Francis Ponge

Born in 1899, Francis Ponge studied both law and philosophy before taking up a variety of editorial and teaching jobs. Le parti pris des choses, published by Gallimard in 1942, caught the attention of writers and artists. Wide recognition came in the sixties when Gallimard published several large collections of his poetry and essays. Ponge avoided appeals to emotion and symbolism, and instead sought to minutely recreate the world of experience of everyday objects with playful neologisms and his own phenomenological ballet. He described his poetry as “a description-definition-literary artwork” that avoided both the drabness of a dictionary and the inadequacy of poetry. He died in 1989.