Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge: Selected Poems, Edited by Margaret Guiton, Translated by Margaret Guiton, John Montague, and C.K. Williams.

Francis Ponge’s prose poems can be as difficult or as easy as you want to make them. They are simple to read, but seem to have almost inexhaustible depth. The depth is not metaphorical, but instead literally like digging in the dirt – Ponge digs down into the history of objects and finds associative potential. Things are based in other things and humans, who usually ask things to stand in for their inner life through metaphor, are along for the ride. Humans do not rule the roost, they are objects just like rocks or water.

Take The Suitcase. In the poem, Ponge starts “My suitcase accompanies me to the Vanoise mountains,” and in typical metaphorical poetry, you would immediately expect a description of the mountains and the journey up to the height and that both descriptions would quickly stand in for the mood and mental state of the poet. However, for Ponge, the suitcase becomes the wonder, “its nickelplate shines and its thick leather exhales.” And again the expectation is that the breathing and shining should apply to us, but again Ponge shifts, “I caress its back, its neckline and flat surface.” Ponge threads a chain of associations -- a suitcase that is also a horse that is also a book that is also a chest -- all things that take us and carry us places. The objects are what matter to Ponge.

There is a great deal of object talk going on in Ponge’s poetry. For instance, in speaking of past, he wants the “past, not as memory or idea, but as matter,” echoing William Carlos William’s “No ideas but in things.” You might expect Ponge to throw his book away and just pick up a pile of dirt if he wants history. This is where Ponge might be different from someone like Williams. To Williams, metaphor attempts “reconcile the people and the rocks” while Ponge seems to find that idea wishful thinking. He’d rather avoid turning objects into people and just observe both people and objects side by side, both in their mutual totality, both potentially acting on it other but with their secular distance maintained.

Ponge’s focus is how we describe objects and how those descriptions act to keep us from the very objects we describe. For Ponge, a poem is a trap – the thing we most want to know (the object) is alienated from us by our acts of intellection, by our words. At their heart, Ponge’s poems start with a simple premise – basically that we should return to objects in our dealing with the world, we should let objects speak about us instead speaking about objects. For instance, most of the time in poetry, we move from the human theater (our emotions, experiences, situations) into passages of description that use objects as metaphors for us. Ponge addresses a world that exists with us, alongside us, and joins us in our own creation.

When I heard that Ponge's work was the darling of philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean Paul Sarte, and Jacques Derrida, I was scared at first that Ponge’s poems would just be impossible, overly rhetorical and more focused on clever arguments than the lyric passages. Surely, Ponge must be out of my league.

However, I should have known better because, like for Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, what is at stake in Ponge is how we view and write about objects and how those objects act on us. A love and admiration of objects is the stuff of poetry, and it does not necessarily follow that a person with a clear philosophical outlook on objects must also be full of rhetoric.

Don’t get me wrong, you’ll find dry arguments in Ponge, but you will also find clear eyed, shocking, and revelatory passages – how can I feel anything but impressed by a person that sees a stack of coal and notices the pile has “the same noble timidity as stars.” I’ve tried to account for coal, but never noticed the matte but luminous glint the lumps have when they hit the light.

In the poem, Earth, Ponge exclaims, using the fullness of a pun, “If speaking of earth like this makes me a miner poet, an earth tiller, that’s what I want to be!” In my mind, Ponge is a miner and there is much to admire in his digging.