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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.
A propos de l'auteur
Francis Ponge (1899-1988) was both a giant of French 20th-century poetry and one of its humblest practitioners. The poet of "things," he practiced a poetic contemplation--usually in the form of his own unique brand of hesitant, searching prose poem--of the everyday objects that share our existence. He did not so much reinvent the shell, cigarette, soap, pebble, sun, oyster or asparagus, as forge and share with them a new language.
