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.