Poetry Readers Challenge discussion

Selected Poems
I first read Francis Ponge years ago in the Random House Anthology of 20th Century French Poetry. It’s surprising that I pursued his work because the anthology doesn’t really contain the best of Ponge, though it has some goodies. I went from there to Lee Fahnenstock’s The Nature of Things, which is an excellent slim book, but I’d be tempted to say the Selected Poems by other translators is even better.

Ponge is a master of the prose poem. What attracts me to him is his how he sticks to the material. He rarely makes a surrealist leap or drags a metaphor to its death. He observes very closely, he likes texture, impression and the senses; he sinks into a thing’s pores and lives in it. It’s not that he doesn’t compare – a suitcase is like a horse and the leggy frog is a kind of Ophelia – but he always comes back to the thing itself and the reader always comes out with very open eyes. I love that about him.

Take “La Cigarette.” The paper is like a sleeve, but it never becomes the sleeve. It is returned to itself. In his poem “Le Pain” (Bread), the surface is like a panoramic view of the Alps, but is also its own landscape.

The Cigarette

Let’s first create the atmosphere, at once misty, dry, and dishevelled, in which the cigarette, since it itself continuously creates it, is always laid athwart.
Then its person: a little torch, much less luminous than fragrant, from which in a rhythm yet to be determined a measurable number of little lumps of ash detach themselves and fall away.
Finally, its passion: that fiery bud, flaking off into silver dandruff, held by a sleeve immediately formed by the most recent of them.

Ponge chooses his words so well. Take the beginning of “Ripe Blackberries:”

In the typographical thickets that go into the making of a poem, along a road that leads neither beyond things nor to the mind, certain fruits are formed by an agglomeration of spheres, each filled with a drop of ink.