to draw more out of the tepid metaphor. I think that he catches his stride with "Pebbles" and "Swallows," but the translation, again (and it may be impossible to really translate), loses so much of the real pop of the French rhyme and half-rhyme and almost proto-hiphop rhythm in those pieces. It was an engaging, curious and strange read for me, but the jacket notes, in retrospect, seem like pure hyperbole.
December 26, 2009
i read The Nature of Things at the beginning of the year and loved it, but somehow this larger collection just bored the hell out of me. i went and compared some of the poems that appeared in both books, and sure enough, this book's translation is just nowhere near as good. i mean who knows, maybe it's truer to the original, and the fault is ponge's, but who cares: this book is just really, really, really dry and boring.
May 5, 2017
Everyone should read this book immediately
This is a book of prose poetry that far exceeded all my expectations and it is a book that made me think about everything around me very excitedly
Some of the translations are a little bit out of control but ultimately it's fine
This is a book of prose poetry that far exceeded all my expectations and it is a book that made me think about everything around me very excitedly
Some of the translations are a little bit out of control but ultimately it's fine
June 28, 2008
A pioneer in the international history of prose-poetry.
July 21, 2009
always himself but a little like dr williams and elizabeth bishop.
wonderful prose poems which he some times lineated as poems
wonderful prose poems which he some times lineated as poems
December 10, 2015
LOVE. A must read. The translation from French to English is stellar. Ponge makes me want to learn French.
June 5, 2016
I think the translations could not really convey Ponge's genius.
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