Bøger af Francis Ponge

"Larson's treatment of Ponge's tone is accessible and in being accessible reflects well the book's imagery and undulations of the natural spirit. What better platform for revolt and uprising than in being nurtured into confidence?" --Greg Bem, Yellow Rabbits ReviewsOn the 50th anniversary of its original publication, The Song Cave is honored to publish the first English translation of Francis Ponge's Nioque of the Early-Spring. Ostensibly a book written to honor the season itself and the cycle of time, upon its first publication in Paris in May 1968, these notes took on a greater metaphorical meaning within this context, addressing the need for new beginnings and revolution.Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was born in Montpellier, France, and is most famously the author of The Voice of Things (1942), Soap (1967) and The Making of the Prairie (1971). During World War II, Ponge joined the French Resistance. He also worked for the National Committee of Journalists, and was literary and artistic director of the communist weekly newspaper L'Action. From 1952 to 1967 he held a professorship at the Alliance Française in Paris, and was a visiting professor at Barnard College and Columbia University. Ponge's awards included the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Académie française's French National Poetry Prize and the Grand prix of the Société des gens de lettres.

The final chapter in Francis Ponge's interrogation of unassuming objectsWritten from 1967 to 1973 over a series of early mornings in seclusion in his country home, The Table offers a final chapter in Francis Ponge's interrogation of the unassuming objects in his life: in this case, the table upon which he wrote. In his effort to get at the presence lying beneath his elbow, Ponge charts out a space of silent consolation that lies beyond (and challenges) scientific objectivity and poetic transport. This is one of Ponge's most personal, overlooked, and--because it was the project he was working on when he died--his least processed works. It reveals the personal struggle Ponge engaged in throughout all of his writing, a hesitant uncertainty he usually pared away from his published texts that is at touching opposition to the manufactured, "durable mother" of the table on and of which he here writes.

In this work, begun during the German occupation, the eminent French poet and philosopher began to turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open form, a kind of prose poem that recounted its own process of coming into being along with the final result.

Through translations by two major contemporary poets and a scholar intimate with the Ponge canon, this volume offers selections of mostly earlier poetry --Le parti pris des choses, Pièces, Proêmes, and Nouveau nouveau recueil--as representative of the strongest work of this modern French master.