More notes on Ponge

Notes on Ponge (quotations from Ponge in quotes, other statements from secondary sources, mainly James Merrill)

1. Parti-pris represents a bias, or a partiality

2. irreverantly and rather defiantly conflated prose and poetic textualization into what he called Proemes or objeux…objegames.

3. Like Rimbaud of Illuminations and Saison en enfer, Ponge followed in the ever-widening wake of the Baudelaireean turn to modernity

4. The Pongian “I” is not “I” but other. That is, “I” is always already made…and as such, is a part of that instrumental language that must be continually exploded, creatively undone with verbal bombs through …the rage of expression…

5. Ponge's attempts to eliminate the lyrico-subjectivity that has plagued romantic poetry from the outset.

6. Answering Hugo's call to a revolutionary poetics

7. “My critical texts, my texts on painter for example, are just as difficult, often more difficult, to write as those texts considered poetic. I make no distinction. My audacities and my scruples are the same, whatever genre you assign to the text.” Ponge interview, 1974

8. It is in realizing things in language that we are their representatives, or “ambassadors” as Ponge sometimes put it.

9. He positively dines upon the etymological root, seasoning it with fantastic gaiety and invention:

10. “You will note…. to what tools, what procedures, what rubrics one should or can appeal. To the dictionary, the encyclopedia, imagination, dreams, telescope, microscope, to both ends of the lorgnette, bifocals, puns, rhyme, contemplation, forgetfulness, volubility, silence, sleep, etc. etc…”

11. Now to consolidate the findings of “these first six pieces, night of the 12th to 13th of June 1924, amidst the white carnations in Madame Dugourd's garden.”

12. “Magnificent knucklehead, this dreamer…whose thoughts, formulated as weapons on his head, for motives of high civility curve backward d ornamentally…”

13. Words: conductors of thought, as heat or electricity..

14. Cosmos and cosmetic share a single root.

15. “I have given pleasure to the human mind.”

16. “lyricism in general disturbs me. That is, it seems to me there is something too subjective, a display of subjectivity which appears to me to be unpleasant, slightly immodest. I believe that things …that emanate from your own subjectivity ---should not be displayed. Naturally one never does anything but that.”

17. “objects represent a way of freeing myself from my subjectivity…At least I try, I know that it is not entirely feasible. I am not mad enough to believe that the apple expresses itself when I speak”

18. the polyphony of the poetic chorus of his work

19. To stand for things: Sartre also called it: revolutionary polyphonic assault on the prison house of language to give voice too, to reflect their en=soi, the phenomenological opacity in brief to resurrect and identity of the signifier to its signified

20. to stand against the anthropomorphic, logo centered discourse that disfunctions at the mimetic level, repressing or victimizing the true nature of things…

21. Later added the salvific: project or venture to revitalize, to re present the complete verbal “defintion-desc ription” of a thing in a finite medium…. wholeness as a collection of disjointed fragments or broken pieces…totalization as the unspoken agenda//he shifted the focus to the processual,

22. steps of modern writing…advancing the text as per Valery, leading to the new(er) but always already incomplete versions

23. the modern poets task as a palimpsestic exercise, an ironic denial and affirmation at the same time, perpetually incomplete and always there waiting to begin again.

24. denotative veil of things: Momon

25. that verbal mask and the rhetorical dance that accompanies it….

26. prose poem, this oxymoronic form is “dangerous and more open”

27. dialogical poetry: Bakhtin's diagological battlefield where prevailing and countervailing voice vie with one another.

A Note On Francis Ponge

"It is less a matter of observing the pebble than installing oneself in its heart
and seeing the world with its eyes, like the novelist who, in order to portray
his heroes, lets himself sink into their consciousness and describes things
and people as they appear to them."
Sartre on Ponge

Oppen on Objects

suppose, instead of an 'instant archeology'
that imagines a personification of things already known,
one imagines the first objects to become object to living consciousness-
their force is that among sensations they emerged as objects-
can we suppose, in the history of the Sacred, a greater moment ?
This is the ground the poem's meant to stand on.
George Oppen, Selected Letters, p. 248

Freedom about to be run over by several dumptrucks

And now the governors of certain states have joined the attack on Liberty. Jeb Bush, long a foe of letting others do what they want, has announced an inquiry into the death, fifteen years ago of Terry Ann Shiavo. This must be motivated by a desire to punish the husband for taking his wife off life support. Why is the Governor of the State of Florida taking such an interest in this case? Certainly it is politically motivated or perhaps more evilly it is motivated by a real belief he is right (about what he is not sure), and the others are wrong. And, in case anyone thought bigotry was relegated to the South, the Governor of the great and liberal state of Massachusetts appears to be launching a cynical attempt to stop the gay marriages in Massachusetts, the only state in which it is legal. What motivates him, this Nit Romney?

Pio Decimo Street

Turning into Tanque Verde, which somewhere turns to Houghton or Harrison, one or the other. which if you turn off too early turns into Pio Decimo, I wondered about the separation of Church and State. The broad avenue was prepared by our money after all. The magesterium is ever accomplishing a morbid conglomeration of souls. And at least it wasn't XII. At least that. Certain houses were left unattended. Others had some style, as such was translated into bricks and mortar, really in the seventies. Should we look askance at this? Lately, the church has taken a stranglehold on life and intends to squeeze everything out of it. Such small minded, such petty, such life hating men trapped in their red robes. Whatever happened to Leonardo Boff, Daniel Berrigan, Philip Berrigan, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Teihard de Chardin. Certainly the progress which abandons these people seems eternally sad.

Definitions

Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
Salvatore Quasimodo

Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
Vicente Aleixandre

All poetry has to do is to make a strong communication. All the poet has to do is listen. The poet is not an important fellow. There will also be another poet.
Stevie Smith

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.
Sylvia Plath

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
Allen Ginsberg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry.
John Cage

"Each word has a little music of its own"

Kenneth Koch. The Language of Poetry

Indio

Curios and documentary films and coconut essentials,
oils, the sound of plenty is a preface to encouragement.
Star fruit, the will and wordiness, like that of Ti Jean, whose
great work appears among the illuminated in forms like
the practice of the diamond heart, or breath squaring itself
on a fire escape, smoking alone. Does this work better for us?
Our audience, great poets of all time, would threaten
anybody. The road by some gum trees turns near the date stand,
I think to remember the Snow Top
of Mt. Shasta and the fields of poppies near Buellton, the eerie
pinkness from an embarrassment like that of the body. This is reading
near a syndicalism or the fear of dreading nothing, close
to cornered and naming. To look real you gather information.
Someone said it was
the building blocks of ideas, and yet true success is so limited.

An Essay on a certain Abyssinian Cat

My friend Liisa says I should put some of my own poetry on this blog. So here goes:

65 Manually Selected Cat Resources

The Bolshevik revolution of the cat's paw. The Trotsky look is so serious, a moustache needs cutting and in the eyes is a better future. He has a coat like a chinchilla, maybe. Someone once thought he was a fox. A star sits on him. But no man of the people no, a streetcar driver no. The train arrives and it is learned that one doesn't cut moustaches on cats---and that they are called whiskers anyway. The extended claws are scimitars, half moons, seafood plates, the cranky cry calls for some sustenance. Baleful, pitiful that cry. There is a ruddy undercoat, and the ears are out of proportion to the body and softer than the rest. The plaintive cry is annoying, as is the needy look which signifies abandonment or hunger. This one, he has never been anywhere but New York and Tucson. How's that for a revolutionary? He sometimes walks as if he has plumage instead of a tail. Some say this is arrogant. Lofty. He has no personal tales to tell. Velvet, velvet the dark fur between his toes. Toes? The foot pads are black leather buttons. The cat of the pharaoahs, serene and statuesque, singed with an unconcern for social norms. Cats have no emotions, which makes them perfect companions. The temptation is to idolatry, semiology, partriarchy and fancy. The third prize at the Crystal Palace Cat show in 1871 was taken by a cat “captured in the late Abyssian War. That cat was named Zula. Patrie Domestica India, the first known one is stuffed and in the Leiden Zoological Museum. It is recommended that such rare treasures be kept indoors, however also alive. Cinnamon stick, brown bunny, devil take the hindmost, the games afoot. All beginnings are shrouded in mystery it seems. In Roman Britain cats were used to guard granaries. It is havoc in the gene pool, it is surviving depredations and cases of wildness. Specular and frantic the cat surrounds his dominant white tummy. Madagascar, elusive, not easily amused like some, the pageant passes. Black eyed susans, Pointsettias, English Ivy, Rhododendron, Rhubarb and Tansy are the poisonous plants. Mistletoe and the Marsh Marigold as well. Mrs. Basnett, Mrs. Menzies, Mrs. Earnshaw and Denham, Lady Barnard founded the first club, devoted to these. We eagerly await them.

Straw Man Kooser

Here is what I mean by being irritated (from Ted Kooser's irritatingly homey The Poetry Home Repair Model):

“If you've gotten the impression from teachers or from reading contemporary poetry that poets don't need to write with a sense of somebody out there who might read what they've written, this book is not for you. Poetry is communication, and every word I've written here subscribes to that belief. Poetry's purpose is to reach other people and to touch their hearts. If a poem doesn't make sense to anybody but its author, nobody but its author will care a whit about it.”

This is clearly a straw man---or a Trojan Horse---or a straw dog, for all that. Those elitist snobby, commie pink “teachers” and that babel of madness “contemporary poetry!” Why bother to attack like this. There really isn't anything to attack anyway. All poets have their readers, now don't they. The poets with the most readers are generally those that are the most like Hallmark cards in their “communication” of this or that belief strongly held for no reason, and without reason. And without research and without history and without context usually. So what is this attack really and always about? Just a ploy to get noticed?

There are lots of things wrong with this statement, including its sentimentality and dullness. “Communication” is one of those words that has been so contaminated with overuse and misuse and general encumberance that it is impossible for it to mean anything now. Talk about meaning. “Touching hearts” is in the same category. Maybe poetry is not about other people but about understanding ourselves or the world or just about play and exploration for all that. Maybe its like sex. But then, there are those who say that sex only has one purpose and it sure isn't fun.