Praise
Francis Ponge’s prose accepts the truth that things themselves defy our language. The writing accepts this, but is not resigned to it: in Ponge, the presence of trees, ‘the slow production of wood,’ senility itself, bespeak a blazing conflagration that has not happened, which is to say that in Ponge, Being holds out against its every nemesis, and both Being and Non-Being offer themselves to our dream of silence. Ponge is the great poet of our being with things.
Ponge wrote like a scientist whose language is poetry. He was endlessly inquisitive about his subjects—including the wasp, birds, the carnation, "The Pleasure of the Pine Woods"—but what we end up learning is how the mind animates the world.
Ponge, to be sure, forfeits no resource of language, natural or unnatural. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention.
No poet has looked more determinedly or more ferociously at things than Francis Ponge.
Extras
Read his New York Times obituary here:
Francis Ponge, considered the last of the postwar generation of French poets, died Saturday at his home in Le Bar-sur-Loup, in the Maritime Alps, his family said today. He was 89 years old.
Mr. Ponge, who was a member of the French Resistance during World War II, gained fame through his ”thing-poetry,” lengthy, detailed descriptions of objects, published mainly between 1942 and 1967.
He had lived as a recluse for the last 20 years.
Mr. Ponge took part in conferences at universities in Italy, Canada and the United States in the 1960’s, and was a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York in 1967. He won several international poetry prizes in addition to the French Academy’s 1972 grand prize for poetry.