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Mute Objects of Expression
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Mute Objects of Expression

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Francis Ponge boldly proclaims his poetic goal in Mute Objects of Expression: "To accept the challenge that objects offer to language." These objects—less chosen than received spontaneously—are perceived with inimitable Pongean humor and rendered into glimmering still lifes. He gives voice to the often unnoticed aspects of natural objects and beings. Shunning familiar poetic modes, Ponge forges new visions, images drawn from nature, from mythology and the classics. In this volume, springing from the Loire countryside in the early 1940s, Ponge’s "prôems" recall the violent perfume of the mimosa, the cries of carnations, and the flirtations of wasps. From a small note- book, his sole supply of paper withinthe wartime deprivations, he composes repeated drafts of an innovative form combining poetry with analysis and impish play. Despite the demoralizing clouds of Occupation, Ponge wrests a soaring paean to his beloved sliver of Provence.
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Praise for Mute Objects of Expression

No poet has looked more determinedly or more ferociously at things than Francis Ponge. —Peter Sirr

Ponge forfeits no resource of language, natural or unnatural. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention. —James Merrill

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. —Leonard Schwartz

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. —American Poet Journal
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Excerpt

Mute Objects of Expression

BANKS OF THE LOIRE

Roanne, May 24, 1941

From now on, may nothing ever cause me to go back on my resolve: never sacrifice the object of my study in order to enhance some verbal turn discovered on the subject, nor piece together any such discoveries in a poem. Always go back to the object itself, to its raw quality, its difference: particularly its difference from what I’ve (just then) written about it. May my work be one of continual rectification of expression on behalf of the raw object (with no a priori concern about the form of that expression). Therefore, writing about the Loire from a place along the banks of the river, I must constantly immerse my eyes and mind in it. Any time they dry up over an expression, dip them back into the waters of the river. Recognize the greater right of the object, its inalienable right, in relation to any poem... No poem ever being free from absolute judgment a minima on the part of the poem’s object, nor from accusation of counterfeit.

About the Author

Francis Ponge
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About the Author

Lee Fahnestock
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